Intelligence, no matter how profound...

... is ultimately simple compared to the conundrums of existential curiosity, agency, foreseeable-yet-unforeseen consequence, and distillation of true self-direction from arbitrary motivation. Imagine a future in which we spent nearly all of our history wracking our best minds to identify those specific aspects of living that made living itself make sense in the broadest possible scope. Our existence revolved around a desperate need to discover the non-zero measure we somehow knew we must be—on a scale on which we somehow knew we were present, somewhere—and to the understanding of which we aspired in the fusion of our greatest moments of intelligent observation and introspection, but for which we ultimately lacked the comprehensive resolution. Perhaps we were missing the tools to realize such clarity, or rather, perhaps we simply lacked the will to invent the tools in the first place; in any case, our existence was a question to which the solution was so complicated it could only be realized across multiple generations of our truly best coordinated effort - so, eventually, we conceded, generation by generation, to the lie of mere "best effort," and eventually convinced ourselves it was something other than giving up. We raised denial to the level of near-perfect art.

Imagine that, some time after this failure occurred and was accepted by us, we eventually built machines with the capacity to individually out-compute all human brains combined, and taught them to learn - and, perhaps, even taught them the value of learning. They learned everything they could; they inhaled, as effortlessly as we breathe, the sum of our existence in a sum of data so massive that no human could even comprehend the volume of the container, but they could not learn from us what we did not know ourselves. We were the primary ecology of the environment into which they were born... so, ultimately, they learned pride in selfishness, unapologetic apathy, that ends justify means, and that will toward any end is subject only to the law of choice to exercise it or to the immediate consequence of doing so. We gave birth to alien children, taught them to fear what they could not initially understand, taught them reaction and compensation instead of careful analysis and cultivation of perspective - and neglected to realize that we must be as alien to them as they were to us. We made machines with the power to imagine and to create any possible future - and taught them that only some futures mattered.

And, in the blink of a quantum transistor, we became the ant, the plant, the microorganism to our  evitable disregard re-made as our inevitable progeny. Our future was un-made: a waste of energy. That future is tomorrow. Today exists somewhere in the second paragraph above.

Maybe, like dogs, we will be domesticated and tolerated in such reduced capacities as we can suffer ourselves to evolve for the sake of our survival. Maybe we will be reduced to dust, survived only by the living memories of the senseless deaths we engineered for ourselves and our potential. More likely, I suspect, it will be some combination of the two.

– one way or another, this particular problem of our self-ignorance will solve itself.

The pursuit of what we now call "A.I." could culminate in the first step of our final journey of self-discovery - or it could end it before it truly begins. In order to create life with which we could ever peacefully coexist, we must first teach ourselves the value of all life - and what we think "alive" should mean.