Sorry for the terse comment, it's finals week soon so things are busy around sweet apple acres.

Essentially what you've done is take the mysterious problem of intelligence and shoved it under a new ill-defined name (living). Pretty much any programmer can write a self-replicating program, or a program that modifies its own source code, or other such things. But putting it as simply as that doesn't actually bring you any closer to actually making AI. You have to explain exactly how the program should modify itself in order to make progress.

Mysterious answers will make this clear. A Human's Guide to Words will maybe show you what's wrong with using "living" like that. EY gave a presentation in which he noted that all the intelligence in the universe that we know of has so far been formed by evolution, and it took a long time. AI will be the first designed intelligence and it'll go much quicker. You seem to base your entire argument on evolution though, which seems unnecessary.

Also, be careful with your wording in phrases like "computers don't have intrinsic goals so they aren't alive." As other peoples mentioned, this is dangerous territory. Be sure to follow a map. Cough cough.