[malloyd]

I do think that much of the reason why discussions of AI and the like tend to focus on capabilities, is that's something we may be able to know something about, if only to find limits of what isn't possible at all. But a lot of the interesting philosophical questions actually revolve around goals, and even the capabilities mostly only matter because of how they might use them to advance those goals

But when you ask what are the goals of a post-human (or anything particularly alien really) the only honest answer you can give is you don't and probably can't know. Sure Marx and Paul (and for that matter Nietzsche or de Chardin or Tippler) have big enough egos to claim more than say Drexler or Kurtzweil or the Cetagandan haut, but in their more honest moments even they admit at a lot is unknowable.