| Sumario: | The article focuses on various aspects of transformation of human into a new construction called posthuman. The fear that technological developments associated with computer technology, artificial intelligence, robotics, and nanotechnology will succeed in displacing humanity through an evolutionary process leading first to a cyborg/human assemblage, and ultimately to the extinction and replacement of the human altogether, has been since 1960s. Physicist Roger Penrose and philosopher Hubert Dreyfus have argued that while computers might perform comparably to human intelligence in some limited areas, the essential qualities of human intelligence need not fear being equaled or overtaken in a posthuman future of the sort that concerns joy. Indeed, critics of the disembodied mind are very much at home in the Al community. During the 1980s and 1990s, arguments rejecting a possible merger of human and machine intelligence were sustained by what seemed insurmountable differences between the reasoning capabilities of computers and humans, as well as by the limitations of silicon- based computer architectures. One of the central threads of discourse constructing the posthuman is the notion that information is disembodied, a pattern independent of a specific material medium, capable of being rewritten into different substrates.
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