In the sense that language and fire were there before the evolving of the Homo sapiens, the species was enhanced by technology since it’s beggining. There’s a sense that technology itself is a part of humans.
Humans, though, are self-described by their biological nature - carbon-based material instances from the Homo sapiens species. This is the sense that the technology is not a part of humans but rather just a tool used to enhance their own lives.
However, as described in the first paragraph, the “Homo sapiens-based humanity” itself only evolved after technology, with it. There were never a sense of humankind without technology. And thus we need to clarify the difference between the Homo sapiens biological society and the bigger civilization we are constructing while being humans.
Where and when this civilization started is not relevant for us, as where and when exactly the first human was born. Both are rather long transitioning processes between the unconscious, clearly-not-our-civilization life-based society and a stage were we can undoubtedly claim be part of our civilization. Also, we may discuss if this bigger civilization started before or after Homo sapiens, but that’s not relevant too.
From now on, I’ll call the civilization we live, that may have started before the modern human species and may expand to other carbon-or-not-based species or any other intelligent form that achieve the citizen status of our civilization in the future, as just “our civilization”.
So, if we achieve a status were our biological nature is irrelevant - thus overcoming our humanity - i.e., transferring the dominant intelligent creature form of the civilization from Homo sapiens to another non-biological form, or even keeping our human bodies but enhancing them to a level were their biological nature is irrelevant, we achieved a “post-human”, or “trans-human” stage.
It’s important to notice that “enhancement” is generally defined only for the civilization as a whole. This happens because there’s no clear one that defines what is “enhancement” - multiple persons may have to make this choice in multiple different situations. - In some cases, the choice is individually made: if one chooses to take a medicine, one considers it a technological enhancement. Other cases may be compulsory, either by government - like vacination - or in an indirect manner - like internet connection: you’re not mandated to have one, but most people simply would be disabled to make financial transactions or apply for a job without one, even though they may consider the internet a bad technology.
When we consider civilization as a whole, though, we can define as “enhancement” anything that either increases our rank in the Kardashev scale - noticing that wasted energy, like the energy that microprocessors liberate as heat, is not considered.
It’s also important to notice that it is not usefull to thing about technological enhancements individually, as the concept of an individual may be temporary. As our civilization is based on biological instances, clearly separated from others, we currently have the concept of “individual”. In the future, though, this concept may be overcomed and the civilization may be just a single big instance. If you think this does not make sense, notice how technology - specially computing - has evolved in order to keep information synced between different human brains across the globe.
Both the problem of “who chooses what is enhancement” and the individual concept show that there are problems in our civilization that aren’t solved by creating a new machine or something alike. A lot of problems like hungry would be solvable with our technical level today, but they aren’t because of politics (not just stuff that happens in the state, but politics in general). If one does not view politics as a technology - view with which I disagree - this would mean that “technological enhancement” is not the only thing we need to use to solve our problems.
Furthermore, it’s important to notice that using technological enhancement to increase our rank in the Kardashev scale fast is not our main goal. This should be repeated a lot of times to be clear. Incresing our rank in the Kardashev scale fast using technological enhancement is not our main goal. This happens because, as said before, we have the concept of “individual” and our civilization is not centrally controlled. This means that a lot of times some groups or individuals may have conflict with others as they seek their own interests. It’s clear for us that we should not sacrifice some individuals so the civilization is enhanced. If we kept with increasing our rank fast as our main goal without caring for the individual, very dangerous ideas may arise, like eugenics. The United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights is a great ethic parameter to keep in mind.
Besides that, those dangerous ideas probably would only produce harm to our civilization in the long term, so they won’t actually increase our rank. Probably, keeping with the goal of providing dignity for all individuals via the welfare state and social democracy is the currently most efficient way of increasing our rank in the long term.
As a resume: currently, the best way to seek for the post-human stage is to help empowering individuals in overcoming their personal disabilities - which can mean from helping solving hungry to creating gadgets for blind and/or deaf people, passing through just generally creating technology and solving people’s problems. Of course, this does not mean that jobs that aren’t directly involved in the creation of technology aren’t usefull for our goal. The creation of technology depends directly and indirectly from virtually all jobs that exists in our society nowadays.
It’s also important to notice that this does not mean that pure science, human science, philosophy, entertainment and other work areas that are tipically thrown in the “not usefull” group by a limited and stupid common sense are actually usefull. Pure and human sciences and philosophy are technology developments by themselves and they help our civilization. Entertainment is also important as art and sports are also technology and we need to have fun to be sane.
It’s clear for us that evolving our civilization is not a general goal, in the sense that lots of people nowadays just does not care in sacrificing other people to reach their personal goals.
Clearly, the mental technology - i.e., technology that is just idea and/or information, like language or software and concepts like ideologies, gender or behaviour - are the most difficult to develop. That means that probably the greatest achivement of our civilization so far is our rich language systems.
Clearly, pure biological beings have lots of disadvantages over technologically-enhanced ones. Some political ideologies view the idea of “overcoming the boundaries of the human species” as a bad thing. It’s actually exactly what our civilization had been trying to do since the evolving of the Homo sapiens.