Post-Humanism?

I'm still trying to wrap my head around this week's readings as well as last week's readings. Science confuses me greatly and I don't think I grasped these concepts as well as a should. I hope these comments are cogent. 

First, let's look at the statement on page 7 of Hayles, "Henceforth, humans were to be seen primarily as information-processing entities who are essentially similar to intelligent machines." 

I think that that statement is mean to be a summary of the conclusion of the project that founded cybernetics. However, I don't think that that statement can resist problematization and critique. I suppose that the biggest argument in favor of the statement is a reasonable application of the Turing Test or configuring machines that can act like and perform human functions. I can agree that this type of machine could be intelligent. But, I fail to see how a machine that can process information as well as a human can be said to be essentially similar to a human. Essentially, which is italicized in the original text is a loaded word. It assumes that the terms preceding it, that humans are primarily information-processing machines is true. It seems to me that humans are characterized by more then that, especially in light of our ability to make decisions in the absence of any/all information. So, the term essentially plays an additional role of essentially essentializing. Not to mention the fact that since Hayle's bases her conception post-humanity on a strict definition of the term intelligent machine, there is doubt whether or not it's even a realistic prospect. 

2. On page 30, Hayles says "Language is not code," Lacan asserted, because he wanted to deny one-to-one correspondence between the signifier and the signified. In word processing, however language is code." Let's add to and say that html is code, ajax is code, and c++ is code. The problem here is that Hayle's conflates two very different systems in order to prove her point about floating signifiers. Language as a communicative apparatus is a symbolic and signifying system. How well this occurs is as "asserted" by Lacan difficult to fathom. I might be wrong here but I tend to think of code as something that is quite unlike a symbolic and signifying system. In fact code is by definition a 1 to 1 representational system. There is nothing resembling the big Other in an ajax script. Hayles might be correct about the existence of a floating signifier but her proof of concept here is a little off. 

3. Speaking of which on 31 let's look at the text starting with "If I am producing Ink marks..." I feel as if there is a somewhat large ambiguity here concerning the difference between hardware, software, and wetware. It's true that a word processing program will allow me to do thing that I cannot do on a typewriter. However, that ignores the fact that code is just software, an information pattern that has to be run on a piece of hardware, i.e. a computer. The typewriter is limited in so far as its hardware = its software. The computer is limited insofar as its software is depended on its hardware for representational activation. I think that distinction needs to be made more clear or her argument about presence vs pattern becomes basically incomprehensible.