Wow, rich material for thought! Regarding the Ray Kurzweil item (also relevant to a couple others): brilliant as Kurzweil may be, he seems stuck in that materialist, reductionist view of the world where things - and people - are just the sum of their parts. And if some of those parts can be replaced or augmented with technology that he believes is “superior” in some way, then we’ll end up being “superior” humans. However I (and probably many on this list) believe that the essence of life exists in a realm quite apart from that of stuff pushed around by chemical and electrical forces. The trend of evolution, even technical evolution, as Buckminster Fuller termed it, is toward “dematerialization”. (For example, think of the infrastructure needed to hear a concert in 1850 versus 1950 versus today.) Consider that technology may be a useful crutch, and may be with us for a century or two, but I suspect there is something an order of magnitude more amazing beyond that. In that sense, a body enhanced with gadgets may be an interesting curiosity (if not a monstrosity) but that effort seems to be moving in the wrong direction.