Who's "we", though, and aren't virtually all of us already bystanders in that sense? I have virtually zero power to shape world events and even if I want to believe that what I do isn't entirely negligible, someone else could do it, possibly better. I live in one of the largest, most important metropolises in the world, and even as a group, everything the entire population of my city does is next to nothing compared to everything being done in the world. As the world has grown, my city's share of it has been falling. If a continent with 20 billion people on it suddenly appeared, the output of my entire country will be negligible; would it matter if they were robots? In the grand scheme of things, my impact on the world is not much greater than my cat's, and I think he's quite content overall. There are many people more accomplished than me (although I don't think they're all smarter); should I care if they were robots? I may be sad that I won't be able to experience what the robots experience, but there are already many people in the world whose experience is largely foreign to mine.

And here's a completely way of looking at it, since I won't lieve forever. A successful species eventually becomes extinct - replaced by its own eventual offspring. Homo erectus are extinct, as they (eventually) evolved into homo sapiens. Are you the "we" of homo erectus or a different "we"? If all that remains from homo sapiens some time in the future is some species of silicon-based machines, machina sapiens, that "we" create, will those beings not also be "us"? After all, "we" will have been their progenitors in not-too-dissimilar a way to how the home erectus were ours (the difference being that we will know we have created a new distinct species). You're probably not a descendent of William Shakespeare's, so what makes him part of the same "we" that you belong to, even though your experience is in some ways similar to his and in some ways different. Will not a similar thing make the machines part of the same "we"?