The term has been used in a variety of contexts and may refer to objects that have been developed with human intelligence, such as robots or vehicles.
For example, various non-human animals have been shown to register pain, compassion, memory, and some cognitive function.
Contemporary philosophers have drawn on the work of Henri Bergson, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, and Claude Lévi-Strauss (among others) to suggest that the non-human poses epistemological and ontological problems for humanist and post-humanist ethics,[2] and have linked the study of non-humans to materialist and ethological approaches to the study of society and culture.
[3] The term non-human has been used to describe computer programs and robot-like devices that display some human-like characteristics.
In both science fiction and in the real world, computer programs and robots have been built to perform tasks that require human-computer interactions in a manner that suggests sentience and compassion.