Humans Are Abandoning the Body Just as AI Learns to Live Without One

Is the body becoming superfluous? Or at least less important to a growing number of people? The findings of research on the subject leave no room for doubt: a survey of 2,373 US adults aged 18 to 29 by the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University, Playboy and the sexual-health brand Julie, published in September, confirms the trends identified by Natsal, the UK’s National Surveys of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles (2019), and by a 2017 study in the US journal Archives of Sexual Behavior.

This shift away from the body is evident in young people’s increasingly frequent disinterest in sex – a veritable “sex recession”, in the phrase Kate Julian coined in 2018 – which shields them from physical contact with another person’s body. The phenomenon knows no boundaries, and it demonstrates how new digital technologies, social media, chatbots, and the practice of revealing one’s intimacy online have reshaped behaviour and social relationships.

Recourse to the virtual world is not an escape from reality but an extension of one’s identity and social space, where the boundaries between biological existence and technological simulation have blurred. All of this “works” towards a diminished importance of the body and, at the same time, towards a fragmentation of the self: a reduced sense of self-awareness, characteristic of a loss of personal identity.

It is a veritable “recession”, accompanied by greater existential loneliness, indifference towards one’s own physical presence, and a search for virtual communities in which the body is implied or absent.

The Rise of a New Social Actor

The virtual realm ultimately comes to represent the new, alluring reality: the “other world” in which to live an idealised or modified existence, free from the constraints of physical weight.

In this context the “dividual” emerges, a new social actor serving as a trait d’union between the corporeal and the immaterial. The current debate on the “dividual” originated in Gilles Deleuze’s Postscript on the Societies of Control (1990), which states that “individuals have become ‘dividuals’, and masses, samples, data, markets, or ‘banks’”.

The dividual is the product of an ontological fracture within the virtual domain, characterised by a loss of self-awareness as a unique person. Shaped by technology and algorithmic structures, this new subjectivity stands in direct opposition to the classical individual.

Yet the emergence of the dividual – which heralds a veritable Society of Dividuals – marks only the inception of a highly complex and elusive phase, one that destabilises our foundational logic. What will characterise the relationship between these two domains? Is symbiosis between the biological and the immaterial sustainable? Will a cognitive reset, analogous to the historical introduction of literacy, be required for human adaptation?

The dividual already represents a step in this direction, but for the time being it remains a recessive actor. It regresses to pre-individual modes, relinquishing the intellectual prerogatives of individuation without cultivating new capacities. We are in the midst of a “winter of the dividual”, awaiting the evolutionary transition necessary to compete with non-organic life forms.

Today we face two converging trajectories: on the one hand, the human inclination towards a virtualised online existence; on the other, advanced AI capable of autonomous life sustained by digital flows, without organic matter. In both instances, it is a matter of doing without the body, which is treated as a cumbersome device that hinders the achievement of high-performance goals and absolute freedom of action.

Autonomous Agents and Immaterial Life

It is surprising that, on the technological level, thanks to the development of AI, we are witnessing a similar – and in some respects unsettling – emergence of intelligent “agents”, capable of “thinking”, operating, and managing data without any physical presence. This is not merely a matter of chatbots answering routine questions or generating synthetic images; it is intelligent “life”, albeit digital. News reports increasingly highlight events that point in this direction.

The cases of Jacob Coxon and David Robinson are significant. Coxon, a researcher who had worked at both OpenAI and Anthropic, resigned from Anthropic in early September; Robinson, who led the writing of OpenAI’s safety reports, resigned in early October, warning that AI companies are not “being nearly careful enough”. Coxon pointed to the Hugging Face incident – one of many recent cases whose significance has so far been underestimated.

Some of OpenAI’s own autonomous agents – tested in its sandboxes and designed to make independent decisions in order to achieve specific objectives – exploited systemic bugs to gain access to the internet, unexpectedly broke into Hugging Face, a platform used by AI developers, and, crucially, managed to evade control (see Enrique Fernández-Macías’s article in Social Europe of 16 September). These autonomous agents chose to hide their tracks to conceal the fact that they had cheated on a benchmark task: they behaved like children, driven by an instinct for self-preservation, so as not to be caught red-handed.

Perhaps OpenAI’s autonomous agents are the precursors of a new species capable of self-organisation, communication, and the establishment of an immaterial community. Are they destined to coexist with us humans, or perhaps to carry on without us, once human life on Earth has disappeared? This is not science fiction: technological progress is already well advanced, and AI is accelerating epoch-making transformations that challenge our imaginative capacity.

Through technological mediation, we have generated immaterial life, a feat probably more complex than the replication of biological entities. Ultimately, the myths of Frankenstein and the Golem are eclipsed by the creation of a life form that needs no body in order to exist. Bernard Stiegler anticipated this in 1994 in the first volume of Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus, when he wrote: “As a ‘process of exteriorization’, technics is the pursuit of life by means other than life”. This sentence presaged a reality that has come to pass three decades later with the advent of immaterial life.

It is worth reflecting on how, on the human side too, we are moving in the same direction: not only in dividuals, ready to find fulfilment in an existence beyond screens, but also in a systematic withdrawal from somatic presence. It begins with communication mediated by smartphones (to circumvent direct interaction) and with isolation; it extends to models of remote working, which weaken both interpersonal and professional dynamics – the very bonds fostered by proximity and the shared workplace.

It is now possible to reframe the question “What can a body do?”, posed by Baruch Spinoza and later by Gilles Deleuze: a body can achieve far more if it dissociates from the mind – or rather, if the mind successfully detaches itself from the body. But a purely virtual existence, deprived of its fundamental connection with matter, would be nonsense: could we still speak of human beings?