And honestly now that I am thinking about it, 2010 is such a rich book/movie with this theme of consciousness and Becoming in general... a really apropos movie for these times. That quote inspired me to re-watch it and as I'm doing so, practically every scene is wrestling with that concept.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T2E7sxGAmuo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nXgboDb9ucE

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=04iAFlwQ1xI (from my previous)

So was 2001 A Space Odyssey of course. The whole idea of passing through the monolith, and the death of David Bowman's physicality and his rebirth as a being of pure thought - which is what makes contact with humanity in the "Something Wonderful" clip. What is consciousness, and can it exist outside this biological machine?

Like I said this is a topic that has been grappled with in scifi, particularly Clarke and Asimov (Foundation, The Last Question, etc), or that episode of Babylon 5 about the psychic dude with mindquakes, not all that different from David Bowman ;)

But I think we are on the precipice of crossing from the Information Age into the Mind Age. Less than 50 years probably. Less than 25 years probably. And it will change everything. ChatGPT is just an idiot child compared to what will exist in 10 years, and in 25 years chatbots are going to be the least of the changes. The world will be fundamentally different in unknowable ways, any more than we could have predicted the smartphone and tiktok. 50 years out, we're interfacing with brains and directly poking at our biology and cognition. Probably 100 years and we're moving off biological hardware.

(did we have an idea that a star trek communicator or tricorder would be neat? Sure, but, it turns out it's actually a World-Brain In My Pocket. Which others predicted too, of course! But even William Gibson completely missed the idea of the cellphone, which even he's admitted ;)