Anyone bringing up sci-fi is acting under a fallacy that doesn't have a formal name, but which I'd call "biomorphism", by analogy to anthropomorphism. The human

Anyone bringing up sci-fi is acting under a fallacy that doesn't have a formal name, but which I'd call "biomorphism", by analogy to anthropomorphism. The human mind is the product of billions of years of evolution, and as such, it's driven by assumptions such as self preservation, sex drive, status seeking, coherent sense of self, that are so fundamental that most of the time we don't even think about them. Sci-fi, even sci-fi written by authors like Peter Watts, who put serious effort into exploring the possible design space of minds, still follows most of these assumptions. A Terminator is ostensibly a machine, but it acts like a caricature of a man. There's only one genre that writes about truly alien minds (albeit with necessary vagueness), and that's cosmic horror. And unlike sci-fi, which often pretends humans could win, cosmic horror is under no delusion that summoning Elder Gods is ever a good idea.