The Potential Advent of a “Meta-Human”

Mark Zuckerberg (CEO of Meta) announces his desire to create a “personal superintelligence for everyone.” Beyond the technological project, an anthropological mutation is perhaps taking shape: that of the meta-human.

Artificial Intelligence at the Heart of the Act of Living

The place of artificial intelligence in human life? What is it really for? And above all, what do we use it for? This is the terrain on which the major players of digital capitalism, who provide us with these artificial intelligences, are now competing. They are creating a new dependency in a particularly intimate place: the act of living itself, that is, the act of thinking, dialoguing, and symbolizing. Why does this go so deep into our intimacy?

The function of symbolization, this fundamental human capacity to put words on our lived experiences to be able to anchor them in us, to exist consciously in the world and build our mental structures, is today partially delegated to AIs. Generative artificial intelligence is no longer content to be a tool; it becomes a kind of twin instance, a perpetual assistant, that invites itself into our phones, that is, into our daily intimacy. Present with us in life, it captures conversations, observes the world around us, and begins to assist us with acts that previously belonged to strict humanity: remembering a conversation, synthesizing our experiences, giving meaning to personal or professional exchanges.

Thus, artificial intelligences continue the movement started with mobile phones more than 30 years ago, our transformation into true bionic beings, hybrids between the biological and the technological, but now precisely at the level of our intelligences. Paul Virilio, in the documentary « About the 21st Century » that I co-directed with Martine Stora in 1995, said: “We will be assigned a line at birth.” Donna Haraway, in her book “Cyborg Manifesto” (1985) wrote: “the boundary between science fiction and social reality is merely an optical illusion.” We don’t really notice it because we are beings who adapt very quickly.

ChatGPT, a Laboratory of Shared Intimacy

The silent hybridization between our humanity and machines is therefore at the heart of the value proposition of today’s major industrialists. ChatGPT was the first playground and experimentation ground where everyone has been able to practice since November 2022, and it is the users themselves who, in large part, invented its most personal uses. The voluntary sharing of intimate data is moreover considered by Sam Altman, the head of OpenAI, as a major risk. We already observe drifts in the corporate world, where colleagues, via shared accounts, read the personal reflections and “intimate diaries” of their peers, introducing unprecedented and complex relational issues. We are creating spaces of digital vulnerability without measuring the consequences at all.

The massive appropriation of these tools reveals a deep human need for dialogue, for assisted reflection, and also undoubtedly a form of solitude unique to our time, which Bernard Stiegler had anticipated in his critique of “hyperindustrial society.” We seek in the machine what we sometimes struggle to find in humans: infinite listening, total availability, absence of judgment, a subject I have extensively documented in the article Generative artificial intelligence and anthropological change, proposing the concept of a “new post-solitary world.”

Meta, from the Metaverse to “Intimate Superintelligence”

Meta, Facebook’s parent company, after believing in the metaverse, pouring billions into it and losing a large part of its stock value, this parallel universe in which we were supposed to spend our virtual life, is now resolutely turning toward artificial intelligence. As reported by Le Monde on July 31, 2025, the company is now investing “tens of billions of dollars in superintelligence,” bolstered by gigantic profits (71.5 billion dollars over twelve months, for comparison TotalEnergies made 16 billion in profits over the same period, and LVMH 14 billion). This is due to AI-improved advertising recommendation algorithms, in short, much better targeted advertisements.

Mark Zuckerberg, in a public announcement in July 2025, outlines his unique vision: “I want to tell you about our new effort, Meta Superintelligence Labs, and our vision to build a personal superintelligence for everyone. [...] I think an even more significant impact in our lives will come from everyone having a personal superintelligence that will help them achieve their goals, create what they want to see in the world, be a better friend, and grow to become the person they aspire to be.”

This approach differs radically from that of his competitors. It is no longer simply an artificial intelligence that accomplishes tasks in our place, but an “intimate superintelligence” that accompanies us in our lived lives. Zuckerberg deliberately chooses the angle of intimate augmentation, even if he doesn’t name it as such. It’s the cyborg he projects, what has long been called “augmented man.” But he goes further: he is not positioning himself at the level of robots that would be our alter egos, but at that of the direct augmentation of our cognitive and emotional capacities.

The Emergence of the Meta-Human

This anthropological change deserves our attention. If Zuckerberg’s project takes shape, we will witness the emergence of what I will name not the augmented man, not the post-human, not the super-human, but the “meta-human”. I deliberately integrate the name of the company Meta into this concept, as it seems essential to me not to lose our critical spirit: we, as meta-humans, would no longer be merely in “electric servitude” (concept by Gérard Dubey and Alain Gras, 2021, in their book “Electric servitude, from the dream of freedom to the digital prison”) but in an informatic dependency at the level of our intimate existence itself.

