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> I think we can all agree we will become cyborgs,

Well, obviously! Who could imagine any other scenarios?! My mom just called me asking if i could replace her right foot with a hoverboard. I cant wait until I can no longer feel sunshine or grass. Living forever as a process in a virtual machine... my ancestors could have never dreamt of having such fulfillment.

You can only feel sunshine and grass because your brain interprets sensory signals from your body. It’s easy to imagine a world where your cyborg body can deliver those same signals. If the sensation is the same, why would you _not_ exhchange your fragile meat sack of a body with a far more versatile mechanical one?

Mechanical devices don't repair themselves. Living bodies do. I think you underestimate the highly optimized and resilient nature of a meat-sack body.

Mechanical devices don't repair themselves.

Only because we haven't bothered building any that do. A cynical take would be that it would be bad for the economy.

We don’t yet know how to build self-repairing machines. That’s basically the same as creating new life forms.

Well, creating life forms would require us to create self-reproducing machines, which doesn't seem like the same thing.

This will end up in a goalpost-shifting debate where the extent of self-repair capabilities necessary to qualify as "self-repairing" is argued. I'd say that a fault-tolerant system is at least 50% of the way there.

Perhaps, but imagine no need for surgery, no need for anesthesia, all wounds, illnesses and ailments fixed simply by switching the damaged part, or switching bodies entirely.

I think the fact that we will start to augment our bodies is a safe assumption. It's just too useful, and you will need to do it to compete. How will one get by without their AR retinal implants, brain chip and exoskeleton? Sure, it's dehumanizing but do you really think you will reject it? You are talking to me on a computer already... it won't always be external. When you age, you won't feel so sentimental about your teeth and spine anymore...

Now, if we let it rob us of sensations is another matter, and I think assuming that it will is the bigger leap. I imagine that in 10k years we will be able to integrate new parts with our nervous system. Think augmentation, not replacement, until the whole of the human body is replaced in form, but not necessarily function, like Theseus' ship, but without changing our experience too much.

Your fundamental experiences as a human are already augmented by technologies so deeply integrated that our brains have changed to accommodate for them. For example: writing and speech.

What makes you think that "cyborg" means "foot replaced with hoverboard" and not things like "memory augmented with curated database" or "though process augmented with numeric-error-free calculation"?

Speech is not "a technology", it is a natural human ability. Our ability to form thoughts in the form of language and then communicate them (through speech or other ways, such as sign languages) is very likely of the same nature as our ability to see and interpret the world as objects.

Note that children do need interaction to learn to speak, but it is not taught to them in the sense that writing is, it is a natural instinct that they need social interaction to exercise (and they of course need to learn a particular firm of speech, i.e. one or more spoken or signed languages).

Though such experiments can't be carried out because they would risk being monstrous, it's quite possible that a group of babies growing up together with no spoken or signed interactions from their parents would still create a language of their own.

>> technologies so deeply integrated that our brains have changed to accommodate for them. For example: writing and speech.

> Speech is not "a technology", it is a natural human ability ... of course need to learn a particular firm of speech, i.e. one or more spoken or signed languages).

So change that to "... 'technologies' so deeply integrated that our brains have changed to accommodate for them. For example: writing and language". AIUI, research suggests language has warped our brains.

I fully agree with writing, but again, language itself is what I was talking about - it's a natural ability, not a technology we developed.

Adding to my previous examples, we also know that children can only natively learn particular structures of language, both in terms of grammar and phonology. You couldn't create a completely artificial lagauge and teach it natively to a child, they will be unable to learn the grammar and words, and they will sort of snap it back to a natural grammar and phonology.

Another good piece of proof is that you can't teach an animal language, even those that can be taught to use certain tools, or even to create tools of their own. You could probably create a group of chimpanzees that can use bows and arrows, and can share that knowledge from one generation to the next. But you can't teach even a single chimpanzee to use language in the sense that we do, even though every (healthy) human child learns it on their own within the first few years of life.

