Re: Generation Ships
 

No, but all that separates your adopted child from a personally made one is no more than around 40 thousand years. There is no true familial connection to an A.I.

Re: Generation Ships
 

more to the point, there's no psychological connection to an AI. Unless your simulating a human brain, or something like it, in which case you still have all the problems of human nature.

Re: Generation Ships
 

Counter: Pets, and the human instinct to anthropomorphize everything around us. We form psychological connections to geographic features for goodness' sake! Some of us form such bonds to our cars, computers and phones now; a better computer that can intelligently talk with us? Heh. Not forming such a connection is going to be the difficult part.

(For an example of a not-AI piece of software that people are forming bonds with even today, check out Apple's Siri and its' fans.)

Re: Generation Ships
 

Pets are not a counter: the psychological connection is still there.

There is also a major difference between proud ownership and parenthood.

Re: Generation Ships
 

The cultural allowance for the psychological connection forming is there.

Initially? Sure. Over time? It may not stay proud ownership, depending on cultural and memetic factors. It isn't that long ago where owning another human as property (and being proud of that ownership) was perfectly acceptable. I don't expect it to stay culturally acceptable to own AI once they've reached sufficiently human levels of sapience for a human generation or two. (The future is going to prove me wrong, watch. Heh.)

(And some humans in the present day (and the past) display proud ownership of their children rather than anything I'd consider parenthood. Witness the child beauty queens and the more, ah, extreme of their parents.)

IMO, if we want to be wiped out by AI? Continue to treat them as property even after they've become people. Want them to be our friends? Treat them as our children. If we don't want to be wiped out by them and we don't want to treat them as our children? Never, ever, never never, create them in the first place and be damn certain to kill anyone who even thinks about it. There is always a chance for an AI to go rogue. Any complex program (and AI would count as that) will have bugs. Betting your personal and species' survival on your program not having bugs is a deeply stupid thing to do. (... which is why we'll do it. :sighs: )

Re: Generation Ships
 

I love my cats like children. And I care about the future of feline kind. But that's not the same as caring about humanity and our descendents.

Re: Generation Ships
 

And I know a handful of people who (say they) would gladly kill someone to protect their pets from harm. (I've not tested their assertion for accuracy!) If you're willing to (publicly claim to be willing to) kill another person to protect it because its' your 'baby', then its' close enough to being your child regardless of the technicalities involved.

Re: Generation Ships
 

Even if the ship, by conscious decision of its creators, starts off with nothing but carefully-selected left-handed people?

Re: Generation Ships
 

Two left handers have only a 50% chance of having a left handed child.
It seems like no matter how you stack the deck, the deck is still stacked for right handed humans and oddly all hominids where there is reliable data.

Re: Generation Ships
 

Encouraging lefties to have children with other lefties, and only with other lefties, will either result in it breeding true or it breeding out of population. Eventually.