All I know is there is a lot of inherent uncertainty.

Your predictions aren't entirely baseless, but neither are those of people like Yudkowsky or those who predict collapse.

And fundamentally I don't know if you grasp human nature enough.

Just because I pointed it out doesn't mean I'm in favor of it, nor that I think the Republicans are wrong to point it out. But let's be real, neither of the two parties are strongholds of integrity and courage. If something benefits one party - in this case, the massive bias of Big Tech towards the current status quo Democratic Party - it will be pointed out and critiqued and challenged by the other party - in this case, Republicans raising the issue as one of freedom of speech in the digital polis. And they're not wrong. It's just that if they were in the Democrats shoes, they wouldn't care one bit because the bias would be in their direction and would help them win elections.

Personally, reddit is the only social media I use and I find it easy to discover, join, and participate in subs where more balanced content is posted and there are nuanced views among the participants. But I've been using the platform for a long time - a decade or so, probably. I don't go on r/politics, for example, because it's an echo chamber.

Ultimately it's up to people to be more discerning about the content they read and the communities they join, but platforms should be making it easier for them to do so, and not harder. As it is they are funneling people into the so-called echo chamber and exploiting it. And we can see the results in our society.

The reason for conservatives - specifically American Republicans - to be so concerned is that their election strategy has relied on a corner of the media space to be hyper conservative. Now, since Big Tech goes overwhelmingly for the other party, the tables might have turned in this respect. It will be another ten or twenty years before the shift is felt more fully, but their willingness to go with an outsider like Donald Trump back in 2016 shows, at least to me, that they were cognizant of the problems in the propaganda strategy which has consistently won them elections since the 1980s.

The idea is just science fiction for now. Provided we develop good enough terraforming technologies and we have enough incentive, I suppose it's possible in the long term. The novel could be interesting - but what's interesting to me about it is not necessarily the technology but what your human-droid goes through mentally. We can assume his consciousness consents to the original mission, but what if he struggles emotionally, or decides that eventually he doesn't want to do this mission after all? Etc. William Gibson's most recent novel has an AI character based on more contemporary ideas for the use of AI/consciousness uploading technologies, and I'm sure there are many other sci-fi authors exploring the idea.