However, there is also another, more functional sense of a “meaning of life,” one that preserves the clarity and singularity of the original question, but does not require life to have a creator in order for the question to have an answer. We can think of the “meaning of life” as the “purpose of life”: what life was “made for” and what life “in fact contributes” to our universe. And while the concept of “purpose” has many latent associations with intelligent design, in nature, many things — in fact, pretty much all things — functionally have a “purpose” without having been “designed” by anything at all (except, of course, the ongoing process of natural selection). For example, the “purpose” of a finch’s curved beak is to crack hard nuts: since the need for finches to crack nuts is why these curved beaks exist, and nut-cracking is (practically) what finch beaks will be mostly used for over the course of their lifetime. Humans, too, could have a functional “purpose” in our universe, something that we were “made for” or that we are “meant to do” in a broader evolutionary context, without having been intentionally created for anything.
If we take this “meaning as purpose” framework seriously, and believe that building superintelligence will be the most important thing that humans will ever do (in terms of cosmic impact), then “building superintelligence” would be the de facto meaning of human life: our greatest “purpose,” our signature cosmic contribution.