[Animats]

> I think transhumanism is a warmed-over Christian heresy.

There's some of that. "Uploading" is going to be really tough. Probably harder than strong AI. If you can build weakly godlike AIs, why bother uploading obsolete biobrain content into advanced hardware?

Although life extension is likely, in the form of editing DNA into a new longer-lived race. Retrofitting existing people is less likely to work.

I don't see strong AI in sight yet, but we're getting progress in the more "human" areas, like art. We may get Microsoft Middle Manager 2.0 before we get a robot that can do auto repair. Then we get "machines should think, people should work", and highly-profitable machine-run companies. This is perhaps followed by the Butlerian jihad.

There's been an implicit assumption in SF that AI capabilities would progress roughly in the direction of skills which lead to increased income levels in humans. That may have been a bad guess. Watch the public rhetoric change when the first machine CEOs outperform humans.