What would this look like in 500 years?

Whenever I'm thinking about the long future of some technology or problem, like the future of AI and the nature of computation, there's a thought-experiment format I like to use to think more openly. It goes like this:

What would X looks like 500/1000 years into the future of humanity?

In the case of that blog, the question was, "What would computing hardware for AI look like in year 2500?"

I think this kind of thinking helps avoid the status-quo bias that's so easy to fall into when we try to imagine the future projecting out from current technology.

• If we project out from the current computing landscape, it's easy to think that binary logic gates on silicon wafers is the right computing substrate for nearly everything we'd want to do. But would humanity still be using silicon wafers to run intelligent, conversational, omnipresent computers five centuries from now?
• It's easy to get sucked into the allure of gene editing in the next few decades and century, but what capabilities over biological processes will humanity have in a thousand years? Surely, we won't just be adding and splicing DNA. Surely, the long future of dominion over the biological source code is something much more expansive, perhaps the equivalent of "software engineering" for biological processes, perhaps a world where there are more artificial life forms in the universe than organically evolved ones.