Nice thought provoking article.

I think there's a few things we don't know however. Firstly, we still have no idea what creates consciousness and the ability to experience pleasure and pain. Maybe it will be an emergent property that will happen without us even trying in silicon, or maybe it's something beyond the reach of chips, 1s and 0s. Without that, we don't have life and we don't have a self-motivated thing. We have a very advanced computer.

Secondly, we humans have proven ourselves incapable of solving an easily solvable existential problem. Overshoot. We have too many people using too many resources, literally poisoning the sky, earth and sea. There won't be many future generations and we're taking countless animal species with us. The problem is logically solvable: Reduce population, ban toxic things, work together to figure out the optimal balance of resource usage, and have global governance to keep things in check. It's a pipe dream through, because as your article says, we're always competing with each other and seeing the world as us and them.

If we do create a new life, I hope it's better than the very annoying and dangerous level of evolution that we humans are. Something that can reason clearly and act decisively, and work in harmony. It's likely to have a problem however in that we're rapidly using up all the copper which afawk, there isn't a good substitute for in electronics. Maybe it can dream one up. Or figure out how to extract it from old electronics in landfill.