Perhaps I should make an implicit point explicit: if we get to a stage where humans can modify their own minds, it is highly likely that this will get rid of the psychological unity of the human race. Everyone else has been posting on how “people will (all) do this, be like this, etc”. The reality is that there may well be on the order of (6*10^9)/100 ~ 10^7 separate psychological niches into which groups of co-self-modifying humans eventually splinter into, as humans with similar preferences gather together into groups of people with similar preferences, the limiting factor being that you don’t want to be in too small a group. Perhaps this number is a overestimate due to vast duplication of desired end-states in self-modification space.
An interesting question is: how many people will want to become superintelligent? Even if only all of the academics in the world did this, you’d still have about 10^5 superintelligent posthumans running around. What would they get up to? Will there be a gender imbalance in humans who want to become superintelligent? [look at the gender balance of the h+ and s^ lists, for example]
Perhaps I should make an implicit point explicit: if we get to a stage where humans can modify their own minds, it is highly likely that this will get rid of the psychological unity of the human race. Everyone else has been posting on how “people will (all) do this, be like this, etc”. The reality is that there may well be on the order of (6*10^9)/100 ~ 10^7 separate psychological niches into which groups of co-self-modifying humans eventually splinter into, as humans with similar preferences gather together into groups of people with similar preferences, the limiting factor being that you don’t want to be in too small a group. Perhaps this number is a overestimate due to vast duplication of desired end-states in self-modification space.
An interesting question is: how many people will want to become superintelligent? Even if only all of the academics in the world did this, you’d still have about 10^5 superintelligent posthumans running around. What would they get up to? Will there be a gender imbalance in humans who want to become superintelligent? [look at the gender balance of the h+ and s^ lists, for example]