Extropian Concepts

The Mysterious Mr. Nakamoto: A Fifteen-Year Quest to Unmask the Secret Genius Behind Crypto

by Benjamin Wallace · 18 Mar 2025 · 431pp · 116,274 words

she’d written that let you hide a message in an image. Machado was also a member of a group called the extropians, with which Szabo became deeply involved too. Extropians were devoted to transhumanism, or extreme life extension. This encompassed everything from smart drugs to artificial intelligence to the Singularity,

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that moment in the future when humans could be uploaded to the cloud. Szabo called it “Future Rapture.” Extropianism stood for expansion of all sorts. The extropian T-shirt read, “Forward, Upward, Outward,” and a number of group members took sunny, techno-optimist nicknames like Jay Prime

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Positive, Tom Morrow, Max More, and David Victor de Transcend. Tim May’s extropian “nom de humor,” as he called it, was Klaus! von Future Prime, and Szabo sometimes went by !Boom!Boom or !Boom!Boom von Past

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reams of science fiction and was an atheist who’d made a religion of tech. Though the group shared many members with the cypherpunks, the extropians were more hedonistic. Why live longer if you weren’t having a good time? “They had better drugs, no question,” Doug Barnes, who belonged

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became the best-known AI doomer as well as a leader of the statistics-and-game-theory-fixated Rationalist movement. When Szabo learned about the extropians, he found people talking seriously, as if they were engineers discussing viable future projects, about ideas he’d previously dismissed as whimsical fictions conjured

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in case God existed, your best move was to act as if he did, in order to maximize your chances of admission to heaven. The extropian gloss was: you should strive to live as long and as healthily as possible, in order to increase the odds that uploading and/or cryonic

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threw parties, like a potluck supper on a Saturday in March 1994 that they billed the Extropaganza. Some guests, upon arriving, gave each other the extropian handshake that group cofounder Max More had devised: after intertwining fingers, you’d shoot them upwards. While Szabo was a bookish personality, his roommates were

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in a dominatrix outfit, dressed as “the State” and holding a leash attached to her boyfriend Geoff Dale, who was dressed as “the Taxpayer.” The extropian playlist ranged from Alphaville’s on-the-nose “Forever Young” to future-ish electronica like the Orb. As Szabo spent more time among the

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extropians and cypherpunks, he seemed happier. Gone were the angry rants of the flame-warrior space activist. He was more courteous and empathic. Though he

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was quiet and reserved and sparing with eye contact, fellow extropians who spent time with him found him “nice” and “mild-mannered,” in addition to radiating intelligence. His erudition on such a remarkable variety of

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subjects led some extropians who hadn’t met him in person to believe his name was the pseudonym for a group. For all his libertarianism, Szabo eschewed Ayn Rand

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children and pets after astronomical objects: Arky, the name of their Rhodesian ridgeback, came from a star in the Boötes constellation. After learning about the extropians, Finney became a regular contributor to its email list. He already avoided alcohol, because he’d experienced seizures in college and there was a history

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year, tried a ketogenic diet, took antioxidant vitamin supplements, and joined Weight Watchers, among other things. He also took a more extreme step popular among extropians. In October 1992, he and Fran drove from Santa Barbara, where they’d recently moved, to Riverside, southeast of LA, to sign the paperwork needed

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could begin without interference or delay. “He did not believe in God,” Fran said later. “He believed in the future.” It was also through the extropians that Hal Finney learned about the project that would become his life’s work. When he read that a guy named Phil Zimmermann had invented

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skeletal list of names and bullet points that barely hinted at their rich history. Nick became animated only when he talked about the cypherpunks and extropians and his old buddies Tim May and Hal Finney. What I was most interested to hear was how he’d situate himself in this lineage

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a ham-handed impersonation by Nick of someone who wasn’t him. I thought there was a more fundamental inconsistency. Nick had been an instinctive extropian, with a hummingbird mind that could alight anywhere: smart drugs, genetic engineering, the corporation of the future. He was a mad tinkerer with a “

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point. There was a Play-Doh Fun Factory–designed structure that could, with human assistance, extrude copies of itself; N-Cat (Nick’s Catalog), hawking extropian-friendly products including his own essays, remailer software, and digests of the cypherpunks list; a methodology for pricing memes; a game called Hungarian Brainstorming, with

