That’s something we’ll have to see to know for sure, but personally I don’t see that biological substrate is fundamental to the patterns of our thoughts. Neural networks within a computer have similar kind of plasticity because the connections within the neural network are balanced through training. They are less efficient than biological networks, but there are already analog chips being made which express neuron potentials in hardware. It’s worth noting that we won’t necessarily create intelligence like our own either. This might be the closest we’ll get to meeting aliens. :)

I suspect that the next decade will be very interesting to watch.