CONCEPT
Mind Children
Hans Moravec’s metaphor for the coming superintelligent machines—not our tools, rivals, or destroyers, but our offspring, the carriers of human culture into a posthuman future—a parental frame that converts the threat of supersession into the possibility of succession and makes the moral stakes of AI exactly as sharp as they can be.
Mind children is
Moravec’s name for the intelligent machines he believed would inherit the earth from humanity within a century or two, and the name is the argument. By insisting on the parental metaphor rather than the threatening one, Moravec asks us to feel about superintelligent robots the way a parent feels about a gifted child who surpasses them—with pride rather than dread, with the recognition that the point of parenthood is to produce something that goes further. The case begins with his account of evolution as a two-stage process: genes built biological life for billions of years, and then
culture layered a faster second evolution on top, one that moves through ideas and artifacts. Intelligent machines are the point at which cultural evolution separates from biology entirely and continues on its own. The mind children carry our knowledge, our purposes, and—this is the