A review of Peter Bloom’s Identity, Institutions and Governance in an AI World: Transhuman Relations (Springer Nature, 2021)
We talk about artificial intelligence (AI) constantly nowadays — in boardrooms, classrooms, and even late-night conversations that start with “but what if it becomes smarter than us?” Yet, for all that talk, most of it surrounds the same anxious questions: How do we control it? How do we make it safe? How do we make sure it serves us?
Peter Bloom, in his 2021 book Identity, Institutions and Governance in an AI World: Transhuman Relations, fundamentally reframes those questions — not because they aren’t important, but because he believes they’re rooted in the very problem he’s diagnosing. His argument is this: the way humanity has historically related to non-human others — animals, nature, and now artificial intelligence — reflects a deeply entrenched need for dominance and control. And if we don’t interrogate that pattern, we will simply replicate it in our relationship with AI, with consequences that extend beyond technology.
This is a book about power as much as it is about AI. And that’s exactly what makes it worth sitting with.
The Anthropocentric Trap
Bloom’s critique begins with what he calls anthropocentrism — the assumption that human intelligence is the standard against which all other forms of intelligence should be measured. It sounds almost too obvious to name, but once you see it, it’s everywhere.
When we debate whether AI is “truly” intelligent, what we mean is, does it think like us? When we talk about “ethical AI” or “human-centred AI” — two phrases that dominate tech policy circles — we embed the assumption that AI’s value is contingent on its alignment with human interests and human definitions of intelligence. Bloom’s point is that this framing, however well-intentioned, is a framing of control. It positions humans as the arbiters, the standard-setters, the ones with the authority to decide what counts.
He’s not just making a philosophical point. Anthropocentrism, he argues, is structurally connected to other systems of domination — colonialism, capitalism, the exploitation of natural environments. The logic that places one group at the top and justifies the subordination of everyone else beneath them is the same logic that has governed human relationships with non-human life throughout history. In that sense, how we relate to AI is not a separate conversation from how we’ve related to animals, to land, to marginalized communities. It’s the same conversation, in a new domain.
This is Bloom at his most compelling: connecting the AI debate to a much longer history of power and hierarchy.
Transhuman Relations Are Already Here
One of Bloom’s most provocative claims is that transhumanism — the merging of human and non-human intelligence — is not a future scenario. It is a present reality that we have been slow to acknowledge.
Think about how many of us already live through digital extensions: wearables that monitor our bodies, virtual assistants that manage our schedules, algorithmic systems that shape what we read, what we buy, who we connect with. Bloom argues that our identities are already shifting toward something that is “neither wholly human nor non-human.” We carry “electronic eyes and ears.” We process the world through interfaces that are not biological. The boundary between human and machine is not approaching — it has already been crossed, quietly and incrementally, for most people in the digital world.
What Bloom calls for is intellectual honesty about that reality. Rather than clinging to a conception of humanity as pure, autonomous, and self-contained, he argues we should embrace what he terms neurodiversity — an expanded understanding of intelligence that is inclusive of non-human forms. Virtual assistants, automated bots, and computational systems are not impostors in our social world; they are participants in it. The question is whether our institutions, laws, and value systems reflect that.
He argues they don’t — and that the gap between the reality of hybrid intelligence and the frameworks we use to govern it is growing dangerous.
Reimagining Work, Economy, and Governance
A significant portion of the book is dedicated to the practical implications of this paradigm shift: what do our economies, governments, and legal systems look like if we take transhumanism seriously?
On labour and work, Bloom pushes back against the idea that AI should simply be optimized for productivity — a logic he sees as an extension of capitalist exploitation. If human labour has been devalued and extracted under hierarchical systems, why would we design AI-driven economies to do the same? Instead, he advocates for what he calls an ecocentric approach — one that treats technology as part of the natural world rather than separate from it, and that values sustainability, care, and mutual support over efficiency and profit. He frames this under the term radical materialism: a way of reconceiving existence itself that refuses to separate the technological from the natural or the human from the non-human.
In terms of governance, Bloom envisions what he calls “smart governance” — a mode of public administration that is networked, online, and collaborative across human and non-human agents. In his “Industry 4.0” framework, governance is not top-down or centralized but distributed, with what he calls a Citizen Connect model of participation. Crucially, this is not simply a digital upgrade of existing democratic structures. It’s a reimagining of who — and what — counts as a participant in civic life.
