Artificial Intelligences: A Bridge Toward Diverse Intelligence and Humanity's Future

Recent discussions and debate around artificial intelligence (AI) and its status are notably incomplete, missing the implications of highly relevant aspects of the emerging fields of diverse intelligence (DI) and synthetic morphology, as well as of basic facts of developmental biology. Herein, it is argued that human flourishing is impossible without an appreciation of the space of possible beings and of the ways in which today's intelligent machine debates are about universal existential questions facing biological beings, not just AI. The inevitable arrival of a wide set of unconventional bodies and minds as humans modify and create new forms will disrupt untenable old narratives of what people are and how to recognize their sentient allies in unfamiliar guises. Herein, the issues engendered by the advent of AI from the perspective of the field of DI and the evolutionary history of the bodies and minds are discussed.