The ideology and imagination that inspire technological "revolutions" sometimes develop centuries earlier. Last century's science fiction imagined us in flying cars, not with faces buried in small screens; however, Italian futurism foresaw the principle of smartphones and social networks as an outcome of their ideology. Nowadays we are told that we might live forever, that robots will do all our work for us, we might marry an android or have a virtual boyfriend, and we ourselves will become cyborgs. Where should we look to in order to understand these ideas critically? This course will suggest some historic roots for the technological dreams of the posthuman era and engage some of the key consequences for human nature, concepts such as life or consciousness and the intricate relationships between humans and technologies in both their embodied and digital form.