If you can keep these alive for a while, I bet you can train them as neural network AI computers.
But we still have the problem that we don’t know what is actually happening in the meat space.
Neural nets are very interesting, but I have read that the major problem is understandability of the coding in neural nets. From an engineering standpoint, tweaking a neural net is not so easy, or even possible in a reliable way, since the data is “learned”, not preset. I am not talking about the code emulating a neural net, but the weights and values that result from training a neural net.
Ie., the only way to tweak a neural net, is really to force more learning into it.
It’s not like compiled C-code or interpreted languages like Java running on a telephone switch, where you can halt everything, change a variable, and then let things proceed without taking down the entire system.
Modifying the weight or value of a node in a neural net would have unpredictable results in most cases except the simplest example.
On the other hand, something like a human brain, without the nasty moral restrictions, could be a quite capable control platform for weapons, etc. Just don’t complain when it decides it hates its masters and attempts to wipe them out and anyone associated with them!
Of course, it begs a moral question: if the neural net is based on human dna, whose to say we haven’t instantiated a human soul to go along with it, but we force it to our purposes? I’d rather keep the neural nets in hardware myself.
We still don’t know how the brain works well enough to be able to reliably control such a construct, either.
So, in the end, I don’t like the idea. If we had successfully done full successful simulations of the human brain and gotten a reliable artificial intelligence out on the other end, then perhaps I’d be more comfortable dropping back to meat for neural computing. For now, meat brains are still the best neural computational constructs known to man, and if we understood it and its relationship to humankind, and there weren’t any moral issues, I’d be OK with going that direction till the silicon (or diamond or grapheme) becomes available that can emulate it faster and more reliably.