Requiem for the hopes of a pre-AI world
A few months from now, I turn 55. I've been a transhumanist since my teens in the late 1980s; since I got online in the 1990s, I have participated remotely in the talking shops and virtual salons of Internet transhumanism and, later, rationalism. The upheavals of 21st century politics have provided many distractions, but I have never abandoned the view that it is possible and desirable to reach for something more than the natural human condition. At the very least, one should try to reverse the aging process and remove the arbitrary bound on lifespan that it imposes. Beyond that, one is free to aspire for a world as idyllic as possible; and there are also multitudinous unknown possibilities of being, beyond human form and life on Earth, waiting to be explored. More than that, I didn't just hope these vistas would open up, I wanted to play a part. And I surely had a chance to contribute; I was academically promising, I can write, I can give a speech... In retrospect, I think I can identify a few factors that impeded the achievement of whatever potential I had. First, I had no "social capital". I didn't come from the middle class, I had no relatives in academia or the professions, so I didn't have that kind of support network or model of industrious sobriety to fall back on, when I found the world wasn't interested in what I had to offer. Second, I came of age on the pre-cloud, pre-corporate Internet, whose potlatch ethos naturally encouraged an anarcho-communal outlook, where again something more careerist or even capitalist might have given me more options later. But instead, I was to become familiar with what seems to be the graduate student lifestyle, without actually doing a higher degree: living in share houses, and working-for-money for as few hours as possible, while you dedicate yourself to whatever fever dreams or higher tasks or intellectual activities really animate you. Through the years of living like this, I tried a number of times to "work with socie
