Another book along those lines I enjoyed reading was "Children of Time" by Adrian Tchaikovsky.

Wonderfully written, but for my shame I expected a different storyline and put it down a year or so ago after only reading 60 pages or so and haven't gone back to it. I keep packing it one times away, but... .

One day I might learn how to have a kid AND read books :/

I started reading the Foundation trilogy out loud to my infant. One gets through the books a lot more slowly but it works! I must admit that even if he falls asleep I'll cheat and finish the chapter (still reading vocally).

Bonus: it lets me practice voices for DM'ing DnD games

haha, I should try that perhaps - particularly as I happen to have been carrying Foundation around in my bag and barely managing to read about two pages on my commute :) I never was good at reading when there's interesting Life to gawp at out the window.

The seeds of humanity won't be humanity at all, but the AI.

I’m imagining a spaceship landing at a deserted planet millions of years in the future and then just sitting there, generating pictures of cities in the sky and Mona Lisa on a surfboard.

Kind of a fun hybrid where AI is clearly dominant in an established solar system, but it ends up being impossible to miniaturize the enormous supply chain necessary to fabricate microprocessors, so to colonize a new solar system it actually ends up being necessary to send self-replicating carbon-based humans who will then bootstrap the industrial supply chain necessary for AGI.

(repeat ad infinitum for the rest of the galaxy, humans live only on the frontier)

Who came first? The AGI or the human?

I think we'll figure out how to give your brain access to something like an AMD Ryzen long before we figure how to make a processor into an AI or make one that's concious.

I'd buy that book!

It's all fun and games until you think about the practicalities of building a self-repairing machine that can keep running for hundreds/thousands/millions of years with no significant software or hardware errors.

I’m reminded of the starship Destiny in Stargate Universe.

The Destiny spaceship travels from one Solar system to the other, and occasionally dives into stars to refuel itself.

https://youtu.be/8iXoK39yLQM

A thinking machine would handle errors. That seems simple. Are you imagining that "AI" would be a static piece of code?

Specifically without becoming a paperclip optimizer.

It seems that there's a very pessimistic trend with regards to estimating the feasibility of engineering human biology for inhabiting outer space. Everyone just wants to let AI do it. I think this is because the progress of biotech has been so glacial. This is largely due to regulation. China will probably change the rules around at some point to allow for more flexibility here, with lots of moral outrage and handwringing in the west, and speed off into the future.

Well, I think that's really just an implementation detail. The point is that we will engineer our successor beings, whether than engineering is computery or mad sciencey or both.

Another book Bobiverse series