The Right to Remain Unaugmented: A Critical Response to Braidotti's Posthuman Ethics for AI

Braidotti (2025) argues that AI-driven transhumanism erases human diversity by classifying non-normative bodies as "noise." This article accepts her diagnosis of structural exclusion but challenges her prescriptions. Prosthetic and augmentation technologies may dissolve the very axes of exclusion Braidotti identifies-sex, race, and disability-by rendering bodily characteristics subject to individual choice. The Proteus effect, whereby altered self-representation transforms behaviour, becomes irreversible through permanent prosthetic embodiment. Yet this liberation generates a new exclusionary axis: as augmentation becomes structurally compulsory, the unaugmented face quiet displacement through market forces and actuarial logic rather than overt discrimination. As the treatment-enhancement distinction collapses, this structural pressure-which this article terms crawling selection-renders the choice to remain unaugmented increasingly untenable. Braidotti's exclusion thesis is not wrong; the axis of exclusion rotates. This article proposes two correctives: a shift from static to dynamic tracking of exclusionary axes and the institutional protection of a right to remain unaugmented-the logical consequence of Braidotti's own affirmative ethics of becoming.