Who Are Your "Descendants"?

On AI risk, I’ve said that evolved things have two robust habits: wariness of co-existing rivals, even when quite similar to you, and indulgence of descendants, even when quite different from you. Today, future AIs are our descendants, not rivals.Some reply that this is a crazy stupid metaphorical application of the of “descendant” concept, as AIs are not from the Homo Sapiens species, and they have no DNA. So AIs are not “real” descendants.But the concept of “descendant” is a technical term in the general theory of Darwinian selection. I’m using this concept literally, not metaphorically. DNA-based evolution is a special case of this general theory, and for many hundreds of thousands of years human evolution has been driven mostly by a different, non-DNA, kind of Darwinian selection: cultural evolution.The general Darwinian theory is that a tendency of things to cause similar future things with a similar tendency is selected for. When such selection is possible, it happens, and such…