When I was a young person in the 1970s reading about technology, space travel was the focus of futurism and predictions. I read a lot about the "accelerating rate of progress" in space technologies, and many experts confidently predicted permanent lunar colonies around 1990 and luxurious martian and orbital space colony living post-2000. The reasoning was more or less the same as the "AI singularists". If you look at the "curve of progress" in space tech from WWII to 1970 and extrapolate from it, we ought to have the full "Star Trek" technologies now.
However, as we know, the pace of progress in space travel and settlement technology slowed down and almost stagnated, despite a lot of very smart people who thought fast space colonization was a sure, inevitable prediction.
I think the same goes for extrapolations from our current computing technology - as exciting as the blue-sky scenarios are, and as fervently as I hope that brain uploading and similar goals will be achieved, I think the barriers to computational transcendence of the current limits of our bodies will probably be at least as challenging as the barriers to permanent off-earth colonization.
However, as we know, the pace of progress in space travel and settlement technology slowed down and almost stagnated, despite a lot of very smart people who thought fast space colonization was a sure, inevitable prediction.
I think the same goes for extrapolations from our current computing technology - as exciting as the blue-sky scenarios are, and as fervently as I hope that brain uploading and similar goals will be achieved, I think the barriers to computational transcendence of the current limits of our bodies will probably be at least as challenging as the barriers to permanent off-earth colonization.