to propagate my genes

I got a vasectomy a number of years ago in my mid 20s with 0 kids. I exist to experience things like love, hydrofoil surfing, skiing, and the journey to try to do more of these things. There are many people or trained models that could say I have a wasted existence of sorts, but the universe’s ending will always be the same no matter how many times the power dynamics on earth and beyond shift.

AI will be better at propagating copies of itself than you at yourself. In that sense, it will be more efficient and you will be obsolete.

When thinking about evolution we should be careful not to confuse description with prescription. Evolution theory says that we have lots of copies of things that replicated in the past, and since they are copies, they themselves are likely to be replicators. But it does not say that things should replicate, or that things which don't replicate are defective. It is merely explaining observations of the world.

If we create an AI that replicates more than humans, and do nothing to prevent that, we can end up in an AI-dominated world, or even one where multicellular carbon life is extinct, but that's absolutely not inevitable, just one possibility. We don't have to create a paperclip-maximized world. We totally have the possibility to declare the goal is human happiness or something, not maximum number of replicators.

So you're saying that we just have to give the AI a command like "Make as many paperclips as possible" and that's all we need, right?