These processes do not produce babies, they come way after the sperm fertilizing the egg.
And there is no top spot in "the" food chain. There are food chains that are separate from ours. And even assuming that's wrong: Do you see all the species of plants and animals just give up because humans exist? It has no bearing on their "aspirations" if you will. If I made a copy of you, a 100% exact clone, would you die peacefully? Or would it change nothing about your desire to live? My answer would be the latter.
> however it is true that people get pleasure in seeing their children grow up and are generally ok dying knowing their children will take on their legacy.
I don't actually believe this. People make their peace with their mortality -- or fail to do so -- on their own. Everybody dies alone. Actually, worrying about the future, and the gulags or world wars one's child might end up in, can have the opposite effect, people being fine about dying but worried about their children suffering.
Yea actually we (collectively) kind of do. I mean the massive institutional educational system, secondary, post secondary, neonatal care, preschool, faber, Montessori, Parenting books, videos blogs etc... are all systems and mechanisms and processes etc that are prescriptive for how to produce a positive, healthy functioning adult in [insert] society.
I guess that's a nice thought until you actually see your child, then it goes out of the window. But I'm guessing here.
Almost across the board, parents say the best thing they have ever done is to raise children. That their kids are smarter and kinder and better etc...than they were and on and on. Millions of words have been spilled for these legacies. Especially parents with disabled children, frequently laud how much more grounded and spiritual and "in the now" their children are. Whether they believe it, or it's objectively true or not is certainly up for debate, however it is true that people get pleasure in seeing their children grow up and are generally ok dying knowing their children will take on their legacy.
You're too focused on the fade into oblivion part. I'm hoping and AGI will help us figure out our existential problems - but maybe it can't or wont. Maybe it can help is figure out how to keep us all in a state of bliss forever, or upload us to computer paradise (ahem, matrix) or cure all of our diseases, or help us merge with it. Who knows, all I know is that we can't get past any kind of "singularity" level of technology with the slow pace of biological evolution.
It's simply a philosophical point that with a superhuman AGI we need not worry about what our fate as a human species is anymore because something else is taking the top spot in the food chain. It's a much more passive statement than you're interpreting it as.