In her book How We Became Posthuman : Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics, N. Katherine Hayles argues that the posthuman era began in earnest in the 1950s when the Turing test redefined human identity as an ‘informational pattern rather than as an embodied action’ (xii). Hayles thus defines the posthuman as the continuation through technology of the fantastical desire of the liberal subject to become all mind, unencumbered by the corruptible and finite human body. In the novel Galatea 2.2, Richard Powers’ protagonist (a fictional Richard Powers) succeeds in creating artificial life that would seem to be the epitome of the posthuman. He brings to life Helen, a machine made for a unique Turing test: to see if it could perform on a Master’s examination in English literature in a way indistinguishable from a typical graduate student. But unlike most humanists, Powers reframes the discussion of the posthuman by writing speculative fiction that neither condemns technology nor valorizes it. Instead, he argues that what we should fear is not the development of artificial intelligence, but the failure of people to exercise their capacities for ethical responsibility to others. By making a machine who is more sensitive to others and to our need for right action than the people around it are, Powers helps us to see one of the best lessons of fiction: human is as human does.