On a lighter note, there's these people, who met recently at the World Transhumanist Associate conference at Yale.

International academics and activists, they met to lay the groundwork for a society that would admit as citizens and companions intelligent robots, cyborgs made from a free mixing of human and machine parts, and fully organic, genetically engineered people who aren't necessarily human at all. A good many of these 160 thinkers aspire to immortality and omniscience through uploading human consciousness into ever evolving machines.

Well yeah...I'd like to be uploaded into a shiny new polyceramic chassis myself, but aren't we getting a little ahead of ourselves here?

I mean, it seems like we've got a new bioethical dilemma every other week, with cloning, stem cells, in-vitro fertilization, genetic screening, and on and on.

Doesn't it make more sense to deal with bioethical concerns that we're facing right now, rather than worrying about what sort of rights will be extended to superintelligent machines?

The fact is, whenever the transhuman epoch dawns, any sorts of guidelines that we may chisel out beforehand will probably be irrelevant.