Eliezer, I agree SF fiction writers find it far easier to just write AIs, and also true aliens, as just odd humans, as it is far more work to write a plausible intelligent non-human. I don't mean to be saying much more than the obvious point that an AI that was a "mind child" of human civilization would in that obvious sense share causal parentage with us. A whole brain emulation would have started out as a particular human brain, a hard coded AI would have started out as the sort of code a human would write, and an AI that evolved under pressure to be useful would have evolved to be useful in our human-dominated world, rather that some random world out there. I don't at all claim that mind children of ours would be particularly "nice"; creatures that share lots of our heritage can obviously be quite unnice.