Posted this above as well.

The reason they all feel like babies to me, from the perspective of "are they people?", is that they're in a condition where we can see a reasonable path for turning them into something that is unquestionably a person.

Here's another case to consider:

I assume you've granted that sufficiently advanced AIs ought to be counted as people. Say that I have running on my computer a script which is compiling an AI's source, and which will launch the resultant executable as soon as compilation finishes with no intervention on my part.

Am I killing a person if I terminate this script before compilation completes? That is, does "software which will compile and run an AI" belong to the "people" or the "not people" group?

I think babies are much closer to this than to any of the examples you've listed above.

In the interests of settling confusion, here's another example:

Suppose we let the above script finish and the AI go about its merry way for a few centuries. We shut down the computer it's running on - writing its current state to non-volatile memory - to transport it somewhere else. To me it seems that destroying that memory would constitute killing a person.

From these examples, I think "will become a person" is only significant for objects which were people in the past. This handles all of the examples you list (leaving aside 3-year-olds, which are too close to the issue at hand), as well as explaining why I don't think interrupting compilation as above is killing a person but destroying the state of a running-but-paused AI does.

Questions for you:

• Does interrupting compilation as above seem to you like killing someone?
• If not, do you still think babies are closer to the examples you list than to this example?
• If not, do you still think babies are people?
• If so, can you think of some other example which we can both readily agree is a person (or not a person) which can help settle this?

This question is fraught with politics and other highly sensitive topics, so I'll try to avoid getting too specific, but it seems to me that thinking of this sort of thing purely in terms of a potentiality relation rather misses the point. A self-extracting binary, a .torrent file, a million lines of uncompiled source code, and a design document are all, in different ways, potential programs, but they differ from each other both in degree and in type of potentiality. Whether you'd call one a program in any given context depends on what you're planning to do with it.

Gametes are not people, even though we know how to make people from them.

I'm not at all sure a randomly selected human gamete is less likely to become a person than a randomly selected cryonics patient (at least, with currently-existing technology).

Might be better to talk about this in terms of conversion cost rather than probability. To turn a gamete into a person you need another gamete, $X worth of miscellaneous raw materials (including, but certainly not limited to, food), and a healthy female of childbearing age. She's effectively removed from the workforce for a predictable period of time, reducing her probable lifetime earning potential by $Y, and has some chance of various medical complications, which can be mitigated by modern treatments costing $Z but even then works out to some number of QALYs in reduced life expectancy. Finally, there's some chance of the process failing and producing an undersized corpse, or a living creature which does not adequately fulfill the definition of "person."

In short, a gamete isn't a person for the same reason a work order and a handful of plastic pellets aren't a street-legal automobile.

Gametes are not people, even though we know how to make people from them, because the chance that any given sex cell ever becomes a person is so slim.

What's the cutoff probability?