This passage seems relevant as it points at the contours of what I take to be the underlying 'problem' that the OP hints at with the litany of questions. It's also an interesting background from which to approach the writings of people like Kurzweil. There is, it seems, a deep desire to escape our bodies. The drive is present in many religions and it is present in futurism of diverse sorts. Lastly, the final sentence seems especially relevant at a time when it seems that most 'misfortunes' get transformed into 'moral failings'.
From the essay "Really Bad Infinities", in the journal parallax, written 1999:
In ‘Body Fluids’, an essay as remarkable for its prescience as for its rigour, Isabelle Stengers and Didier Gille ask in the context of what we have come to know as safer sex discourse in the AIDS pandemic:
What will we say to those who ignore advice and continue to make contacts
known to be at risk? Will we treat them as irresponsible, to be lectured to,
put under observation, and converted? In that case, our future scenario is
assured: that of the child in the glass bubble, for whom the outside envi-
ronment means death; that of the obsessional struggle against all unmonitored
contact as potentially the source of death.‘
Much has happened in the fourteen years since Stengers’s and Gille’s essay first appeared. We have learned, for example, that the pandemic is interminable, that we are, and will be, in what we call our being, of AIDS (with the full force of the partitive: we belong to AIDS as its ownmost), and that we can therefore no longer think of the future as the restoration of a putatively uncontaminated past; we have learned, perhaps, that so-called safer sex is not a state of being, and that latex is no guarantee of immortality; we, some of us, have learned the hard way (there being no easy way) the existential irrelevance of both hope and despair; we have learned that the fact that we both are and possess bodies means that our bodies are our unavoidable exposure to danger, that there never is, has been, nor can be a place of safety; more, that the fact of our embodiment is the fact of our utter nontranscendence, our finitude. And we have had to live the future scenario of which Stengers and Gille warned us in 1985; absolutely nothing has happened to deprive their question and their warning of their cogency, for we have seen technical advice pertinent to our pleasures pressed into the service of a thoroughly authoritarian, albeit thoroughly stupid, moralism. Indeed, safer sex discourse, including not only verbal admonition but an entire range of material and institutional practices, has become an essential part of an entire scientific medical technology of social control such that all illness, disability, and death itself have become essentially moral failings rather than misfortunes.
Perhaps; the medical industry follows our collective choices.
Say we eat more and grow obese, industry then works hard on maintaining sclerotic, clogged arteries and other over-sizing-related sequelae. Or we choose to have unsafe sex, so we get better at treating STDs.
Ultimately, medical industry expands to support an ever-increasing number of human configurations. Financing this expansion aside, we are witnessing an evolution of the human form.
Nature doesn't provide an unchanging measure by which we can gauge our overall fitness. Luckily, the OP wishes to provide one for us.
From the essay "Really Bad Infinities", in the journal parallax, written 1999:
In ‘Body Fluids’, an essay as remarkable for its prescience as for its rigour, Isabelle Stengers and Didier Gille ask in the context of what we have come to know as safer sex discourse in the AIDS pandemic:
Much has happened in the fourteen years since Stengers’s and Gille’s essay first appeared. We have learned, for example, that the pandemic is interminable, that we are, and will be, in what we call our being, of AIDS (with the full force of the partitive: we belong to AIDS as its ownmost), and that we can therefore no longer think of the future as the restoration of a putatively uncontaminated past; we have learned, perhaps, that so-called safer sex is not a state of being, and that latex is no guarantee of immortality; we, some of us, have learned the hard way (there being no easy way) the existential irrelevance of both hope and despair; we have learned that the fact that we both are and possess bodies means that our bodies are our unavoidable exposure to danger, that there never is, has been, nor can be a place of safety; more, that the fact of our embodiment is the fact of our utter nontranscendence, our finitude. And we have had to live the future scenario of which Stengers and Gille warned us in 1985; absolutely nothing has happened to deprive their question and their warning of their cogency, for we have seen technical advice pertinent to our pleasures pressed into the service of a thoroughly authoritarian, albeit thoroughly stupid, moralism. Indeed, safer sex discourse, including not only verbal admonition but an entire range of material and institutional practices, has become an essential part of an entire scientific medical technology of social control such that all illness, disability, and death itself have become essentially moral failings rather than misfortunes.