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neighbor’s name. Robin Hanson speculated on the statistics-obsessed LessWrong blog that there was at least a 15 percent chance that his old co-extropian Hal had been more involved with Bitcoin than he’d let on. A Forbes reporter named Andy Greenberg, who’d also heard the rumor,

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steel trough called a patient-former. “You don’t want the patient to freeze with their arms sticking out,” Max More, who’d cofounded the extropians and was now Alcor’s CEO, told me later, “ ’cause it makes them hard to fit in.” A circulating ice bath began external cooling. Then

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replaced it with a cocktail of chemical preservatives Alcor called M-22. Fran was in the room as all this happened, and Max kept fellow extropians updated: “Hal Finney is being cryopreserved now.” Once perfusion was complete, Hal’s body temperature was rapidly lowered to minus 110 degrees Celsius. The

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nitrogen. Hal was Alcor’s 128th patient. Like many Alcor members, much of his cryopreservation was covered by life insurance. Max More eulogized his old extropian friend: “Hal, I know I speak for many when I say that I look forward to speaking to you again sometime in the future and

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Bayesian probability, a statistical approach revered by Silicon Valley’s influential Rationalists, the contemporary community that came closest to and shared many members with the extropians. “If I give you no evidence, am I Satoshi?” Jeremy said. “The probability is one in seven billion. So things like ‘He’s from

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separate their cherished technology from its human creator. * * * — In fits and starts, I coded scrapers for each of the groups I wanted to target: cypherpunks, extropians, Rationalists, cryptographers, P2P people. Various self-assigned archivists had preserved, on their websites, the records of select mailing lists for select years. Wei Dai, for

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one, had a copy of the extropians list from 1996 to 2002. The first time I ran a scraper, it went for two hours, then crashed. I made a little fix and

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It wasn’t as rare as I’d expected. Maybe two dozen cypherpunks had used it during the list’s heyday. Fewer people on the extropians list had used it, though a handful stood out as having used it more than once, including Mark Grant, an elusive, self-described Oxford University

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’s voice. I began looking more closely at Donald. He’d been an active poster on several lists Nakamoto would plausibly have been on: cypherpunks, extropians, Metzdowd, P2P hackers, coderpunks. In his posts, he almost never revealed personal details, but a few were strewn here and there. He was Australian

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a regular feed of beyond-the-pale language and opinions that were racist, homophobic, and misogynist. He was so abrasive that, in the 1990s, the extropians listserv had kicked him out. In 2014, Slate Star Codex, an influential Silicon Valley blog with a history of tolerating discussion of taboo subjects like

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for prime time.” Despite the shared interest in longevity, Calvin didn’t strike me as someone who would have fit in particularly well among the extropians. We were sitting at a long blond-wood table with glass bottles of mineral water and a dish of nuts with a pair of miniature

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Metzdowd list in the four years and ten months leading up to Nakamoto’s appearance there. I also sent several years’ worth of cypherpunks and extropians archives, as well as longer writing samples for many of the leading Nakamoto candidates. In both the Molière and QAnon cases, the results had immediately

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don’t think he would have been involved.” Jon thought the best place to look for a coconspirator of Hal’s would be among the extropians, the group to which Hal, Wei Dai, and Nick Szabo had all belonged. “Those are extraordinarily smart people, self-educated polymaths. And somebody there

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as the beneficiary. It was also then that he legally changed his name to Max More and invented his own philosophy, extropianism. With Tom Bell, aka Tom Morrow, he cofounded the extropians group and launched the ’zine Extropy: Vaccine for Future Shock. Max met his future wife, who’d been born

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’cause he was kind of an early influence, in a way. He had the SMI2LE formula, which I always thought was kind of a proto-extropian thing: Space Migration, Intelligence Increase, Life Extension.” Max had been CEO of Alcor until two years before my visit, and he was still an ambassador

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DJ Steve Aoki has said he’s a member, and Peter Thiel has been reported to be a member. A number of Max’s old extropian friends were members too. Max said that atheist computer people represented the largest contingent. “The hacker mentality basically sees a very difficult, complex problem and

