It's all good – thanks for sharing your thoughts. I read the Vinge essay a long time ago and maybe it's worth rereading now. Actually, Bill Joy's essay "The future doesn't need us" still strikes me as a more relevant one in the context of the current AI discourse. As much as I can perceive, modern software engineers are already hybrids because they are joined at the hip with supercomputing systems and are paid based on their ability to leverage the immense capital, both tangible and intangible, invested into such systems.

What puzzles me a bit is that people consistently assume that the growing computational power will somehow translate into biological immortality. This smells like the good old fear of death, rather than rational thinking about Singularity, etc. And it gives me hope for the humanity in general because this fear is a consistent theme over the ages.