> Digitization is one direction but I think augmentation is perhaps a more likely one. Or a first one.

First seems likely, but as a permanent alternative I don't know why a species would eschew lightspeed transportation and effortless immortality for the fragility and slowness of an organic body. It's possible there are good reasons, but I don't know of any.

Digitization, upload, has always seemed to me an iffy goal. The brains' packaging doesn't seem very amenable to any of our current technologies, as far as being able to "read" it. And then once read emulating it seems just as difficult.

Once uploaded comes the issue of getting computing time to run it (the economics and politics of prefering run time of X over run time of Y). And maintaining the computing platform. Certainly there are immense advantages to the digitized form - of course.

By contrast, augmentation (which is what we already do) seems straightforward. And seems to fit current society "easily" (haha - or let's say it will be tough enough as a first stage.)

So that from the point of view of a next epoch in life forms, AI fits more immediately in the struggle of AI as symbiont, AI as independent, or AI as desktop assistant.