I agree primarily because of all uses of energy, genes seem (to an unabashedly biased creature such as your truly) to record the most teleological information.
This is, in part, why I suspect panspermia between hydrothermal planets would be a natural byproduct of technological civilization. “The Road To Panspermia Is Paved With Sexual Perversion” may, in this respect, be seen as pesmimistic given its assumption of the “good enough” criterion for evolution – which assumes no telos beyond that which created life in the first place.
Having said that, engineering tradeoffs do exist even for AGI-guided spores dependent on limited hydrothermal materials. Among them are communication latency between spores resulting in incoherence hence loss of singular AGI identity analogous to the emergence of individuality in the nervous systems in sexual species. So I do expect the “war of all against all” to emerge over the space-borne materials derived from hydrothermal ores, to support mitotic evolution of spores. This will be mitigated if hydrogen fusion (Protium aka Hydrogen-1 isotope) obtains thereby expanding the definition of “ore” to include more non-terrestrial materials. However, just as is the case with the emergence of predatory behavior, it will be more energetically efficient to locate and “digest” previously refined materials present in other spores. This is what I suspect will drive the “man-like beings” coddled within the spores to little more than asexual organelles of the spores in a manner not unlike that which produces “metrosexuals” in cities.
One might then suspect that a convenient target for such “digestion” would be Earth’s crust – but then that gets back to the Wolpert-constraint on rogue AGIs imposed, if not by the rogues realizing what they are doing, then by other AGIs that have not gone rogue.
PS: xAI’s datacenter claims to have expanded the scale of coherence with a recent patent:
