Here's one thing I've never gotten about singularity folks: why the assumption that human ego / personality will persist into post-human evolution?

It's easy enough to buy into a reduction of the basic singularity tenants: a) that we'll understand and be able to model the brain at some point, and b) that at that point evolution can proceed on, well, non-evolutionary time scales.

But it's always seemed to me like that step will have a tragic quality to it as well: that's the day humans become just animals. I don't know why a post-human intelligence would feel a need to preserve human individuals or the human concept of self any more than we feel the need to preserve gerbil personalities.