As a sci-fi writer just starting out, what suggestions do you have for me?

What started me on this debate, is a scene from my story where I envisioned the AI advances so well in controlling humanity, given the traits and limitations of human are so throughly analyzed by the AI.

A group of dissent believes the AI overlord is obstructing human FREE WILL, hence rendering them lesser human. So, they did what they could. They used bodily dysmorphic technology to alter themselves, differently from the original human states, but as you could see how it might get ugly. It's like this time, human willingly opt themselves into transforming into the likes of Nemesis from Resident Evil, willingly get in contact of a virus and lose their human forms.

The remaining human who pride themselves on their intact human form hunted those dissents down. But it sparks a whole new debate, who's more human? The ones that are permanently slaved to the form, or those who pertained what they thought, would be the most important thing of humanity?

1. The Legacy approach.

Quite simple, what was our ancestor and our posteriors will be considered human since we are human.

It looks simple, but this approach yields many questions in the future. Consider genetic modification, BCI where human consciousness gets be implanted in a robot extending lives to multi-century long, or what if sciences find a way to merge our genes to other creatures to "invent" a specie that will flourish on Mars?

Those extreme scenarios are meant to challenge the boundary of this definition. But you could see, anyone with flimsy connection to our current legacy is potentially human in the future.

By this view, those dissents like Nemesis are considered legitimate human heir.

2. The Form similarity approach.

Let's say we found some life form on one of the planets. If they share our form, our intelligence, we tested them, they got the same chemical formulations, are they human?

But the key here is that, as long as we define a perimeter, that perimeter not only works in including alien humans, but also excluding ourselves, if some dissent evolves away from current human form like I explain in the story above.

3. Ending and Beginning approach.

The attitude is basically, by some time, we will just have to end the concept of humanity, and call ourselves something else. That we become Martians or whatnot, this humanness is no longer intact.

**so what I'm trying to say here is that, A)the name human, B)the concept defining the name, and C)the underlying scenario on what's actually happening can be quite disengaged.

What I meant to say with the monkey case is that, if a group of human evolves to become Martians, they would be no longer considered as human, by some definition.