This is from Charles Stross' 'Curator' from the December issue of Asimovs:

Humans are just barely intelligent tool users; Darwinian evolutionary selection stopped when language and tool use converged, leaving the average hairy meme-carrier sadly deficient smarts. Now the brightly burning beacon of sapience isn't held by humans any more—their cross-infectious enthusiasms have spread to a myriad of other hosts, several of them qualitatively better at thinking. At last count, there were about a thousand non-human intelligent species in Sol space split evenly between posthumans on one side, naturally self-organizing Al’s in the middle, and mammalian-nonhumans on the other. The common mammalian neural chassis is easily upgraded to human-style intelligence in most species that can carry a half kilogram brain, and the descendants of a hundred ethics-challenged doctoral theses are now demanding equal rights. So are the in-quiet dead; the panopticon-logged net-ghosts of people who lived recently enough to imprint their identity on the information age, and brought up in the ambitious theological engineering schemes of the Reformed Church of Latter-Day Saints (who want to emulate all possible human being in real time, so that they can have the opportunity to be saved).

The human memesphere is coming alive, although how long it will remain recognizably human is open to question. The informational density of the inner planets is visibly converging on Avogadro.’s number of bits per mole, one bit per atom, as the deconstructed dumb matter of the inner planets—except for Earth, preserved for now like a picturesque historic building stranded in an industrial park—is converted into computrenium.

Here's the introduction to John C. Wright's 'Golden Age': (2003)

It was the eve of the High Transcendence, an event so solemn and significant that it could be held but once each thousand years, and folk of every name and iteration, phenotype, composition, consciousness and neuroform, from every school and ear, had come to celebrate its coming, to welcome the transfiguration, and to prepare.

Splendor, feast, and ceremony filled the many months before the great event itself. Energy shapes living in the north polar magnetosphere of the sun, and Cold Dukes from the Kuiper belts beyond Neptune, had gathered to Old Earth, or sent their representations through the mentality; and celebrants had come from every world and moon in the solar system, from every station, sail, habitat and crystal-magnetic latticework.

No human or posthuman race of the Golden Oecuemene was absent from these festivities. Fictional as well as actual personalities were invited. Composition-assisted reconstructions of dead or deleted paladins and sages, magnates and philosophers, walked by night the boulevards of the Aurelian place-city, arm-in-arm with extrapolated demigoddesses from imagined superhuman futures or, languid-eyed lamia from morbid unrealized alternatives, and strolled or dances among the monuments and energy sculptures, fountains dream fixtures, and phantasm, all beneath a silver, city-covered moon, larger than the moon past ages knew.

This is what I was talking about in my entries on August 20 and September 11. Stross has it happening in a few decades, Wright has it happening in a few millenia. I tend to think it will happen in a few centuries. But even Wright's time frame is the blink of an eye in cosmic time.

Religious visions of an 'Armaggeddon' or 'Ragnorak' just show me how deficient the imaginations of our ancestors were and how little they comprehended of the scale of our universe. The petty battles between ethnic groups, concerns about human morality, all seem to lose their significance in the face of the changes that seem likely to overcome our species in the next few centuries. Oh, I'm not certain about this 'uploading our brains into computers' crap, but I am certain that large scale transformations are inevitable and that eventually our descendants will become things as distant from us as we are from the amoeba.

This recognition of the inevitability of human transformation seems to have incorporated itself into the newer science fiction. Science fiction reflects the vision we have of our future. In the golden age that was one of humans continuing the process of European colonization begun on earth, retaining our culture and humanity, and planting flags on the more distant soils of other worlds. Our vision is changing and our science fiction is changing with that vision. As our sense of our future changes, so too will the importance we place on certain things in our lives.

A lot of what is happening is still under the radar and I'm glad that it remains that way. In our daily lives computers are seen as benevolent tools rather than agents of change. Activists focus on genetic engineering in terms of its harm to the environment rather than an a tool to redefine ourselves. I suspect that if given the knowledge, a lot of people would react in a very Luddite, recividist fashion that will only delay the inevitable. Remember our time scale is potentially millions and billions of years. Reactionary movements are likely only to be stuttersteps. Once knowledge exists there is no turning back from it, and the principles of variation and selection will force change upon us at some point.

For those like myself who see this change as something to look forward to there is really not much to do. Our present open society which encourages research and development will eventually get us where I think we should be. There is no great need to preach to the masses. In the mean time I'll just sit back and watch as events unfold, taking pleasure in the knowledge of what lies ahead.