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"There is also a deeper message laid bare within our futurist projections. Our notions about the emergence of intelligent machines expose our fantasies (often unspoken) about what perfection is: not soft and biological, like our current selves, but hard, digital and almost inconceivably powerful. To some people, such a future is one of hope and elevation. To others, it is one of fear and subjugation. Either way, it assumes that machines sit at the pinnacle of the evolution of consciousness.

Superficially, the logic behind the conjectures about cosmic machine intelligence appears pretty solid. Extrapolating the trajectory of our own current technological evolution suggests that with enough computational sophistication on hand, the capacity and capability of our biological minds and bodies could become less and less attractive. At a certain point we’d want to hop into new receptacles, custom-built to suit whatever takes our fancy. Similarly, that technological arc could take us to a place where we’ll create artificial intelligences that are either indifferent to us, or that will overtake and subsume (or simply squish) us. 

Biology is not up to the task of sustaining pan-stellar civilisations or the far-future human civilisation, the argument goes. The environmental and temporal challenges of space exploration are huge. Any realistic impetus to become an interstellar species might demand robust machines, not delicate protein complexes with fairly pathetic use-by dates. A machine might live forever and copy itself perfectly, unencumbered by the error-prone flexibility of natural evolution. Self-designing life forms could also tailor themselves to very specific environments. In a single generation they could adapt to the great gulfs of time and space between the stars, or to the environments of alien worlds."