I expect that uploading human minds is a very tricky problem indeed, and wouldn’t expect that happening in the foreseeable future. However, I do think we may be able to create artificial intelligence on the same principles our brains operate on before that. The key part is that I expect this will happen very quickly in terms of cosmic timescales as opposed to human ones. Even if it takes a century or a millennium do to, that’s a blink of an eye in the grand scheme of things.

I found Culture series was fun, a few other examples I could recommend would be The Lifecycle of Artificial Objects by Ted Chiang, Diaspora by Greg Egan and Life Artificial by David A. Eubanks, and Inverted Frontier by Linda Nagata.