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this post was submitted on 06 Apr 2025
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TechTakes
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
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In the late 2000s, rationalists were squarely in the middle of transhumanism. They were into the Singularity, but also the cryonics and a whole pile of stuff they got from the Extropians. It was very much the thing.
These days they're most interested in Effective Altruism (loudly -the label at least) and race science (used to be quiet, now a bit louder). I hardly ever hear them even mention transhumanism as it was back then.
Did rationalists abandon transhumanism?
Is it just me? What happened?
As to cryonics... for both LLM doomers and accelerationists, they have no need for a frozen purgatory when the techno-rapture is just a few years around the corner.
As for the rest of the shiny futuristic dreams, they have give way to ugly practical realities:
no magic nootropics, just Scott telling people to take adderal and other rationalists telling people to micro dose on LSD
no low hanging fruit in terms of gene editing (as epistaxis pointed out over on reddit) so they’re left with eugenics and GeneSmith’s insanity
no drexler nanotech so they are left hoping (or fearing) the god-AI can figure it (which is also a problem for ever reviving cryonically frozen people)
no exocortex, just over priced google glasses and a hallucinating LLM “assistant”
no neural jacks (or neural lace or whatever the cyberpunk term for them is), just Elon murdering a bunch of lab animals and trying out (temporary) hope on paralyzed people
The future is here, and it’s subpar compared to the early 2000s fantasies. But hey, you can rip off Ghibli’s style for your shitty fanfic projects, so there are a few upsides.
Another thread worth pulling is that biotechnology and synthetic biology have turned out to be substantially harder to master than anticipated, and it didn't seem like it was ever the primary area of expertise for a lot of these people anyway. I don't have a copy of any of Kurzweil's books at hand to look at his predicted timelines for that stuff, but they're surely way off.
Faulty assumptions about the biological equivalence of digital neural network algorithms have done a lot of unexamined heavy lifting in driving the current AI bubble, and keeping the harder stuff on the fringes of the conversation. That said, I don't doubt that a few refugees from the bubble-burst will attempt to inflate the next bubble on the back of speculative biotech, and I've seen a couple of signs of that already.
Yes, there was a big hype in the upcoming biotech revolution in popular transhumanist media a ~decade ago. Lot of it seems to have fizzled out or gone nootropics like stuff. (And even that is meh).
It's possible that the most popular fora for discussions of the other topics were drowned out by AI doomerism and the people who are interested in them simply left.
One of the most popular and controversial ways in recent times to use technological means to improve human condition and overcome its natural limitations is gender affirming care, such as hormone replacement therapy. Transhumanism is woke now — hell, "trans" is right there in the name!
Yeah this kind of stuff is why im not the biggest fan of the tescreal label.
still holds - it's still a bunch that needs a label and that's the label
even as TREACLES was right there
(i asked emile, they said it was TESCREAL is very searchable. i mean fine)
Tired: Sand Hill Road
Wired: Treacle Mine Road