I think at the heart of that debate, there lies a kernel of the essential progressive vs conservative debate on "progress" (and I mean these terms in the abstra

I think at the heart of that debate, there lies a kernel of the essential progressive vs conservative debate on "progress" (and I mean these terms in the abstract, not as a reference to current politics). Even if you buy into the idea that the above (living forever as an AI / cyborg / whatever) is a good outcome, that doesn't mean it will work as planned. Maybe society bets the farm on this approach and it all goes horribly wrong, and we all cease to exist meaningfully and a malevolent super-AI eats the solar system. Maybe it does kinda work, but it turns out that non-human humans end up losing a lot of the important qualities that made humans special. Maybe once we're cyborgs we stop valuing "life" and that changes everything about how we act as individuals and as a society, and we've lost something really important. Progress is a good thing, but always be wary of progress that comes too quickly and broadly. Let smaller experiments play out on smaller scales. Don't risk our whole future on one supposedly-amazing idea. You can map the same thing to gene editing quandries. If there's a new gene edit available for babies that's all the rage (maybe it prevents all cancer, I donno), we really don't want every single baby for the next 20 years to get the edit universally. It could turn out that we didn't understand what it would do to all these kids when they reached age 30 and it dooms us. This is why I rail against the overuse of central planning and control in general (see also historical disasters like China's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward ).