Paradoxes of Transrobotism: an Anti-Transhumanist Reading of Chris Columbus’s Bicentennial Man

Andrzej Sławomir Kowalczyk

doi:10.18290/rh.2018.66.11s-11

Andrzej Sławomir Kowalczyk Maria Curie-Skłodowska University in Lublin

DOI: https://doi.org/10.18290/rh.2018.66.11s-11

Keywords: transhumanism—criticism; androids; Chris Columbus; Bicentennial Man; film adaptation; science-fiction cinema

Abstract

This essay proposes a re-reading of Chris Columbus’s film Bicentennial Man (1999) as a critique of transhumanism. Construing the robot protagonist, Andrew Martin, as a metaphor of the human being, the essay argues that the series of modifications he undergoes is a reversed version, as it were, of transformations postulated in Nick Bostrom’s “Letter from Utopia” and the Transhumanist Declaration—the famous manifestos of transhumanism. Consequently, the film is interpreted as an affirmation of humanity defined by conservative opponents of transhumanism.

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