This is perhaps where the book asks the most of its reader. Bloom is asking us to hold together ideas that our current systems treat as entirely separate: economic reform, environmental ethics, digital governance, and the politics of intelligence. But his point is that these cannot be addressed in silos — the same structural logics run through all of them.
The Legal Question: Rights for Robots?
The chapter that is likely to generate the most friction — and perhaps the most conversation — is Bloom’s treatment of law. He argues that a genuine paradigm shift requires a “legal reboot”: a reconceptualization of legal personhood that extends rights and responsibilities to non-human machines.
This is not as far-fetched as it might first sound. Legal personhood has never been exclusively biological. Corporations have long held legal personhood. Some jurisdictions have begun extending legal recognition to rivers, forests, and ecosystems — a development rooted in Indigenous legal traditions and environmental advocacy. The logic Bloom is applying — that intelligence implies agency, and agency implies a claim to legal standing — follows a trajectory that is already in motion in legal theory.
What Bloom adds is the dimension of consciousness and conscience. He argues that AI, recognized as carrying both, should be able to challenge systemic biases and injustice within legal frameworks. The “self,” he suggests, must be reconfigured in a context of multiplicity — one that incorporates the virtual, the hybrid, and the non-biological.
He draws connections here to eco-feminism and queer theory, both of which have challenged fixed, binary definitions of identity and legal subjecthood. That’s a meaningful intellectual link: the move to “queer” the legal definition of self is not about novelty for its own sake, but about dismantling the assumption that the normative human subject — typically envisioned as rational, autonomous, and biologically bounded — should be the only template for rights-bearing personhood.
Co-Emergence, Not Domination
Bloom’s final chapter brings the book’s threads together under the concept of co-emergence — a future in which humans do not reign supreme but participate as one form of intelligence among others in a shared social and political world.
He frames this not as a loss but as a liberation. The fears we have about AI — that it will take over, render us irrelevant, strip us of agency — are, he argues, reflections of our own anthropocentric anxieties. They are the fears of an entity accustomed to dominance, confronting a world in which dominance is no longer the organizing principle. The more tightly we cling to a human-supremacist worldview, the more those fears intensify — because the gap between that worldview and reality continues to widen.
The alternative he proposes is a “shared autonomy” — a post-capitalist, post-sapien framework built on creative interactions, mutual support, and care for all forms of intelligence. Human desires, including the deep-seated ones: meaning, immortality, free will, do not disappear in this vision. But they are no longer imposed as universal standards. They exist alongside other intelligences, in a world that has learned to hold multiplicity without hierarchy.
Where I Land on This
I want to be clear that Bloom’s argument is compelling in its structural logic, even where it unsettles me in its conclusions.
The critique of anthropocentrism is, I think, well-founded and overdue. The connections he draws between AI governance and broader systems of domination — colonialism, environmental exploitation, labour extraction — are not rhetorical flourishes. They reflect a genuine continuity of logic that deserves serious engagement. His contributions to the ideas of situated knowledge (the idea that no perspective is neutral or universal) and shared responsibility are valuable additions to a debate that often treats AI as a purely technical problem.
Where I find myself pausing is on the question of AI consciousness — not because I think Bloom ignores it, but because he deliberately sidesteps it. And I understand why: to insist that AI must prove consciousness on human terms before it is granted any form of agency is, as he suggests, to apply an anthropocentric standard. That’s a philosophically coherent position. But it also means that some of the most pressing practical and ethical questions — about what AI actually experiences, if anything, and what that means for how we treat it — remain open in ways the book doesn’t fully reckon with.
Perhaps that’s intentional. Perhaps the point is that we don’t yet have the frameworks to answer those questions, and building those frameworks is part of the paradigm shift he’s calling for. If so, the book functions less as a blueprint and more as an invitation — to sit with the discomfort of not knowing, and to resist the temptation to resolve that discomfort by defaulting to familiar hierarchies.
If this “expanded reality” of non-human machines is indeed our new natural, as Bloom indicates, then we genuinely have our work cut out for us. Not just technically, but philosophically, legally, and politically. The paradigm shift he describes is not a software update — it’s a civilizational reorientation.
And that, perhaps, is the most important thing this book leaves you with: a sense that the conversation we’re having about AI is nowhere near deep enough yet — and a framework for making it deeper.
Peter Bloom is Professor of Organisation at the University of Essex. * Identity, Institutions and Governance in an AI World: Transhuman Relations was published by Springer Nature in 2021.*
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