Great post!
I will read your paper...If you want... Thanks in advance ...
Here my own guiding ideas:
I think that any future A.I. will be rooted in an information field containing at most a finite number of primes numbers...
By contrast all living organisms are rooted in an information field containing an infinite number of primes numbers. All life is the result of a source of infinite information.
Then any robots or A.I. even with a civilization of the future cannot own a "soul" nor reincarnate as a spirit inhabiting and owning the cosmic information field in the form of a continuous evolutive chain of living bodies ( this field is primarily an ether of numbers not an energy field which is only a manifestation of the primary field ).
A robot may become at most a captive entity in a cosmos, his life span even indefinite will stay finite forever. All living organism are ONE and not captive save temporarily ...All life is immortal...
In a way we must choose between the Borg assimilation or stay human...
The choice is easy if we let our soul guiding us and not fear or greed ...
I just published a paper that speaks directly to this subject ("Our Minds, Our Selves: Mind, Meaning, and Machines," forthcoming in Borderless Philosophy 7 later this year). It argues that machines cannot be minds because they lack sentience and community, the two features of embodied beings (human beings) for whom things have meaning and value. Computers certainly can, because they already do, create poems, artworks, stories, music, even jokes. But such products become valuable and meaningful (become "art," if you like) only in a complex process of reception. The essay is fairly technical, regarding both computer engineering and philosophy, but I’d be happy to provide a PDF to anyone who might be interested. DM me if you’d like to take a look.