For those not getting this, the book Accelerando starts with the main character being called by something with a russian accent that claims to be a neuromorphic AI based off of lobsters grafted into some knowledge management. This AI (roughly "the lobsters") seeks a human who can help them "defect".

I recommend the book! The ideas aren't super deep in retrospect but its "near future" parts have one hilariously juxtaposed geeky allusion after another and the later parts are an interesting take on post-human politics and economics.

I assume the lobsters were chosen because of existing research in this area. For example, there are techniques for keeping bits alive in vitro, there is modeling work from the 1990's trying to reproduce known neural mechanisms in silico, and I remember (but couldn't find the link) that a team had some success around 2001(?) doing a moravec transfer to one or more cells in a lobster ganglia (minus the nanotech of course). There are lots of papers in this area. The ones I linked to were easy to find.