Are ‘mind children’ the future of reproduction? | AI (artificial intelligence)

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2026/may/31/are-mind-children-the-future-of-reproduction

Publish Date: 2026-05-31 07:00:00

A few months ago, an AI researcher from Europe attended a dinner party in Silicon Valley. During one of the many courses, the host addressed his guests, all of whom worked in AI. The researcher paraphrased his message like this: “Isn’t it amazing that we are the last generation of humans who will need to think about procreating biologically? We were lucky enough to be born at a time where we can simply upload our consciousnesses instead.”

“I didn’t see that coming,” the researcher told me. “I was just enjoying my fish.”

But the host was serious. His words struck the researcher as the kind of comment a well-informed person might have made 100 years ago, once antibiotics had been invented: “Aren’t we lucky that we came after?”

Suddenly all the guests were talking about “mind children”, and the researcher turned to their neighbour to ask what this phrase meant. “He said, ‘Oh this is the book,’ and, ‘Haven’t you read the book?’ and, ‘Oh my God, you should really read the book.’”

double quotation markIs humanity staring down its own last act?

The book in question was Hans Moravec’s Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence, which was first published in 1988, and which at the time, according to economist and futurist Robin Hanson of George Mason University, caused a big splash in a small pond – the community of robotics and machine-learning experts to which Moravec belonged.

Moravec’s book is more philosophical treatise than technological manual, but the central idea is that cultural evolution has long since taken over from biological evolution as the most powerful force shaping humanity, and the logical extrapolation of this is that the information that encodes our future selves would soon be packed into hardware and software rather than DNA. These mind children could be equipped with soft, squishy bodies, like real children, but they could also take a kaleidoscope of other physical – or indeed…

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