Humans may be products of biological computation, and now we are trying to redesign ourselves.

a couple of years ago, the mad scientists in me thought about a business where we preserve the brains of people a la Futurama. When the body dies, the brain does not necessarily have to follow. Possible? Yes. Feed it the right chemical cocktail, O2, remove waste products. Ethical/Moral? Whose to say? We are preserving life..in a sense. Profitable - Sure. Connect it to a keyboard/mouse interface. I mean we already have business cyro-preserving with the hope of unfreezing in the distant future!

Contrarian take: the Promethian efforts will continue, and asymptotically approach the axis of The Real Thing, until we realize that that Prometheus is a variation on the theme of Sisyphus.

Only in this telling, Sisyphus is rolling his uneven boulder along that asymptotic curve a little further with every iteration toward a smiling Zeus.

"Where do we draw the line?"

There will be no line as long as there is the rush to win the capitalist game.

UNTIL -> The ball of neurons begins outthinking the humans. Probably also fused with some AI augmentation.

It only takes a few percentage points for a Human to outthink a Chimp. This new 'thing' will dominate the humans.

I don’t believe that silicon has a soul (loosely speaking). For the same reason I don’t believe that some biomatter in a lab has a soul.

see also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beyond_Lies_the_Wub

Am I the only one that read Greg Bear’s novel Blood Music?

That book has haunted me for decades.

LLMs have awareness for the time they are spawned into memory. But it's very limited, think about if you could use your brain to think, but only after someone asked you a question. After you think the answer, then you are brain dead (unconscious) until another question is asked.

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