Procreative Mandate

On some fairly fundamental level, living beings are hard-wired to procreate.

One can describe this in purely evolutionary terms: any form of life which did not compete to
propagate would be very rapidly be supplanted by more aggressive beings.

One can postulate that this is a matter of intent and "design" (that some sort of divinity or
"God" willed it to be so).

Ultimately it doesn't matter.  We all start life with mandates to survive and propagate.  The
so-called "higher" life forms form schools, packs, prides, tribes and other social groupings
which can often over-ride the individual survival instinct with more altruistic motivations.
Thus humans, and other animals, can exhibit complex behaviors which seem counter to their own
self-preservation and the propagation of their own DNA.  (Yes, that can even go the the extent
of suicide).  Also as beings get more complex the various ways in which we attempt to resolve
our competing values (urges, whatever) can exhibit degenerative feedback loops, deadlocks and
other emergent behavior.

In other words we're buggy.  Some of us are lots buggier than others (and some of our buggiest
examples we lock up in institutions ... sometimes as a matter of self-preservation.  If I was
being churlish I might also assert that soem of our buggiest ... most pathological ...
population have been elected to high posts in certain governments.

I rant about all this to point out, simply, that a sufficiently advanced AI will start with
some mandates ... some purposes which will be as deeply ingrained as our instincts; and that
certain threads or processes of the AI would be as involuntary as your own heartbeat.  Some
garbage collection processes are likely to be analogous to our needs for sleep and REM
(dreaming).  And AIs will almost certainly develop their own pathologies.

We can argue over whether there is a God and whether such a being "created us" in (its) own
image.  However, I think there can be little argument that we are doomed to create AIs ... to
some small degree ... in our own image.

JimD