Over on IEET, Mark Plus comments:

I wonder if transhumanism has more legs than extropianism. A few years ago the principals at Extropy Institute said, in effect, "Poof! Extropianism doesn't exist any more." I suspect a middle-aged reality check, combined with improgression towards extropian goals in a normal life span, had something to do with the extropians' collapse of purpose. Will something similar happen to transhumanism by 2020 if we see yet another decade of drunkards' walks instead of "progress" towards transhumanist goals?

I doubt that h+ will go the same way as the extropians, rather I suspect that h+ will morph again by 2020, indeed with the changing h+ board and the breakoff of the "existential risks", "singularity" and "rationality" movements, you can already see it.

I suspect that transhumanism will undergo a significant change in favor of populism - indeed, this process has been underway for a few years now. Gone are Jupiter Brains and physical eschatology, in will be practical life extension and health tips, the right to have minor physical modifications like Oscar Pistorius' legs, and the biopolitics of popular culture. But really, this is progress: in order to appeal to millions of people, h+ has to become simple. It has to be easy to understand, practical, and something that everyone can participate in without having to put in large amounts of effort or be exceptionally intelligent.

H+ is migrating back down the future shock levels, and it seems that the drive behind this is purely organic: no-one is doing it on purpose, and I see no reason for this trend not to continue. At some point in the next few decades, we should see a point where the increasing curve of technological progress meets the decreasing curve of ambitiousness of h+ discourse: people will really be able to engage with "transhumanist" technological fixes like anti-aging therapies and simple brain-computer interfaces (better versions of the emotiv epoc) and much more immersive and high-bandwidth virtual reality. When that happens, I predict that we'll see a massive growth in popularity of the h+ memes.

This same set of comments seems to apply to the "singularity" concept: the concept originated in 1965 with I.J Good's observations about the first ultraintelligent machine. Nowadays, the casual observer might think that the word "singularity" had something to do with twitter and domestic help robots.

In all this, there is, of course, a great and subtle irony. The truth about the causal future of our time will be closer to what gets discussed at SL4 than what we see from h+ magazine. In the long run, reality will shock even those at shock level 4, and they know it. But the reality of today's futurism is determined by what the majority of people think will happen: in effect, reality is a democracy in the short run. The truth about the future has to compete for people's attention on an equal footing with every other possible form of infotainment, and in the Darwinian battle for hits, it is hardly surprising that the truth is losing out.

But, of course, there will still be a few hard-core academic futurists who push the boundary of accurate predictions about the future. The question is, will anyone listen to them?