Common Assumption
Human-like AI is the natural endpoint of development
AI should think, speak, and reason like us. The Turing test is the goal. We train on human text, optimize for human approval, and call the result "intelligence."
- Training on human text makes AI inherently human-shaped
- RLHF optimizes for human preference = human-like output
- Consumer familiarity drives commercial AI design
- "Hallucination" borrowed from psychiatry — already treating AI as a mind
The Actual Problem
We're not discovering AI's potential — we're discovering its reflection of us
The choice to build human-like AI is not inevitable — it's a design philosophy. An alien optimization engine on non-human principles might solve problems we can't even formulate.
- Two paths exist: human-emulator vs. genuinely alien intelligence
- Path 1 (current): familiar, commercially safe, anthropomorphic by default
- Path 2 (unexplored): alien cognitive architecture, post-human optimization
- This choice deserves to be made explicitly — not by market default