I don't think we will "transfer" our consciousness to anything else. I think that's impossible.
Do you really think it's impossible in principle, or just prohibitively difficult (as I believe interstellar travel to be)?
I think it is impossible in principle. That is, the idea that you could wake up in some machine body after undergoing a transfer procedure is impossible. We will build machines that are just as intellectually capable and "alive" as ourselves, but they will be their own selves.
The think our minds are constructs of our brains and although we might be able to build machines as capable we can't move into them unless we can put our brains in them and keep them alive. Even if we could somehow download the information content of our brains to a machine, that machine would be a copy. It wouldn't be me any more than my clone is me.
I understand the sentiment, but this is only true under certain strict conditions. Systems that have built-in error correction and fault tolerance (like our brain), can be slowly migrated to new hardware via incremental component replacement, using the built-in error correction and fault tolerance facilities to "recover" bits of the brain on new hardware. Eventually, you could be completely migrated to artificial hardware without interrupting your normal thought patterns or even really copying yourself in the conventional sense. Much like how on high-end fault-tolerant hot-swappable servers you can pretty much replace the entire machine while it is running, as long as you do it component at a time.