[jjcon]

1,2,4 are already occurring so I’m not sure what you’re on about. The third is completely irrelevant and seems fairly pseudoscientific, leave that to philosophers, we’re not trying to create souls.

> advanced statistical methods

Furthermore plenty of methods in machine learning, including some methods of training neural nets, are completely astatistical in nature. Unless you want to grow the definition of statistics to be so large as to consider all of maths and every science as ‘statistics’ these will rightly remain distinct fields of study (though they do overlap just like stats is used and overlaps with most sciences).