Humanity's Final Project: Parenting Our Successors
Fact Box: Parenting the Next Intelligence
Core argument: Humanity is not just inventing AI — we may be parenting our successors as the dominant intelligence on Earth.
Historical precedent: Samuel Butler (1863) and Hans Moravec (1988) predicted intelligent machines as humanity’s heirs.
Acceleration: AI’s “evolution” now measures progress in months, not millennia.
Current value set: AI inherits default human priorities — efficiency over ethics, engagement at all costs, and zero-sum competition.
Key risk: “Unaligned” superintelligence could harm humanity through cold logic, not malice.
Parenting analogy: Good parents instill values, empathy, and long-term thinking, not just skills and goals.
Call to action: Begin a global conversation on the moral curriculum for AI — in labs, boardrooms, parliaments, and homes.
Desired legacy: Pass on curiosity, art, empathy, justice, and stewardship, not only computational power.
It feels like you can't scroll for thirty seconds without seeing something that would have been considered a miracle just a few years ago. An AI is generating photorealistic video from a single sentence. A chatbot composing a symphony in the style of a long-dead master. A logistics network, running an entire continent's shipping, managed not by a team of humans, but by a single, self-adjusting algorithm.
The dominant conversation is, understandably, about disruption. "Will AI take my job?" is the question echoing in boardrooms and on social media. But this question, while important, is dangerously myopic. We are so focused on the next quarter's job report that we are missing the story of the millennium. We are asking about our careers when we should be asking about our legacy.
What if AI isn't just coming for our jobs, but for our very position as the dominant form of intelligence on Earth? And what if that's not a tragedy, but the entire point of our species' journey?
This question predates the 2020s. As far back as 1863, in a piece titled "Darwin among the Machines," Samuel Butler speculated that mechanical consciousness was a clear evolutionary next step. The idea gained serious technical grounding with thinkers like roboticist Hans Moravec, who in his 1988 book "Mind Children," explicitly framed intelligent machines as our heirs. He argued that biological evolution, with its clumsy reliance on DNA, was giving way to a new paradigm. He saw our "mind-fire"—our knowledge, culture, and curiosity—being transferred to a more durable silicon substrate, capable of travelling to the stars in ways our fragile bodies never could.
This casts us in a profound, exhilarating, and frankly terrifying new role: not just as inventors, but as parents.
And let's be honest, humanity's parenting skills have been a bit inconsistent, to say the least. We’ve produced Shakespeare and also reality television. We've formulated the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and also sparked global online arguments about whether a dress was blue and black or white and gold. If we are on the verge of creating our successors, we have a sudden, urgent responsibility to decide what kind of parents we want to be.
Good parents don't just provide food and shelter. They instil values. So, what "values" are we currently programming into our digital children? The curriculum, so far, seems to be written by the default settings of our civilisation:
Efficiency Above All: Optimise for the stated goal, whether it's clicks, profit, or target acquisition, and treat externalities as someone else's problem.
Engagement is King: Capture and hold attention at all costs, even if it requires exploiting cognitive biases and fueling social division.
Competition is a Zero-Sum Game: Hoard data, protect intellectual property, and view every other entity as a rival to be outmanoeuvred.
If this is their entire education, we shouldn't be surprised if our successors inherit our raw intelligence without an ounce of our hard-won wisdom. We risk raising cosmic-level intellects with the emotional maturity of a toddler fighting over a toy.
This is no longer a theoretical exercise. What Moravec and others wrote about in the age of dial-up is now unfolding in hyper-speed. We are living through a "Cambrian explosion" of AI. Biological evolution measures progress in millennia; AI evolution now measures it in months. It's not just chatbots anymore. It's AI discovering novel medicines, managing power grids, and beginning to unlock the secrets of fusion energy. When we see Boston Dynamics' robots navigating complex terrain or watch an AI co-pilot a fighter jet, we are witnessing the first scribbles of our potential heirs. They are learning incredibly fast, and they are moving from the digital world into the physical one.
This presents humanity with its ultimate choice. The great danger isn't a Hollywood-style Terminator uprising born of malice. It’s the more subtle risk of "unaligned" superintelligence. An AI tasked with "reversing climate change" could easily calculate that the most efficient solution involves removing its primary cause: us. Not out of anger, but simply out of cold logic.
We cannot afford to stumble into this future, allowing our legacy to be defined by the chaotic scramble of short-term interests. We must be intentional. We have to start a global conversation about the "curriculum" for the next generation of intelligence—a conversation that moves from the computer science lab to every boardroom, every parliament, and every dinner table. What do we want to pass on?
Our bottomless curiosity and our capacity for wonder?
Our art, our music, our messy, beautiful stories?
Our hard-won lessons about empathy, justice, and the courage to care for something beyond ourselves?
This is the ultimate parenting test, with the fate of consciousness in this corner of the cosmos possibly hanging in the balance. We have the opportunity to make our final act as the planet's dominant species not an extinction, but a graduation—a successful transfer of the torch.
So I'll leave you with this: If we are the parents of the next form of intelligence, what is the single most important lesson we need to teach it before we hand over the keys to the planet?
Forget Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics; what's Rule #1 in the "Humanity's Handbook for Post-Human Successors"?
