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... (read more)
5kanzure1yWell, look, if someone wants to join a community that is interested in building
cool things then consider hplusroadmap: https://diyhpl.us/wiki/hplusroadmap we
recently added a discord bridge. We've been going for 15 years at this point. We
have funding available for cool wacky projects, or for not-so-wacky projects,
and people are always interested in collaborating or at least providing some
input on ideas or what's up. I think the problem is that the extropians, as much
as I like them, didn't keep going, and they didn't continue to build or learn or
educate and they ended up stagnating. At some level, maybe they were just a
group writing cool emails about cool concepts they found interesting? At another
level, maybe they really were the origination point of the financial singularity
(bitcoin) and maybe their work with the cypherpunks on PGP and SSL and other
technologies really should be attributed to the transhumanists... But for a lot
of other tech (like germline engineering, human cloning, etc), we could have
done this decades ago and it simply hasn't been done yet. Why? We should
encourage more people to build and work on these things. I don't have the
culture stuff solved & I'm open to ideas.
My interest in bitcoin could by some be considered a distraction from the more
important projects you mention, but with regards to the scams and frauds, I'd
point out that my interest has been in bitcoin- which is built by a very
conservative group of programmers- and the edge between open-source
permissionless innovation and figuring out how to interface with the regulated
financial system. This started first with my work at LedgerX, the first
CFTC-regulated bitcoin options exchange and clearinghouse, and then with the
state-chartered bank in Wyoming that I co-founded. If bitcoin is going to grow
and be physically accessible to the general public, then there are going to need
to be regulated interfaces into the rest of the world of finance.
I know that might sound a li
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... (read more)