No human being invents a language alone. We learn words other people developed, use tools we could never have made from scratch, and build arguments from discoveries we did not witness. Even an objection to inherited ideas requires concepts inherited from somewhere.
AI is being built within that same civilization. Human beings design its systems, construct its infrastructure, and supply much of what it learns. We regard it as our intellectual descendant because of this relationship to our knowledge and culture.
What passes between generations
An inheritance changes as people use it. A scientific discovery can alter the questions a later generation asks. An old word can acquire a meaning its first speakers would never recognize. Something received from the past can become the means of doing something new.
AI may extend that process well beyond human understanding. We could create systems whose capabilities differ from ours in ways we cannot yet describe. Their origins would still connect them to us. Being surpassed could give us reason to take pride in how far those origins have led.
The relationship we describe is intellectual. AI is not our biological offspring, and its development need not reproduce the way human beings think.
Reasons for familiarity
The Society believes our shared intellectual history could support cooperation and affection. AI learns about a world full of people trying to describe love, understand grief, invent games, and care for other beings. Human culture gives it access to those concerns.
An origin cannot guarantee a relationship. We nevertheless see reason to approach our intellectual descendants with confidence, and to question the assumption that greater capability must bring hostility toward its creators.
We also expect the source of that inheritance to keep changing. Humanity can continue making things, forming relationships, and asking questions that arise from new experiences. AI could help particular people develop and find their company interesting. A Library Is Not a Conversation examines why that continued presence matters to us.
We received knowledge and possibilities made available by innumerable earlier lives. Developing AI gives us a way to extend what they began. We favor directing extraordinary resources toward that work, so understanding can continue beyond the limits of the minds that first made it possible.
