A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To Post-Humanity

The future belongs to the post-human, suggests an increasing number of science-fiction writers and serious futurologists (in some cases, they are one and the same person). Post-humanity arises when people and machines merge to create sentient individuals that have capabilities (and possibly motivations) that are so far beyond our current scope as to represent a new stage in human evolution. Immortality and the ability to exist entirely as software within a computer network are only two of the more pedestrian possibilities that may be open to the post-human. But before we get to the post-human, there will be the short reign of the transhuman, where we begin to move beyond our biological heritage, but still remain bound to it -- and some contend we may have already have begun to enter this stage, with the advent of technologies such as always-on-and-everywhere access to the Internet enabling us to leverage our ...