Yeah, it’s all good and well until the AI answers your question with “42”.
Not sure how serious your post is, but there would be massive benefits in being able to emulate a human brain on a digital computer. It would likely make reverse engineering the brain much, much easier for example.
And as to the point that we would only make something on a par with a standard human…for how long would that be the case? Even if we can’t speed up the hardware any further, at the least we would do stuff like network brains together. 
Learning is by and large just the forming of connections between neurons; a lot of this can be skipped, for instance by just emulating the connections of an adult human brain (this, of course, presumes the development of appropriate scanning technologies, but if we don’t insist on this being possible in vivo, then I don’t think that’s too big an obstacle).
But in any case, I don’t really think that explicit brain simulation is going to be the way towards strong AI; but it’s without a doubt going to be a great leap forward in our understanding of what makes us tick.
Oh, absolutely: A simulated brain would be a huge boost to the studies of psychology and neurology. But that’s not what get lives was talking about. His premise, so far as I can tell, was that brain emulation would produce a simulated brain that was much smarter than us, so smart that it would be able to easily figure out how to make us immortal.
A smarter brain might be more concerned about what makes it’s own self immortal. Part of the answer to that conundrum might be to eliminate us pesky humans.
Setting aside the issue of whether you could “migrate” into an AI. Say your own body did last into perpetuity… how long would you still be you?
There is a cool movie that asks this. The Man From Earth (2007) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0756683/
It is about a man who claims to be 14,000 years-old and the difficulty in establishing the falsifiability of his claim at any one given moment.
I intend to beat both of you. I am turning 4,805 in the year 6781 and I found out that my birthday is falling on a Friday. I’m trying to make plans…
I’ll take you a cake on that day!
Plus, to be that sophisticated, you need to have done those experiments both to provide data in the first place, and then to test that all the emergent properties are being caught.
Plus Moore’s law is not an absolute, and is hitting some fundamental limits very soon. Transistors can only get so small before they don’t work. And, despite what you may have been told, quantum computing is not capable of picking up and carrying on the spirit of Moore’s law, at least, in the time frame allotted. It’s only faster at some very specific problems.
Moore’s law that transistor size will decrease exponentially will flatten out, and it will likely happen in my lifetime. Unless you have a replacement process that can carry on the spirit, computing complexity is going to hit a brick wall quite soon.
Spoken like someone who’s only ever been tasked with the initial phase of the production process. 
OK, that one took me a few moments to get… But well-played.
Even if we didn’t know how to create intelligence from first principles and could only copy human brains, presumably we could reliably duplicate the very best human intelligences and combine them to form a polymath savant genius- perhaps one with a greater total memory capacity than a human brain, and able to think faster than organic synapses will allow.
Back to the OP, it seems to me that strictly speaking only something which entails a contradiction has 0 probability of occurring, e.g., the probability of my discovering the round square cupola on Berkeley College is 0. (By the same lights, something which entails a tautology has a probability of 1; it is certain. For example, the probability of Siam Siam dying tomorrow or not dying tomorrow is 1.)
Taken that way (which, if I remember Philosophy 400 from 13 years ago correctly, is the way to take it), then Siam Siam indeed does have a non-zero chance of living forever (and the universe has a non-zero chance of enduring forever) since his doing so (and its doing so) wouldn’t violate a law of logic, viz., entail a contradiction.
But assuming forever means infinity, wouldn’t zero be the limit of one’s chances?
Yeah, maybe, but then since 0 would be the limit of one’s chances, one’s chances would never reach (be) 0. Therefore at any time before the last moment of time (which doesn’t exist), they’re non-zero. Therefore Siam Siam has a chance that they’ll l*ve forever. (It occurs to me, if the ‘forever’ in ‘live forever’ makes it tough, think of it as ‘won’t die’. For someone to not die doesn’t entail a contradiction, so their chances of not dying >0 (and <1).)
This may very well be the wrong way to go about it, but it has a certain intuitive appeal, I think. “Is there a chance I’ll live forever” very naturally reads as “Is it possible I’ll live forever”, and the notion of possibility seems bound up, perhaps inextricably, with the notion of contradiction. But maybe that’s an equivocation on ‘possible’.
Now someone’ll come along and talk about fuzzy logic or probabilistic logic or limits and 0.9999…=1 or Zeno or whatever and make hash of what I’ve said.
I’m living forever, and you can’t talk me out of it! :mad:
In order for the term “the probability of me living forever” to have any meaning, it must logically be synonymous with “the limit, as t approaches infinity, of me living to age t”. Which is exactly zero. It does not “approach zero”, because it’s just a number, and numbers don’t go anywhere, they just sit there.
No one really understands why we age but it appears that the most likely reason has to do with the fact that our cells have to replicate and that they do so imperfectly. While humans do have a lot of genetic machinery that manages to proof read our DNA, between oxidative stress, ionizing radiation and host of other factors both known and unknown, our bodies accumulate genetic damage that eventually makes our continued existence unlikely.
Telomeres are also a factor of course but it’s likely that this mechanism evolved as a way to prevent the replication of cells that had probably already reached their expiry date anyway - IOW had probably already accumulated enough damaged that continued replication wasn’t advisable.
However the idea that DNA damage can be repaired isn’t all that far fetched if that is indeed the essence of our mortality. Gene therapies have been researched for decades and there is current research into reversing epigenetic tags that attach directly to sugar backbone of DNA. Even the idea of molecular machines that could repair damaged or miscoded DNA isn’t that strange.
Right, but the probability of you dying at any age is exactly zero. Assuming there is no time quantum in the universe. Wouldn’t it be like picking a random real number, the probability of picking any real number is zero, but you can still pick one?
Yes, if the time of death is specified with infinite precision. This almost never happens, though: Colloquially, people usually report ages as a whole number of years, or times of events in hours and minutes (and maybe seconds). Scientifically, there are implicit error bars based on the number of digits reported.