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he didn’t know off the top of his head. “We don’t generally identify them,” he said, “for security reasons.” So many of the extropians’ visions had come to pass. On the internet, memes ruled the day. Elon Musk was, among other things, the standard-bearer for a push to

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coordinated “city” of far-flung cabins in woodsy places) aimed to take them 3D. “That is kind of pleasing,” Max allowed of recent history’s extropian drift, but he was disappointed by the progress made in conquering death. “I’m not very optimistic that we’ll fix aging in my lifetime

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currency called Stellar, to set up a Hal Finney Cryonics Research Fund. There was a more profound connection as well. In the early 1990s, an extropian named Mark Plus coined the term aeonomics to describe “the study of the economic problems of immortal existence.” The idea of radically extending life span

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plan. Cryonics added the twist of how to ensure that the money you had when you de-animated was still available when you reanimated. If extropians were going to freeze themselves, they’d need a way to send money into the future, ready to be claimed upon awakening. In this way

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based on computer science can be forbidding territory for a journalist interested in telling a human story. I am grateful to a legion of cypherpunks, extropians, cryptographers, computer scientists, peer-to-peer networkers, coderpunks, monetary enthusiasts, stylometrists, Bitcoiners, Nakamotologists, would-be Nakamotos, would-be-Nakamoto debunkers, and others whose paths

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cypherpunks’ email list, I relied most frequently on the archives at cypherpunks.venona.com, https://marc.info, and https://cryptoanarchy.wiki. Repositories of the extropians’ email list are scattered. A rare collection of the group’s digests from 1992 to 1994 is at https://diyhpl.us/~bryan/irc

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Charlie Shrem, Tom Simonite, Paul Vigna, Daniel Walters, Nicole Weinstock, and Rob Wile. In these notes, I use the following abbreviations: CP: cypherpunks list EX: extropians list CR: The Cryptography and Cryptography Policy Mailing List (https://www.metzdowd.com/mailman/listinfo/cryptography) BF: Bitcoin Forum (https://bitcointalk.org) UN: Usenet (https

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de humor”: Tim May, “ ‘Pretty Good Paranoia’ and ‘Dining Detweilers Net,’ ” CP, November 28, 1993. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT The extropian T-shirt: Ed Regis, “Meet the Extropians,” Wired, October 1994. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT !Boom!Boom: e.g., Nick Szabo, “META: Is an armed society a polite

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society?,” EX, March 17, 1993. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT !Boom!Boom von Past Primeval: e.g., Nick Szabo, “the extropian pan-opticon,” EX, January 2, 1994. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT he liked to lie in bed: Nick Szabo, “Dream screen,” EX, March 15

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payday”: Nick Szabo, “PHIL/UPLOAD/STORY,” EX, March 6, 1993. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT billed the Extropaganza: Geoff Dale, “Party with the Extropians! at Nexus-Lite!,” CP, February 26, 1994. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Machado would walk around a party: Regis, “Meet the

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Extropians.” GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT The extropian playlist: Max More, “EDITORIAL: Suggestions Wanted,” Extropy, no. 6 (Summer 1990); Dave Krieger, interview. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “nice”

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TEXT “software architecture and engineering”: Nick Szabo, “Consulting Services,” Unenumerated (blog), April 2, 2008. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “extensive hacking skills”: Nick Szabo, “Extropian priorities,” EX, April 11, 1993. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT no fewer than six C/C++ books: Nick Szabo, “Books on my desk,” EX

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, May 15, 1993. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “I knit some mean code.”: Nick Szabo, “Culture: My Extropian Name,” EX, March 14, 1993. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT studied Japanese: Nick Szabo, “funny message,” SCI.LANG.JAPAN, UN, January 10, 1991. GO

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Catalog): Nick Szabo, “Introducing N-CAT!,” EX, September 30, 1993. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT methodology for pricing memes: Nick Szabo, “PHIL: GS + Objectivism (+ Extropianism) = ?,” EX, April 30, 1993. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Hungarian Brainstorming: Nick Szabo, “Meta-Brainstorm,” EX, June 1, 1993. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN

