Boringpunk
Humans merely want to be humans
Noticing that SF is not as actively transhumanist as it may seem on the tin, because almost no-one is willing to wear cat ears. Or that advances in body modification (Ozempic, HRT, steroids) often converge on being used to emphasize that one is in the desired norm rather than to separate from it. Few people have NFC tags embedded in their hand. Even outside of body modification, people are stunningly conservative when it comes to using technology to expand their sense of perception. Most Americans choose an uneditable OS for their smartphones in a time where editing your OS in natural language is actually possible. Most people don't own VR headsets or augmented reality glasses—and just like Neuralink those technologies tend to focus on helping disabled humans return to the norm, rather than expanding the norm for everyone.1 Instead of inventing a new form of communication, social media seems to have converged on this shape:
In fact the new Android version includes native software for filming yourself as a talking head on your screen. AI vision models capable of running on a smartphone chip to cut one's moving outline onto a screen recording, instantly—sounds like transnormal future. (“Transnormalism” is a registered Gavin Leech trademark.)
The environment of evolutionary adaptiveness probably involved humans talking to each other while making faces, haggling over just a handful of topics, excessive interest in the personal lives of others (gossip), harsh punishments for any missteps, and weighing many things over rational debate (physical looks, subtribal loyalties, status, etc.): that's what contemporary “shortform content” looks like to me! One of the reasons “the internet” didn't fulfill all the promises utopians pegged on it is the market simply bent it in the direction of transnormalism, and here we are.
Likewise it's poetic that the fact most of our corpus / easily RLed skills / market demand is in the form of conversations in natural language means recursive self-improvement truly seems to be on track to kick off in the format of revamped cleverbot.2
Will the future also take this shape? Currently... not bullish on the human desire to inhabit new ways of being. If we're all handed simulations that take whichever shape we want, a great many of us would simply elect to live an eternal year 2026. Why bother for a greater mode of existence when we could instead bumble about living in the pleasant society we inhabit? AI does not seem to be currently able to fully replace that need we have for there to be real humans out there to gossip about and feel for, despite Zuckerberg’s most sincere attempts at doing so.3 Perhaps the point where AIs will appear as present in our other-people brain nodes will cause a massive increase in trait openness in society as old human-inherent limitations are cast away (consensus seeking, truth in numbers, self-modification being difficult) and we'll get gifts like “here's the world Claude Requiem built for me”. But we're not there yet and I don't see it happening without the models themselves being pretty transhumanist.
Until then all our most impressive and wizardlike technology will continue being funneled into making phones more convenient, social media more tribalizing, and bodies more conventionally attractive and healthy. If this holds, then when gene selection becomes prevalent in society, it’ll be seen as a bare minimum necessity to ensure your kid is healthy, and we'll get slightly more attractive intelligent and healthy kids instead of more high openness, purple-eyed anime kids, which will be illegal to select for.
See here a lady describing how her Meta glasses considerably improved her ability to navigate and enjoy the world while blind.
As an aside, I admire that the creators of this website are still running it on the code it used to run on. It's a nice artifact to have around, today when it'd be so easy to hook it up to an API and basta.
See e.g. why Mr. Beast videos can’t be automated—you need real humans for real stakes and a true feeling that someone is enduring this.
though cat ears are acceptable, the cultivation of human beauty seems preferable to strange transhuman fashion dynamics, as happened with architecture. The Brutalist human must be prevented at all costs. transhumanism should be human. we should become as the elves are. more ourselves rather than whatever memes and competition want to grind us into. absent a god, we don’t get that though.
The majority of the human population has an astounding desire to be normal, and if they desire anything abnormal, to make it normal. Change is always executed by a small cadre of weirdos who experiment with gila monster spit and advanced math, and when they make something sufficiently useful, the ballast of the species says “thanks, i’ll use this to be more competitive in the eternal ranked competitive attractiveness competition”. Which makes it sound like human nature is immutable but I think in general we’re pretty weird compared to who we were 5,000 years ago.