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NancyLebovitz comments on Neo-reactionaries, why are you neo-reactionary? - Less Wrong Discussion
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If you think seriously about what living a lot longer than current norms would have to mean, then you'll realize that everything familiar to you now will eventually vanish, and new things will take their place. Then those things will vanish as well, and other things will take their place. Just keep iterating.
Consider how much of the currently familiar things in our social world originated in an intellectual experiment in the 18th Century called the Enlightenment: democracy, egalitarianism, cosmopolitanism, feminism, secularism, individualism and so forth. Do you think the social innovations based on these ideas have gotten locked in as a permanent part of the human condition? I wouldn't assume anything of the sort.
In fact if I survive long enough, it wouldn't surprise me to see "regression towards the mean" in human society after a few centuries. The people of the world in the 24th Century might wield amazing technologies by our standards, but their society could have more in common with premodern, pre-Enlightenment societies than the ones we've known as products of the late 20th and early 21st Centuries.
I feel sorry for the feminist women in cryonics who don't see this as a distinct possibility of the kind of Future World which would revive them. They might find themselves in a conservative, patriarchal society which won't have much tolerance for their assumptions about women's freedoms.
Prediction is hard, especially about the future.
It's possible that feminists and MRAs will wake up to find a matriarchal future.
Or gender (if any) will come to mean something very different from what we're used to. Once humanity starts bioengineering itself, the range of possibility opens up tremendously.
My bet is that if cryonics works, the future will divide into home era cohorts, and the vast majority of people from earlier times may be living in reasonable comfort but will have very little power. A few highly adaptable people may be able to get up to speed to join the current culture.
What do I have to do to be highly adaptable enough to join the culture that is still experiencing growth? What could I be doing now in order to prepare for that?
Tentatively-- try living in a bunch of different cultures.
Seconded.
That sounds like premature optimization to me.
Unquestionably, but it's still fun to ask.
You mean there are people who don't just shape-shift their apparent sex depending on the precise situational combination of their current mood and what they want to signal? Goddamn you lot are weirdos ;-).
Although the conservation-of-mass issue gets awkward: you can either be a scrawny male but a healthy-looking female or a healthy-looking male and a rather overweight female, or be kinda awkwardly lithe in either form. Or you can go to the bathroom and store the extra unwanted mass when female, but really, there's only so much biological nanotechnology can do against basic physics.
(EDIT: Yes, I did make this up on the bus one day when thinking of things future people might consider good ideas that we'd consider unutterably bizarre, and was indeed waiting for an opportunity to post it ;-).)
Um, if you have the ability to arbitrary rearrange your cells, they're likely more loosely attached to each other than those in animals. In any case you should be able to process raw environmental material to grow.
I have thought about possible future societies that aren't based on biological reproduction. Most of the examples in scifi fall apart after a little MoR-style pocking (their main flaw is keeping certain aspects of the setting the same as ours even if those aspects no longer make sense). The two that seem stable are the following:
1) Sentients become pure infomorphs (or ems as Hanson calls them). This abolishes the distinction between memetic and genetic inheritance. Thus "sex" in the sense of recombining "genetic" material is separate from reproduction and resembles having conversations. Reproduction consists of creating a copy of your mind/source code. This resembles the life cycle of bacteria, who exchange information via conjugation but reproduce via binary fission.
2) Sentients are produced in centralized factories, e.g., most children are grown in artificial wombs, or robots produced in more conventional factories. This effectively makes them eusocial with all that implies about their sense of individuality, or rather lack thereof.
The other possibility is old-fashioned sexual reproduction. I have no idea which of those possibilities will come to dominate.
One possibility is that body composition becomes less important because it's so easily changed. At that tech level, it probably doesn't have any health implications.
Height might be less significant.
Instead of more mass to be a larger male, how about less density?
Height and density. I'm a moron. brb, retuning bodily nanomachines.