But on that scale, why would we be limited to flesh? I'm reminded of Sobornost practices in Hannu Rajaniemi's Jean le Flambeur trilogy. Basically, make numerous copies of a mind, introducing more-or-less random changes, and select on some set of criteria. I mean, why is natural selection limited to biological systems?
Well, if a few billion people were doing it, at least some of them would get useful results. We might get lots of [insert name of "famous" person] variants, however.