I've worked in ML since 1994. I've been very impressed with the progress of models lately. I read "The Coming Technological Singularity" when it was first written and dedicated my career to seeing these sorts of things coming true.
That doesn't mean that their exponential improvement will change faster than light travel. Therefore, to deliver a human being to the surface of another planet (let's say Proxima Centauri at ~4 ly away) with enough resources to create a stable colony means we'll travel at less than the speed of light. Even with a solar assist, the best we can do right now is less than 1% the speed of light in an unmanned probe. People are working on alternatives, but those are not the sort of technology you just pop in a space ship and send for 400 years to a neighboring star. How do you support a population for 400 years?
As an alternative, let's just make humans like tardigrades, capable of shrivelling up and surviving high-radiation, low-moisture environments. Then we can take 10K years to get to a remote location. As a bonus, the resulting humans can survive in a much wider range of conditions so we have many more target systems to consider. Oh, but that's human engineering- are you sure that we'll just be able to genetically modify people (technologically and morally) at that level any time soon? A single person died in an early gene therapy trial and it shut down the field for 10+ years.
Basically, what you're arguing is that exponential growth in AI (not a given) will unlock huge material sciences and biological advances. While possible, it's unlikely to combine in a way that suggests "we should send people to other solar systems".
It doesn't. But if FTL is possible, ASI will get us there faster.
> How do you support a population for 400 years
There are engineering solution to all of the individual points you're making.
> Basically, what you're arguing is that exponential growth in AI (not a given) will unlock huge material sciences and biological advances.
It already is unlocking material science and biological advances. What happens when you can literally simulate matter, the human body, cells, perfectly in a computer - and run millions of experiments to reverse engineer these things? I don't understand how someone can't see where this is going.
> While possible, it's unlikely to combine in a way that suggests "we should send people to other solar systems".
I'm not sure what your last sentence means exactly. What determines this is whether people have the desire to or not, and I'm sure profit will be involved in one way or another. If there's a will, there's a way - there are enough sci-fi movies and books to clearly illustrate what mankind dreams of and has dreamt of for millennia.
Just my thoughts as a software engineer with a mechanical engineering background.