As usual your terrifying position is defended well and with very clever observations. “But it’s worth remembering that if there were any smaller modification of a chimpanzee that spontaneously gave rise to a technological civilization, we would be having this conversation at that lower level of intelligence instead.” Quite so, and a perspicacious observation indeed.
I content myself with the belief that what you are proposing is likely impossible; it is quite likely that the universe may not be able to support vast orders of magnitude of intelligence. Failing this hope, I can fall back on a hope that because you are such a clever philosopher you won’t have enough energy left over for the actual implementation of your ideas. Please reassure me that you sleep sometimes.
In any case, what you are describing as your “profession” is a very very (limit N->inf very^N) bad idea, because the problem of consciousness is inherently unsolvable. This being the case, you and your crowd risk replacing humanity with an unconscious entity; the risk of such a prospect is even more astonishingly huge than your ambitions. If our planet is the sole location of consciousness in the universe you run the risk of snuffing out existence entirely!
A very interesting analysis, though I hope your overstatement is for effect...
It is in fact an overstatement, though the tendencies you describe are surely strong. It is interesting that my field, climatology, is often accused of drumming up an existential threat to preserve our funding, which would be almost as bad of a moral failure as ignoring one. Of course, the situation is somewhat different as physicists advocate bizarre experiments while we are suggesting a bizarre experiment come to an end as soon as possible...