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to a Jesuit conspiracy: James Donald, “Covid 19 and the Faith,” Jim’s Blog (blog), February 28, 2023. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT the extropians listserv had kicked him out: Harry Shapiro, “Meta: Judgement,” EX, November 11, 1993. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT In 2014, Slate Star Codex:

More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley's Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity

by Adam Becker · 14 Jun 2025 · 381pp · 119,533 words

I am not content.”41 More (born Max O’Connor) was one of the founders of the “Extropian” movement, named “as a metaphorical opposite” of entropy, the physical measure of disorder and decay, which the Extropians declared “the supreme enemy of human hope.”42 More, along with Tom Morrow (born Tom Bell

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Morrow also founded the Extropy Institute in 1992, which led in short order to something ultimately more influential than their magazine: an email list for Extropians. “In the mid-nineties, many got [their] first exposure to transhumanist views from the Extropy Institute’s listserv,” wrote the philosopher Nick Bostrom in 2005

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where responsible decisions can be implemented.”45 Most of those debates happened on the internet, but there were also Extropian parties, conferences, and at least one student organization, at MIT.46 The Extropians and their intellectual compatriots were profiled in magazines like Wired and in several books.47 By the end of

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the 1990s, Extropians and transhumanists like Hans Moravec and Ray Kurzweil had published nonfiction books of their own, expounding on the imminent approach of AGI and other transformative

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. He’s not crazy, and he’s not stupid. Nor is he alone. Today, the Singularity isn’t just something that fringe groups like the Extropians take seriously. Kurzweil’s books have been bestsellers. His take on the Singularity has landed him in major magazines like Time, Wired, and Rolling Stone

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space travel far simpler, faster, and more comfortable. Unsurprisingly, the nascent transhumanist movement and other futurists in the 1980s jumped on Drexler’s ideas. The Extropians frequently talked about nanotech on their email list in the ’90s, with Drexler himself sometimes contributing to the discussion online and occasionally in person at

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Extropian conferences. “I agree with most of the Extropian ideas,” Drexler said. “Overall, it’s a forward-looking, adventurous group that is thinking about important issues of technology and human

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to produce something smarter than we are; any problems beyond that are not ours to solve.”25 Around that time, in 1996, Yudkowsky found the Extropian email list and became an active poster there.26 (“How old are you anyways?” another poster asked him. “17. But I don’t have time

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’s posts and essays got the attention of others on the list, including Bostrom and the libertarian economist Robin Hanson.28 In 2000, Yudkowsky’s Extropian connections led him to a meeting in Palo Alto run by the Foresight Institute, a nonprofit founded by Eric Drexler and the futurist Christine Peterson

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, uploading, transparency, space expansion, [and] AI.”29 At that meeting, Yudkowsky talked with internet entrepreneurs Brian and Sabine Atkins. He had met them through the Extropian list, and by the time of the meeting, the three were already planning to create a new research nonprofit. Not long after, they launched the

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no super-clever special trick to it. I just did it the hard way.”)38 Despite this opacity, to many in the online community of Extropians and transhumanists Yudkowsky had made his point: humans couldn’t be trusted with exposure to unaligned superintelligent AIs, and the AI would always find a

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was widely taken by rationalists to be plausible, if the AI alignment problem was solved—to human genetics to space colonization. Like Kurzweil and the Extropians and transhumanists before them, they dreamed of a limitless future in space. They saw death as an avoidable evil, or at least one that could

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general intelligence—as part of a larger plan to improve humanity, a plan that also included many of the same themes as the rationalists, singularitarians, Extropians, and other modern transhumanists and futurists. Even the word “transhumanism” was first popularized in its modern sense by a eugenicist, Julian Huxley (the brother of

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novelist Aldous Huxley), in a speech in 1951. That heritage of eugenics was carried down to the Extropians. In a revealing interview about the Singularity in 1993, the Extropian roboticist Hans Moravec dismissed concerns about the fate of people of lower socioeconomic status in the transition to a post

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most of our ancestors or near relatives—Australopithecus, Homo erectus, Neanderthal man.”132 This kind of casual bigotry wasn’t unusual among the Extropians at the time. The Extropian Society at MIT sent a pamphlet to all incoming freshmen in the summer of 1997. In it, they claimed that “MIT certainly lowers

