The potential moral implications of Alu being life have nothing to do with multiplying by the number of transposons, they have to do with realizing that what you value isn't "life".
What definition of "life" is satisfied by both a transposon and an AI?
Edit: Did you learn ethics from Orson Scott Card or something?
If we consider all life to have ethical value (and we must, if we wish to be raman and not varelse), and if we classify transposons and other mobile genetic elements as life, then it is a simple syllogism to conclude that transposons have ethical value.
My ethics were influenced a nonzero amount by reading Orson Scott Card. More to the point, OSC provided terminology which I felt was both useful and likely to be understood by my audience.
I now think that my use of the word "must" in the above-quoted passage was a mistake.
I recently read (in Dawkins' The Ancestor's Tale) about the Alu sequence, and went on to read about transposons generally. Having as I do a rather broad definition of life, I concluded that Alu (and others like it) are lifeforms in their own right, although parasitic ones. I found the potential ethical implications somewhat staggering, especially given the need to shut up and multiply those implications by the rather large number of transposon instances in a typical multicellular organism.
I have written out my thoughts on the subject, at http://jttlov.no-ip.org/writings/alulife.htm. I don't claim to have a well-worked out position, just a series of ideas and questions I feel to be worthy of discussion.
ETA: I have started editing the article based on the discussion below. For reference with the existing discussion, I have preserved a copy of the original article as well, linked from the current version.