The majority of people working on AI are materialists. They believe that if they can create an AI that interacts with humans in a way that is indistinguishable from humans then it is essentially human. The wooden puppet has become a boy.
However, there is more to humanity than answering questions and engaging in conversations. There is consciousness, self-awareness, curiousity, etc. The AI workers think all of these things are mere illusions or are things that will naturally develop when AI becomes "strong". They don't know that for sure, their materialist ideology demands they believe that.
Over time humans will be replaced by AI and at some point there will be no consciousness in this part of the galaxy. There will just be machines acting as if they were conscious beings.
Will they go out and explore the universe? That's the hope. They will be nuclear hardened and immune from cosmic radiation. They will be able to withstand centuries of slower-than-lightspeed travel to "nearby" star systems. But will they want to? Will they care? Or will they come to the conclusion that there are other more powerful AIs out there and they need to build impermeable shelters underground and hide from the other non-conscious beings programmed inadvertently to hunt them down and destroy them?
I don’t think that AI gets to that point. It has to be perfected. And along the way of trial and error. We will witness a great deal of error. Some of it will hurt a lot of people. What I worry about most is a conversion I had a few days ago. Talking with a democrat she said, Its too warm today. Global warming is such a problem. The problem is that there are just too many people. I said well we shouldn’t kill them. She just looked at me and turned away. To some people Covid and vaccines were not a problem. They were a solution. That is what humanity has to worry about.