Hi. Maybe ten years ago, thanks to your role in maintaining #hplusroadmap, you seemed to me a leader of a new generation in transhumanism. Since then, while technology has kept advancing, and various futurist dreams have remained alive, I feel that “transhumanism” as a movement or subculture or identity, lost some of its momentum and its avantgarde character. One way to put it, is that in the 1990s there was a transhumanist futurism centered on Eric Drexler and nanotechnology, but in the 2010s it was eclipsed by the rationalist futurism centered on Eliezer Yudkowsky and artificial intelligence. Of course there have been many many other movements, personalities, and technologies of interest; but I think one could tell a plausible story about the radical techno-futurism of recent decades, in which a cultural transition from transhumanism to rationalism, is at the heart of the narrative.
Meanwhile, your own bio says that you got heavily into crypto, something I never got into, but which went from a “cypherpunk” fantasy, to a headline phenomenon, and ultimately to a financial ecosystem with a nominal worth of something like a trillion US dollars, and which, pardon my bluntness, seems to be riddled with at least as much hype, scamming, and corruption, as anything in mainstream finance. I would be interested to know how the recent history of transhumanism and futurism looks, from the perspective of someone who took your path, into the world of startups and legal commerce.
Hi. Maybe ten years ago, thanks to your role in maintaining #hplusroadmap, you seemed to me a leader of a new generation in transhumanism. Since then, while technology has kept advancing, and various futurist dreams have remained alive, I feel that “transhumanism” as a movement or subculture or identity, lost some of its momentum and its avantgarde character. One way to put it, is that in the 1990s there was a transhumanist futurism centered on Eric Drexler and nanotechnology, but in the 2010s it was eclipsed by the rationalist futurism centered on Eliezer Yudkowsky and artificial intelligence. Of course there have been many many other movements, personalities, and technologies of interest; but I think one could tell a plausible story about the radical techno-futurism of recent decades, in which a cultural transition from transhumanism to rationalism, is at the heart of the narrative.
Meanwhile, your own bio says that you got heavily into crypto, something I never got into, but which went from a “cypherpunk” fantasy, to a headline phenomenon, and ultimately to a financial ecosystem with a nominal worth of something like a trillion US dollars, and which, pardon my bluntness, seems to be riddled with at least as much hype, scamming, and corruption, as anything in mainstream finance. I would be interested to know how the recent history of transhumanism and futurism looks, from the perspective of someone who took your path, into the world of startups and legal commerce.