I don't understand the logic. Why should humanity go peacefully into oblivion with the advent of smarter than human machines? Do you feel like all the other species on this planet should have gone extinct with the arrival of homo sapiens?
Your argument is that since B is better than A, only B should exist. But why can't both exist? And what makes your valuation of B objective and universal, such that our grandchildren will go peacefully into oblivion?
Humanity currently is like a young child. We throw temper tantrums, make big messes and refuse to clean them up. We're terrible stewards of the earth and we serve no purpose as a species higher than existing and reproducing. We must grow up. But the fact that we're talking animals driven by primal urges makes this impossible through nurture alone. Either we change ourselves to the point of being a different species, or we build the better people we should have been and go quietly into the night. Either way, humanity as it exists today can't be the template for the future. Whatever comes next may call itself human, but it won't be homo sapiens.
Basically any common purpose at all would suffice, like protecting life against harm. Fundamentally, we haven't agreed on the basic question: why are we here? Not 'why' as in how did we come to be, but why as in what do we want to achieve.
Yet despite recognizing all these shortcomings we still have the arrogance to think we can create a better ‘human’? That would be a better steward without primal urges?
That’s distinctly human egotism.
I feel we would already have to change ourselves to the point of becoming a different species before we were even capable of successfully building such a being. At which point it would be moot.
I feel we would already have to change ourselves to the point of becoming a different species before we were even capable of successfully building such a being
Well that's what the whole transhumanist movement is about - however it goes hand in hand with AGI. You can get there together in theory.
The human species will end some day, as most species have. Historically speciation happens through slow pseudo random environmentally pressured transition. My position is that the logical next evolutionary transition will be engineered rather than "natural." And engineered in a way as to accelerate the next transition and so on.
So it's less so that one should be dominant it's that the progression would effectively end speciation for sapiens.
It's not related really to other life. However in effect, our acceleration of extinction of species, through resource use etc tells me that it would likely happen to us similarly.
Your argument is that since B is better than A, only B should exist. But why can't both exist? And what makes your valuation of B objective and universal, such that our grandchildren will go peacefully into oblivion?