There are many easy-to-guess advantages to moving consciousness to a machine platform. If/when "we" as a society become machine-based beings:
- We will be able to move from one body to another with the same ease we biology-based beings now change vehicles.
- We will be able to live and work in the vacuum of space without having to take along a very-hard-to-maintain bubble of pressurized air.
- We will be able to travel on a beam of electro-magnetic energy to far-away worlds where spare bodies have been shipped.
- And those faraway worlds will not need to have a biosphere, or have bubbles of biosphere constructed/cultivated.
- In like fashion, we will be able to move to and from orbits and Lagrange points where bodies have been previously placed.
- Our sustenance will not be limited to carbohydrates that require a biosphere in which to grow. Most sources will be harvestable directly from light, heat, and kinetics, which all exist in the vacuum of space.
While this is not by any means a complete list, there are likely to be many
less obvious advantages, too. This one for example:
We will be able to have multiple independent bodies, each with its own short-term
situational memories, working off of a single set of long-term
experiential memories that have been accumulated over time.
Consider multiple bodies working in a manufacturing environment, each working off of a single experienced individual's learning and acquired expertise in manufacturing processes. Each maintaining its own short-term memories which will form and decay quickly to respond to the fine-grained details of its immediate individual situation
It may even be possible that the single individual's long-term
experiential memory may be able to continue to gain learning from each body's short-term
situational connections as they form and decay in response to their own current situations.
-djr