[ExI] How many transhumanist

[Keith Henson]

On Sun, Feb 19, 2012 at 5:00 AM,  Anders Sandberg <anders at aleph.se> wrote:

snip

> Anybody
> who has an estimate of how many people are mentioned in Wikipedia in
> total? Scaling up 73 by the ratio 7 billion / #people in Wikipedia might
> give a lower bound (since many people in Wikipedia are historical).

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Living_people reports 557,616

Wikipedia (EN) probably draws living people from fewer than half a
billion people.

so 73/557,616 * 0.5 B is ~ 65,000.

L5 Society defeated the moon treaty with fewer than 10,000 people, but
normally 65,000 people isn't enough to do serious lobbying in the US
and the US share wouldn't be higher than 40k.  This is a very
uncertain number, just exploring Anders question.

> I was attending a meeting about emerging technology and global security
> in Washington DC last week. I think that among the intelligence analysts
> and technologists present at least a third were "transhumanists" in some
> sense. At the very least they were quite open to radical new
> technologies, although often more concerned with how to avoid bad guys
> getting them.
>
> Transhumanism is creeping into the mainstream to the extent that we
> card-carrying transhumanists might want to consider what role - if any -
> we should play. An old-timer I met recently complained that he wasn't
> seeing much *new* ideas on our fora - maybe it is time for us to shape
> up and go to the next level? Or revel in our mainstreaminess and get
> lucrative jobs as lobbyists?

As you have seen recently, there isn't much interest in exploring the
consequences of speeding up on our old concept of M-brains.

Or advanced proposals for solving the much more mundane (but
important) energy/carbon problems.

Or low cost space transport based on high exhaust velocities.

Keith

> --
> Anders Sandberg,
> Future of Humanity Institute
> Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University
>
>
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