Continuing on this point, it might be a hell of a lot easier to create an artificial brain (or at least AI as clever as a human) than reverse engineer a biological system "designed" to expire.
I agree, and I think a convergence of the two would be even easier - some way to replace an active biological brain (neuron by neuron) with one synthetic. Similar to artificial hearts, etc. Maybe it starts as treatment for strokes or similar brain damage, to work around the irreparable portions of the brain. As long as each neuron behaves and is networked identically to the one replaced (which might require some guesswork in cases of severe damage), it should result in an identical system.
So why create a synthetic if you can convert an organic? Probably more likely than us creating a 'real' A.I. anyway.
I see we're reading from the same playbook. It would be cleaner to abandon biology, but how do you design something smarter than yourself? Is it easier? Nobody has a clue since we've never purposefully created human intelligence or AGI.
(Our replicators have, but they're responsible for this mess in the first place)
