“Its most plausible use, and most likely use, is the technology of human enhancement,” he said, according to the South China Morning Post.As these examples show, many of the fantastic technologies that until recently were confined to science fiction have already arrived, at least in their early forms.“We are no longer living in a time when we can say we either want to enhance or we don’t,” says Nicholas Agar, a professor of ethics at Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand, and author of the book “Humanity’s End: Why We Should Reject Radical Enhancement.” “We are already living in an age of enhancement.”

The road to TALOS, brain chips and synthetic blood has been a long one that has included many stops along the way.Many of these advances come from a convergence of more than one type of technology – from genetics and robotics to nanotechnology and information technology.These technologies are “intermingling and feeding on one another, and they are collectively creating a curve of change unlike anything we humans have ever seen,” journalist Joel Garreau writes in his book “Radical Evolution: The Promise and Peril of Enhancing Our Minds, Our Bodies – and What It Means to Be Human.”

The combination of information technology and nanotechnology offers the prospect of machines that are, to quote the title of Robert Bryce’s recent book on innovation, “Smaller Faster Lighter Denser Cheaper.” And as some futurists such as Ray Kurzweil argue, these developments will occur at an accelerated rate as technologies build on each other.