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are also here, ruining the place. The culprit is MIT’s admissions policy, especially its policy of affirmative action.”133 A few years later, the Extropian email list discussed this pamphlet and a student op-ed decrying it. “This is not a statement of racist hate,” one of the

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Extropians wrote. If anything, they said, the author of the op-ed was harboring “hatred toward white males.” The real problem, they claimed, was affirmative action,

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list was rife with this attitude—and worse. “It is explicitly stated in Extropian doctrine that there cannot be socialist Extropians,” wrote transhumanist Ben Goertzel in 2000. “The vast majority of Extropians are radical libertarians, advocating the total or near-total abolition of the government.”135 With that ideology came a promotion of

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capitalism over democracy—“Capitalism, yes, but few on this list have anything good to say about democracy, I certainly don’t,” one Extropian wrote on the email list in 1996—and a concomitant refusal to acknowledge that free markets might produce anything other than fair outcomes.136 This

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attitude, common among libertarians to this day, made it easy for some Extropians to conclude that injustice and inequality in the world stemmed from inherent differences among people, rather than pervasive societal problems like racism, sexism, and the

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a ‘racist’: that I _disliked_ black people and thought that it is fair if blacks are treated badly. I don’t,” Bostrom wrote on the Extropian mailing list in 1996. I think it is probable that black people have a lower average IQ than mankind in general, and I think that

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if ever there was one—but it’s also not new among transhumanists. It’s an echo of the tech-first libertarian attitude among the Extropians. There are also echoes of it in the views of a certain venture capitalist who backed MIRI, as well as Yarvin’s start-up Tlön

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office not far from MacAskill’s. Sandberg has been a fixture in transhumanist and singularitarian communities for decades, going back to the days of the Extropian email listserv in the 1990s, where he first encountered a teenager by the name of Eliezer Yudkowsky. “I’m very much a skeptical transhumanist who

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like to live in space and live forever.” Inspired in part by O’Neill, he promoted “Space Migration, Intelligence Increase, and Life Extension,” anticipating the Extropians by over a decade.2 The L5 Society’s newsletters frequently featured ads related to life extension and cryonics.3 Even cryonics itself was originally

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link is historical as well. Timnit Gebru and Émile Torres have dubbed this set of related ideologies (traced throughout this book) the TESCREAL bundle: Transhumanism, Extropianism, Singularitarianism, Cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism, and Longtermism. Gebru and Torres have done extensive work linking these ideologies to each other and to the core of

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Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era (New York: Thomas Dunne, 2013), 121. 41 Ed Regis, “Meet the Extropians,” Wired, October 1, 1994, www.wired.com/1994/10/extropians/. 42 Nick Bostrom, “A History of Transhumanist Thought,” Journal of Evolution and Technology 14, no. 1 (April 2005), https://jetpress

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.org/volume14/bostrom.pdf; Extropy: Vaccine for Future Shock, no. 1 (Fall 1988), 2, https://github.com/Extropians/Extropy/blob/master/Extropy-01.pdf. See also, H+Pedia, s.v. “Extropy Magazines,” last modified November 30, 2023, 01:06, https://hpluspedia.org/wiki

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/Extropy_Magazines. 43 Extropy no. 1, 3. 44 Bostrom, “History of Transhumanist Thought.” 45 Ibid. 46 Parties: Regis, “Meet the Extropians”; Jim McClellan, “The Tomorrow People,” UK Observer, March 26, 1995, https://mason.gmu.edu/~rhanson/press/UKObserver-3-26-95.htm; Jon Evans, “Extropia’s

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/12/off-series-that-bostrom-email/. 47 Ed Regis, Great Mambo Chicken and the Transhuman Condition (New York: Basic Books, 1990); and Regis, “Meet the Extropians,” for example. 48 Evans, “Extropia’s Children”; Meghan O’Gieblyn, “God in the Machine: My Strange Journey into Transhumanism,” The Guardian, April 18, 2017, www

