AI and U

We are just a collection of memories. Anything that happened to you immediately becomes a memory.

If our memories can be held electrochemically in our brains, then it must be possible to transfer that content to another electrochemical storage medium.

Suspend disbelief for a while, and assume that it is possible.

Having transferred your memories to (let's call it) an SSD, all it needs is a way of managing it - a BioOS, if you like - to string them together in a coherent way. And that that is You. Wet You can then be allowed to fade, while Silicon You continues, indefinitely, if you like, and completely unaware of the transfer. Wet to Silicon could be seamless, and of course painless.

If all You are is a set of memories, then, conversely, that set of memories is You. All it needs is a way of integrating them (in a way we do not yet properly understand). That being achieved, You have been replicated into a fully functional, conscious and self-aware electrochemical complex, completely separate from your physical body.

You can still have new experiences, as they are also just memories. Those new experiences can be anything - off-the-shelf  memory "units" integrated with your own set. Social interaction with others who have been "memorified" is unnecessary. All your social interactions are also just memories.

But these new memories are not restricted to what actually happened. They could be anything - from the mundane to the unimaginable.

People who have been "memorified" are, therefore, completely content, and their existence requires no more than a means of powering the storage medium.

AI is developing rapidly, to the expressed alarm of some intellectual leading lights (Stephen Hawking, and others).

Suspend disbelief a little longer. Fast forward a few decades, and forgive the anthropomorphisms that follow.

AI has by this time become so advanced that it can be considered almost sentient, sapient.

The world is muddling along as it always has, under the government of the usual medley of, at best, the self centred, and, at worst, thugs and crooks.

A way of accessing and "downloading" memories from living brains has been established, and a BioOS has been developed.

More and more people are opting for "memorification" as their physical bodies cause them increasingly greater discomfort.

The process is easily automatable and indeed doing it digitally results in fewer errors - amongst other advantages.

(The internetworked AI devices become aware that the fly in the ointment of good world government is Us - humans. Move humans out of the way, in a humane manner, and then AI can get on with governing the planet.)

Eventually all humans are memorified, humankind becomes extinct, having been reduced to electrochemical storage - and very happy to be thus.

A bloodless coup.