Actually, I don't find these conjectures desperate or crazy at all, because it's what I'd do. Moving off this biological substrate onto something more reliable, hardy, efficient, and copyable seems like a no-brainer level "Good Idea". If there's any advanced intelligent life out there at all, one of its highest priorities is going to be finding more durable substrate to live in than sloppy, unoptimized and non-designed biochemistry.
An Article on Motherboard reports about Alien Minds by Susan Schneider who claiThe Dominant Life Form In the Cosmos Is Probably Superintelligent Robots. The article is crosslinked to other posts about superintelligence and at the end discusses the question why these alien robots leave us along. The arguments puts forth on this don't convince me though.