> My strongest hope is that the human brain and mind are such powerful computing and reasoning substrates that a tight coupling of biological and synthetic "minds" will outcompete pure synthetic minds for quite a while.
Unfortunately most of the cases I can think of where synthetic "minds" outperform biological "minds," but biological and synthetic "minds" outcompete pure synthetic "minds," end up fairly quickly dominated by pure synthetic "minds." The middle case is a very short intermediate period. The most prominent example is chess where "centaurs" consisting of a human and a computer are obsolete at this point in favor of just getting the most powerful computer you can get. See e.g. the International Correspondence Chess Federation's (which is centaur play) last championship. https://www.iccf.com/event?id=100104
17 competitors competed. Out of 136 games, every single game was drawn except for 10. The only reason those 10 games were not drawn was because they were all played against one competitor, Aleksandr Dronov, who died during the course of the tournament while those 10 games were in session and therefore forfeited those games. Every single game between competitors who did not die resulted in a draw. The only thing that separated the 11 joint first-place finishers and 6 joint second-place finishers was whether they played the deceased Dronov. The sole third-place finisher was Dronov because of his death. As far as I can tell, humans contributed nothing to this championship.
The current ICCF championship started last December and is still ongoing. Every single one of the currently completed 16 games is currently drawn.
This seems like a very weak hope to rely on.