> You're not going to be able to abolish death until you can get neural networks to run at the speed of your current brain hardware and at similar capacity.
That can't possibly be true. You're dead if you are slower than you once were?
If you can't merge your consciousness with the prosthesis then you'll never actually be able to consider it 'you'. And you won't be able to merge if there's a serious impedance mismatch.
Unless you're talking about taking not just a human brain and simulating it, but rather programming a brand new electronic brain to run your own consciousness. Which is even farther out than merging. You'd have to understand neurons to a much-greater depth.
This is assuming that neuronal processes aren't relying on quantum dynamics, which I suspect would make true simulation impossible. Just because you can do simulated annealing on silicon doesn't mean you can predict the unfolding of arbitrary quantum states. Merging would be the only viable strategy, and there, your new brain would only have a fraction of its former speed until we're so far along with quantum computers that they're as ubiquitous as silicon processors are today.
That can't possibly be true. You're dead if you are slower than you once were?