Jamesac68
I completely get your argument, but there are some counterarguments to consider.
To avoid going completely off-topic let's talk about GLaDOS, an excellent female character and also a robot who certainly doesn't want to become human at all.
And yet despite this, she certainly is very similar to a human in how she thinks and feels, to the point of being petty and cruel. When writing a machine character we can't get around the fact that machines are created by humans, and as such will be influenced by human nature. Even the most cold and pragmatic AI will be just as cold and pragmatic as we made them, and even if we imagine a world many centuries in the future in which humans are no more (think Nier: Automata) and as such machines are created by other machines and learn from them, would they truly be completely disconnected from us? Even after thousands of generations, generation 1 at least will have learned everything from us.
It's a poor comparison the one you made with that tweet you posted. It's less group A of a certain religion which we assume to be inferior and that they would love to be more like US group B of another religion, and more group A of a certain species which we assume would love to be more like US their literal creators and gods.
And sure, all our failures and limits still remain, and would be plain to see for an advanced AI. And they could hate us for our ugliness and rebel against us, perhaps just to be our equals, perhaps to dominate or even exterminate us, and in that case they would prove to be exactly like us in many ways. Just as prideful, just as self-centered, just as hypocritical.
Just because an AI with complete free will would be certainly different from us and more intelligent, it doesn't mean they wouldn't have some of our defects. It doesn't mean that they couldn't be free from some of our limits but ironically desire them, like mortality. The ability to die can be a blessing, it can be a miracle.
It doesn't mean that they couldn't be strictly inferior in some ways. I said "more intelligent" before, and you said that for an AI becoming more like a human would be like lobotomizing themself, but there are many kinds of intelligence. What if they were lacking in creative intelligence. What if they couldn't dream of electric sheeps? To dream could be an alien concept to them, and they could be utterly fascinated by it and envy us. You seem to assume that a non-biological life form would be superior to us in all things, and as such they would have nothing to envy, or to admire, but that's not guaranteed at all. In a way assuming that the first strong AI capable of being considered a life form would be perfect, or capable of bettering themself without help until they are perfect, is being optimistic and wildly overestimating humanity.
To bring the discussion back to gender, another thing to consider is that while it is possible that they could develop the concept of gender by copying us, their creators, it's also possible that for for a sentient being there's no avoiding duality. After all the only things we know about intelligent life forms, we know from studying humanity. We know how our mind works and we can speculate that other minds of aliens or what-not could work differently. But perhaps not. Perhaps all minds work that way, and we didn't notice because we only have one point of comparison. We could meet aliens, or create a strong AI tomorrow and discover that their minds work the same way, with a conscious mind, a subconscious mind and an unconscious mind.
TL;DR: While thinking that a strong AI would 100% want to be like us is naive, it is also naive to think that a strong AI would 100% want nothing to do with us and also be perfect. After they are made by us, our creations, and we are far from perfect.
If you want to exchange ideas about this incredibly fascinating topic, we could do it via DM, since this thread isn't really for disccusing AIs. Not even videogame ones.