We are already in informatic dependency for all our institutional functioning, but here, the dependency would be anchored more ontologically, and it’s already the case. Paul Virilio had not projected artificial intelligence as we know it, but he had anticipated the meta-human.
This meta-human is ontologically modified in their very humanity. A human who would need, to be able to fully exist with their peers, to be “super-intelligent” will have to, if they want to develop their capacities, hybridize as early as possible with this technology. Here we are propelled into what science fiction had long imagined (“Neuromancer” by William Gibson or Philip K. Dick’s short stories for example). The encounter between fiction and reality is troubling.

Beyond Singularity, Intimate Fusion

The concept of a future of “technological singularity”, a subject I worked on extensively 10 years ago, popularized in the early 2000s by Ray Kurzweil, now seems to me an outdated idea. The singularity assumes an external intelligent instance, the machines, opposed to the intelligence of human beings. It postulates an opposition, a complementarity that breaks down, a power issue that tips over. It’s ultimately a fairly Marxist political representation of class struggle, even though it was conceived by Silicon Valley capitalists, in which the oppressive bosses become machines. I believed in it.

But something else seems to be taking shape for our future. What we perceive with Zuckerberg’s project, just as we had seen it with Facebook in fact, since its appearance in 2004, is a movement, in tools and uses, toward the “meta-human.” Facebook is not fundamentally normalizing, despite the censorship that exists and which was particularly terrible during the Covid period. Mark Zuckerberg finally apologized for it in 2024, recognizing that his social network is not there to format, but to allow everyone to emancipate themselves in these new ways of communicating.

For this superintelligence to effectively transform humans into meta-humans, it will have to respect our diversities. The industrialists know this. If this is not the case, people won’t use it massively. This is where I believe the most interesting philosophical paradox lies: we will potentially merge with these forms of intelligence, certainly in dependence on major industrialists, but in an intimate and not normalized movement. As Michel Serres said in “Thumbelina” (2012), new technologies don’t necessarily alienate us; they can also free us if we know how to tame them.

Extimacy in the Era of the Meta-Human

At the beginning of Facebook, I was deeply troubled by the use of the term “friends.” People became “friends” with people who were absolutely not their friends in the traditional sense of the term. This semantic shift already revealed a profound mutation in our social relationships. Users shared their private lives, their family photos with people who didn’t belong to their intimate circle.

This was the beginning of what Serge Tisseron had brilliantly conceptualized by taking up the term “extimacy,” this overexposed intimacy that characterizes our era. As he writes in “Overexposed Intimacy” (2001): “The desire for extimacy consists of exposing certain fragments of one’s physical or psychological intimacy.” This phenomenon is of course already present in dating applications, where one presents oneself to others in what is most intimate: love, sexuality, the desire for marriage, just as it was in the “pink” personal ads in the newspaper Libération, before the Internet.

For my part, this new world with its “false friends” has always seemed worrying and potentially dehumanizing to me. I entered it as little as possible, notably by never installing social network applications on my mobile phone, so that this layer of reality wouldn’t be present in my daily life and travels. I wanted the connection to be a conscious choice. So, I go on social networks from time to time, on my computer, it takes me more time, it’s less intrinsic to my life, so I go there little. I’ve only met a few people via Facebook and have never signed up for a dating app. It’s a personal choice, and I don’t consider myself freer or more virtuous than another. But I don’t think it places me on the margins either, or on the margins of what kind of existence? I’m not advocating disconnection at all costs, but I want to signify that independence is possible, because there is often confusion between dependency and necessity.

Living Among Meta-Humans

It is crucial in my opinion, collectively, in our differences, to take into account the reality that is coming. Because whether we adopt intimate superintelligence or not, whether we become meta-humans or not, we will inevitably be in relationship with meta-humans. Even if we choose to remain outside this transformation, it will modify our lives.

Critical reflection, outside of hasty judgments that are only blinders, seems essential to me. We must project and think about the future without yielding either to blissful technophilia or reactionary technophobia. Jacques Ellul wrote in “The Technological System” (1977): “It is not technology that enslaves us but the sacred transferred to technology.” The future will tell us if it’s Zuckerberg’s vision or another that will come true. This text, written in the middle of 2025 at the time of the public announcement of his intention, which is already excessively financially profitable and ultimately inscribed in Facebook’s very DNA from its origin, can serve as a reference point for understanding future developments. Even if what happens will necessarily be different from what we project, I believe that the confrontation between these reflections and future reality will be rich in lessons. This is why I often take Paul Virilio as a reference, who was a visionary thinker of speed and technology. He has bequeathed us, it seems to me, precious conceptual tools. Even if he wasn’t a prophet, his desire to think about tomorrow’s world helps us live today. In “The Administration of Fear” (2010), he wrote: “When you delegate your own power to prostheses, you run the risk of becoming a prosthesis yourself.”

Thus, faced with the possible emergence of the meta-human that we may become, we must cultivate active vigilance, continuous reflection on our personal and collective sovereignty. Because that’s what it’s about: how to preserve our humanity while exploring these new frontiers of being? The question remains open, and perhaps that’s our last freedom!