Humans are fundamentally Animals.
However complex and "risen" we believe our motives, they're actually quite simple..
Take a step back, and you'd see that ANYTHING and EVERYTHING you do is towards protraction of the population .. basicallllly sex... more sex, sex in more places, m0re sex, and now, elon musk wants sex-in-space..
So, as to AI.. I've discussed this before on Geekhack, perhaps you've missed it.
AI, will be humanity's salvation.
It is Very hard to have sex in space, we will not evolve fast enough to do this efficiently, and it's very very impractical to send human being, essentially, large bags of goop into space for exploration.
So, what's much more likely to happen.. is building cybernetic brains, or servers, that will house human consciousness..
A machine that will inherit the human and therefore life's motives, and have it explore the galaxy in name of man.
The earth will simply be exhausted to create this Mechanical child of ours.. and that will be the end of that..
Maybe one day, it will come back and visit us, assuming there are still a few of us around..
but given how often human childs visit parents, there's no need to bet on it.