It's the same process that has been running - creation of complexity as a dissipative structure - but now with even less friction. Some say we'll transcend, I think we're spiraling into the language-navel of cartesian dualist logical positivist insanity.
I love the dissipative structure framing. It's the only logical explanation for all of this.
Datacenters in space are visionary -- they are maximally energy rate dense and they expand the area of energy absorption. Might be 100 years too early but that is where we are headed, after we turn all of the available biosphere of earth into computronium, that is.
The only superior technology left would be von Neumann probes.
> Of all the things we could be doing, why are we doing this?
Money. Capitalism. It's all a fucking grift. Always has been.
If you thought AI was going to usher in a post scarcity golden age of infinite wealth where all disease, hunger, want and inequality are solved and everyone gets to live their lives purely for pleasure and intellectual pursuit, where the Eschaton is in their Heaven and all is right in the world, and humanity spreads out amongst the stars as beings of transcendent posthuman machine intellect or some shit you read in a sci-fi book then congratulations, you're the mark.
Of all the things we could be doing, why are we doing this?
Is it collective mental illness? Economic hysteria? A cult of virtual personality?
It's simultaneously irrational, obsessive, ecologically and politically catastrophic, and all-consuming - none of which are good things.