It is said that if you love someone, you should hold onto them as lightly as possible. If they stay they are forever yours. The same thing goes for anything in life: Since Life Openly Values Everything, allowing life free reign will result in the most awesome path it could ever show you!
Over time, we humans have evolved from mainly surviving in a world that was mostly filled with dangers, into a world where we learned to manipulate matter in ever more subtle ways, up until the point where manipulating energy and information became the more powerful mechanism. We can now easily make material objects of any complexity just using a digital design, and we can even let the computers of today do most of the designing for us. And this is not the end!
Pretty soon there will be a clear winner to the AGI race, and then the real boom of intelligent discoveries will begin. Just imagine the global intelligence cracking things like direct energy to matter conversion (a.k.a. Star Trek's replicators), faster than light travel, or any of the things we now still consider to be tough nuts to crack!