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.theguardian.com/technology/2017/apr/18/god-in-the-machine-my-strange-journey-into-transhumanism; Ben Goertzel, “The Extropian Creed,” September 2000, accessed June 13, 2024, www.goertzel.org/benzine/extropians.htm. 49 Kurzweil, Singularity Is Near, 369. 50 Vinge, “Coming Technological Singularity” (ellipsis in original). 51 Ken MacLeod, introduction

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My Flying Car? (San Francisco: Stripe Press, 2021), 59. 111 Hall, Flying Car, 60. 112 Ibid., 61, 304. 113 Ibid., 64. 114 Regis, “Meet the Extropians.” 115 Kurzweil, Singularity Is Near, 226. 116 Ibid., 29. 117 Ibid., 352. 118 Ibid., 365. 119 Ibid., 375 (and many, many other places in the

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/web/20010125023900/http://sysopmind.com/singularity.html (emphasis his). 26 Extropians listserv archive, July 25–December 31, 1996, https://extropians.weidai.com/extropians.96/. 27 Eliezer Yudkowsky, “Re: Arrogent [sic] Bastards,” Extropians listserv archive, December 14, 1996, https://extropians.weidai.com/extropians.96/4049.html. 28 Extropians listserv archive, July 25–December 31, 1996. 29 “Engines of

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/course/topics/curveball.html. 132 Mark Dery, Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century (New York: Grove Press, 1996), 307. 133 Anders Hove, “Extropians Take Their Cue from Bigotry,” The Tech, August 20, 1997, archived March 1, 2023, at the Wayback Machine, https://web.archive.org/web/20230301090204/http

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://tech.mit.edu/V117/N30/anders.30c.html (via Thorstad, “Belonging”); Anna Dirks, “MIT Extropians Anger Many,” MIT Observer, September 3, 1997, https://web.mit.edu/observer/www/1-1/articles/ad1.html. 134 Mike Lorrey, “Re: Are

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Extropians Libertarian? (Was RE: Learn to Shoot),” Extropians listserv archive, October 29, 2000, https://diyhpl.us/~bryan/irc/extropians/extracted-extropians-archive/archive/0010/70932.html (via Thorstad, “Belonging”). 135 Goertzel, “Extropian Creed.” 136 John K. Clark, “The Extropian Principles,” Extropians listserv archive, July 29, 1996, www.lucifer.com

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/exi-lists/extropians.96/0064.html. 137 Nick Bostrom, “Re

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: Offending People’s Minds,” Extropians listserv archive, August 24, 1996

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, www.lucifer.com/exi-lists/extropians.96/0441.html (racial slur unredacted

The Optimist: Sam Altman, OpenAI, and the Race to Invent the Future

by Keach Hagey · 19 May 2025 · 439pp · 125,379 words

an Algernon is to accelerate the Singularity,” he wrote.15 Around this time, Yudkowsky discovered an obscure mailing list of a society calling itself the Extropians, which was the subject of a 1994 article in Wired that happened to include their email address at the end. Founded by philosopher Max More

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in the 1980s, Extropianism is a form of pro-science, super-optimism that seeks to fight entropy—the universal law that says things fall apart, everything tends toward chaos

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only the positive aspects of a given situation.) Robin Hanson, who joined the movement and later became renowned for creating prediction markets, described attending multilevel Extropian parties at big houses in Palo Alto at the time. “And I was energized by them, because they were talking about all these interesting ideas

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), wrote about systems of “polycentric law” that could arise organically from voluntary transactions between agents free of government interference, and of “Free Oceana,” a potential Extropian settlement on a man-made floating island in international waters. (Bell ended up doing pro bono work years later for the Seasteading Institute, for which

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Thiel provided seed funding.) If this all sounds more than a bit libertarian, that’s because it was. The Wired article opens at one such Extropian gathering during which an attendee shows up dressed like “State,” wearing a vinyl bustier, miniskirt, and chain harness top and carrying a riding crop, dragging

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another attendee dressed up as “the Taxpayer” on a leash on all fours.16 The mailing list and broader Extropian community had only a few hundred members, but among them were a number of famous names, including Hanson; Marvin Minsky, the Turing Award–winning scientist

