slashdot points to a great article on freedom in a post-human or trans-human world. There seem to be two main issues: Since the first use of the walking stick, up through pace makers, motorized wheelchairs, and PDAs, we've been moving towards improving our physical bodies and mental capacities with engineering. Also the internet is growing, possibly growing similarly to a biological entity. Its adding not just CPUs and Disk, but cameras and microphones too. Software is so very isolated from other software, but once service discovery finally catches on an a simple turing complete language does for code what XML did for data, the article states these people believe there will be a moment where machine intelligence starts to grow at unbelivable rates.