Has anyone been able to do this? Is anyone working on it?
I only follow the field as a hobby, but as far as I can tell we are nowhere near getting to this point. I think the ability to combine all these parts in a way that the sum is greater than it's parts is going to require many many breakthroughs still.
The thing is that it's most likely not something anyone does per se but something that happens with enough complexity.
If you happen to believe evolutionary theory is the most convincing then we weren't built either but a byproduct of emergent complexity.
It is my belief that humans are pattern recognizing feedback loops and carriers of information. We externalized some of that into books and built libraries to be able to keep even more than humans can remember as individuals and now have technology to save even more information and even manipulate it in ways impossible up until 80 years ago or so.
I am fairly certain that a technology is part of nature and that technology based conscience is nothing like our limited conscience but something rather different. The end result will not be like humans just better but nothing like humans at all but much better at the carrying of information part.
And so with that (my personal belief) perspective in mind no one is going to be able to do it it will happen as a by-product.
Please keep in mind that I saying "we exeternalized" in the same way we say "selfish genes" it's not a conscious effort as such but rather something which happen to be favorized in the game of life.
Why that is I have no idea but I am fairly certain humans aren't the last species. But yes it's all very speculative I just haven't been able to find better explanations for now.
The problem is that we don't really know for sure. We kind of predict things by extrapolating what we know and what we have, but we can never be sure there won't be any sudden breakthroughs.
I only follow the field as a hobby, but as far as I can tell we are nowhere near getting to this point. I think the ability to combine all these parts in a way that the sum is greater than it's parts is going to require many many breakthroughs still.