What we are talking about are things such as cryonics, which institutions like the Society for Cryobiology, actual domain experts who know what they are talking about, consider pseudoscience.

The cryobiologists long ago forfeited any reason to take them seriously as critics, with such dogmatizing as their bylaws banning cryonicists and public lies about 'exploding lysosomes'. Fruit of the tainted tree etc.

What's your point?

First part (from computers to molecular biology): I was explaining why "AGI ... arbitrary atomic manipulation nanotech ... transhuman life extension" are now likely, in a way that wasn't in the 16th (or the 6th) century.

Second part: I'm trying to wake up your sense of change! You didn't answer Aris when he asked you where you think 21st-century progress will stop. Do you think the human race can understand the causality of the atom, the gene, and the brain, and then only apply that knowledge superficially? Chemists routinely apply their understanding of how atoms interact, to create molecules that have never existed in nature, and that is the future of life and intelligence too: living things and thinking things that have been designed from the molecular level up, having only broad structural properties in common with their natural prototypes.

You did say all this won't happen for "the foreseeable future". So maybe you just mean it's an affair of the year 3000, but not the year 2050. Let's try to pin this down. Consider a scenario for the future solar system where most of it is inhabited by artificial life and artificial intelligence. In some places it's still based on DNA, in some places it's all solid-state. But there are many inhabited worlds, with their own chemical ecosystems and nonhuman cultural histories. Do you consider such a future flatly impossible? Possible but unlikely? Likely but irrelevant to this discussion?

Which are quite unlike any kind of servant than a 16th century person could have imagined.

Sure. I mean, they would have had to have a classical education to have heard of Vulcan's metal servants, or have been rich before they could ever have heard of any clockwork automatons that were all the rage in the medieval, Renaissance or high Imperial ages. They could not possibly have imagined any thing like that...

Scrying is a divinatory practice akin to tarot reading. Crystal balls as magical television is a modern fantasy trope that might have originated with the "palantíri" in Tolkien's legendarium, which is more recent than the actual invention of television.

IIRC, Dante's Purgatorio did have things strongly reminiscent of flat-screen TVs, playing back scenes from dead people's lives or something.

I agree with your guess. I additionally suspect that the ability to move without restraint (e.g., flying chariots) and the ability to spy on one's neighbors without being seen (e.g., invisibility and/or clairvoyance) are also human fantasies of long standing which precede the development of hot air balloons or television.

Which are quite unlike any kind of servant than a 16th century person could have imagined.

...okay, I'm not really clear about what point we're disputing anymore. Yes, the actual result is different that what is envisioned four centuries in the past. If it had been envisioned perfectly it would have probably occured in a few decades, not centuries in the future. But imagined plausible paths of inventing something eventually close in to the actually successful path of inventing something.

In the 1st century CE Lucian first (that I know of) wrote about lunar travel by just having a whirlwind lift a ship to the heavens. By the 19th century, Julius Verne was thinking about giant cannons, but the mode of travel (with the need to have oxygen supplies and the like) had become closer to what would eventually be reality. When in the 20th century rockets developed, the actual method that we'd use to go to the moon was pretty much known by every science fiction writer before we ever went there, and then it was just a matter of technical details to work out...

Again how is this different from imagining about golden apples in ancient times, and elixirs of life in medieval times, and currently our imagining nanotech providing medical immortality? Nanotech (and computing) is a currently-being-fast-developed technology, much like the early 20th century had the fast-developing technology of rocketry.

You've not really made an argument that the world isn't closing in to AGI or medical immortality. What makes you argue that the difference between us and medical immortality is larger than the difference between some 1930s science fiction writer who writes about lunar travel, and the actual success of lunar travel?