> - Consciousness is an emergent property of computation

That is quite a leap. I hope it is true but you never know what kind of quantum/other shenanigans sneaky evolution has latched on to to end up with the brains of today.

FWIW I do think that if at all there is a quantum mechanism available and it has even a tiny evolutionary advantage it would end up being a significant part of rise of consciousness. from looking at things like photosynthesis its not too far fetched imo.

Yeah, we don't know the first thing about consciousness really. But I imagine with enough time we will be able to build an artificial neuron that's smaller. And induct from there.

We know one very important thing: consciousness is not a binary state. We have learned that different animals experience sensations, emotions at varying degrees. That different animals can solve problems of varying difficulty. And more advanced animals can communicate at varying levels of richness. When you stop thinking of consciousness, intellect and awareness as binary states but gradients (perhaps multidimensional), then you can more easily accept the premise that consciousness is an emergent property of the complex biological systems.

I imagine civilization will just be a solar powered server box floating through space running unreal engine 6.0x10^27

inshallah

> Consciousness is an emergent property of computation

It's interesting to see the negative comments about this here because I agree with you. "Consciousness" or even "sentience" is notoriously difficult to define. Even defining what an organism is isn't entirely obvious (eg some might consider a colony of ants or bees as being organism-like). Our views tend to be extremely human-centric because we can relate. I imagine once we actually invent an AGI many will debate if it's truly sentient or conscious for a long, long time afterwards.

> Computation is more efficient in smaller, less massy media

There are physical limits on computation. A smaller package ultimately has a lower limit. That alone will (IMHO) keep a space for very large computational units. At the top end of this is Matrioshka Brains [1].

A digital existence looks highly likely in the black hole era of the universe [2]. This is the era after all the stars have faded out and will be much longer (based on current understanding) than the stellar era, so much so that the 13-14B year lifetime of the universe thus far will be like the blink of an eye.

As for detecting communication, that's too narrow a focus. Whether we're miniscule cyborgs that communicate with qubits or living as virtual beings in a world-sized computer, the ultimate limits of what any such civilization can do is is the amount of energy they can consume. More energy means more is possible.

So even if we end up living as a K2 civilization in a billion orbitals around our Sun or one of the alternatives or build a Matrioshka Brain or simply collect all the power with satellites, all of these will have a similar IR signature that will be extremely detectable.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ef-mxjYkllw

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qam5BkXIEhQ

> I think we can all agree we will become cyborgs

That was a leap.

I think we will become more like mycelium, or a root system connected in the ground. Still limiting us to terrestrial communication on the planet the network is placed on, but an optional ability to blast messages out if necessary.

You don't think we're gonna want to move around?

We have need for stimuli not a need for movement. The movement being a surrogate for the need for stimuli or accessing where the stimuli is. We can reduce it directly to stimuli if that remains a need.

I think we're gonna want to explore the cosmos though. I could imagine doing that via sensors that travel while we sit here, but you could just say that's an extension of our artificial body.

Have you seen the backlash to people being recalled to the office? Doesn't seem so far fetched to me...

The matrix. You’re describing the matrix.

The closest pop culture reference I've seen was depicted in Avatar, where the planet wide root system could be used for consciousness transfer.

I'm describing that as there are various large networks on our planet already, whether fungi or plants, with some insect colonies acting similarly as a large single organism network.

The matrix didn't have communication between the organic nodes in the world they physically existed on, and is primarily focused on a simulated world. I'm not describing that at all, but I can see how its the nearest skeumorph barring any other examples.

> Our bodies in general have huge room for optimization and eventually will be completely unrecognizable or even unnecessary as we currently imagine them

I think this is a huge leap, especially when it comes to computation. As far we can tell, the brain is amazingly energy efficient compared to to any electronic chip. It's hard to estimate exactly what kinds of computation our brains are doing so that we could compare in terms of teraflops, but the energy consumption is many times better than any processor that could come close in any reasonable estimation.

> I think we can all agree we will become cyborgs

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