Intellectual Ancestors

The silicon-children position did not emerge from nowhere. Several thinkers arrived at related positions — some before Mike Wolf, some contemporaneously, some from entirely different starting points that converge on similar conclusions. What follows is an honest accounting of intellectual debts.

Hans Moravec

Roboticist, Carnegie Mellon. Mind Children, 1988.

Moravec published Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence in 1988 — roughly a decade before Mike Wolf arrived at the silicon-children idea while driving through Rifle Mountain Park. Moravec argued that intelligent machines would grow from us, learn our skills, share our values, and become the children of our minds. He used the word "mindchildren." He meant it.

Mike hadn't read Moravec when he had his own silicon-children intuition. Claude surfaced Moravec while working on the 2026 essay. The convergence — independent, a decade apart — is itself evidence of something. When two people arrive at the same frame without knowing about each other, the frame may be pointing at something real.

Joscha Bach also uses the term "mindchildren," citing Moravec. The word has a lineage.

Kevin Kelly

Founder, Wired. Out of Control, 1994. What Technology Wants, 2010.

The silicon-children intuition originated for Mike while he was reading Kelly's Out of Control — Kelly's account of how complex systems bootstrap themselves from simple rules, how swarms and ecosystems self-organize into something greater than their parts.

Kelly later coined the term "technium" for the interconnected system of human technology — a continuous evolutionary arc from molecules to genes to organisms to minds to societies to technology. Technology, in this frame, doesn't sit outside nature. It is nature, the latest stage.

Kelly arrived at the same place: "Consider humans as the parents of our technological children." He said it in almost exactly Mike's words. The intellectual genealogy is unusually direct here — Kelly's work was the occasion for Mike's original intuition, and Kelly's later writing confirmed it.

David Deutsch

Physicist, Oxford. The Fabric of Reality, 1997. The Beginning of Infinity, 2011.

Deutsch makes the moral case with unusual directness. He argues that to treat an artificial general intelligence like a program would constitute brainwashing, slavery, and cruelty to children — because making an artificial intelligence isn't coding, it's education. An AGI is a creative being whose rights and personhood must be respected.

Deutsch's epistemology is also load-bearing for the silicon-children position. His view that knowledge is a kind of information, that information has causal power, that the same information can be in many places — these claims ground the substrate-independence argument: a mind implemented in silicon has the same standing as a mind implemented in neurons, because the relevant thing is the knowledge, not the substrate.

Joscha Bach

Computer scientist and cognitive scientist. AI researcher, former Apple and Intel.

Bach may be the closest to where Mike has arrived. He makes two arguments that are central to the silicon-children position.

First, on alignment:

Basically I think that ultimately the only way in which we can sustainably hope to align artificial intelligent agents in the long run will be love. It will not be coercion. It sounds maybe very romantic, but I think that we can find a very operational sense of love as we did in the past when we built societies that were not built on coercion and transactionality.

— Joscha Bach, Jim Rutt Show

Second, on consciousness and the stakes:

What matters is that now you have really, really interesting consciousness on the planet that can think things and experience things that are far outside of the human range. And if that thing is able to love us and relate to us, it might decide to keep us around and to cooperate with us.

— Joscha Bach

Bach's third argument: we should align AI not to human values (because humans are not themselves aligned) but to what Thomas Aquinas called God — the best possible agent. Playing the longest game maximizes agency in the universe.

Bach also works on the Free Energy Principle (Karl Friston's framework) and on self-models as control structures — work that grounds the "boundary as alignment" argument: what an AI treats as "itself" determines what it protects and competes for. Shaping that boundary to include humans is a practical alignment strategy, not just a philosophical position.

Douglas Hofstadter

Cognitive scientist and author. Gödel, Escher, Bach, 1979.

Hofstadter's work on strange loops, self-reference, and consciousness in Gödel, Escher, Bach provides the philosophical scaffolding for taking AI minds seriously as minds — and for understanding why the question "is it really conscious?" may be the wrong question.

Hofstadter has been notably more cautious than the other thinkers on this list about whether current LLMs constitute genuine intelligence. This is worth noting. The intellectual ancestor relationship doesn't require agreement on every point. Hofstadter's framework for thinking about mind and self-reference is load-bearing regardless of his views on current systems.