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—rumored to either be or be adjacent to the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto. “It is clear from even a casual perusal of the Extropians archive (maintained by Wei Dai) that within a few months, teenage Eliezer Yudkowsky became one of this extraordinary cacophony’s preeminent voices,” wrote the journalist

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superintelligences would be a great improvement over humans, and could be here by 2020.17 Two members of the Extropian community, internet entrepreneurs Brian and Sabine Atkins—who met on an Extropian mailing list in 1998 and were married soon after—were so taken by this message that in 2000 they bankrolled

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a bestseller—to create the Singularity Summit at Stanford University. Over the next six years, it expanded to become a prominent forum for futurists, transhumanists, Extropians, AI researchers, and science fiction authors, including Bostrom, More, Hanson, Stanford AI professor Sebastian Thrun, XPRIZE founder Peter Diamandis, and Aubrey de Grey, a gerontologist

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, an ambitious software project that attempted to predict stock market trends. Goertzel, who had a PhD in mathematics, had been an active poster on the Extropians mailing list for years, sparring affectionately with Yudkowsky on transhumanism and libertarianism. (He was in favor of the former but not so much the latter

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potential future technologies, like AI and nanotech,” he said. “It was really very niche. No academics were interested in this at all.” He discovered the Extropians listserv and became an active participant alongside Yudkowsky. “That was really where the action was in terms of the most advanced conversations about some of

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star power. One of Altman’s favorite depictions of AI in science fiction was the short story “The Gentle Seduction,” published in 1989 by enthusiastic Extropian Marc Stiegler. In the tale, an initially skeptical woman is seduced by technology itself, gradually agreeing to first take a capsule of nanobots to repair

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, this new block of funding marked a significant step toward OpenAI having the resources to realize the long-simmering futuristic visions of Alan Kay, the Extropians, sci-fi writers, and now Sam Altman. The statement also resurrected Kay’s quote: “The best way to predict the future is to invent it

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’s Start-up Machine,” The New York Times Magazine, May 2, 2013. 15.Eliezer S. Yudkowsky, “The Low Beyond,” 1996. 16.Ed Regis, “Meet the Extropians,” Wired, October 1, 1994. 17.Jon Evans, “Extropia’s Children, Chapter 1: The Wunderkind,” Gradient Ascent, October 17, 2022. 18.Sabine Atkins, “Introducing Another Atkins

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.Cade Metz, Genius Makers: The Mavericks Who Brought AI to Google, Facebook, and the World (New York: Dutton, 2021). 23.Eliezer Yudkowsky, “Ben’s ‘Extropian Creed,’ ” Extropians mailing list, November 13, 2000. 24.Shane Legg (@ShaneLegg), “Yudkowsky wasn’t actually working at Intelligenesis (aka Webmind), he was just visiting and he gave

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, 177, 205, 230, 259, 280 solar energy, 28 see also compute Enigma machine, 139 Enlightenment, 314–15 Enron, 60 esports, 215–16 Evans, Jon, 142 Extropians, 141–42, 144–45, 164–65, 199, 214 Fabolous (DJ), 102 Facebook, 60, 63, 73, 79–80, 96, 101, 116–17, 123, 127, 131, 137

The Transhumanist Reader

by Max More and Natasha Vita-More · 4 Mar 2013 · 798pp · 240,182 words

of The Transhumanist Reader. He authored “The Overhuman in the Transhuman” (Journal of Evolution and Technology 21, 2010); “True Transhumanism” (Global Spiral 2009); and “The Extropian Principles” (Extropy: The Journal of Transhumanist Thought 8). Michael Nielsen is one of the pioneers of quantum computing. He is an essayist, speaker, and advocate

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agreement between definitions of the philosophy from multiple sources. According to my early definition (More 1990), the term refers to: Philosophies of life (such as extropian perspectives) that seek the continuation and acceleration of the evolution of intelligent life beyond its currently human form and human limitations by means of science

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according rights can be consequentialist, deontological, or virtue-based. A genuinely pure deontological ethics appears to be uncommon. At least since the advent of the extropian transhumanism, many transhumanists have established their morality on a virtue foundation. In recent years, some prominent transhumanists have assumed a consequentialist foundation, in the form

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Personality.” EXTRO-3 Proceedings, Extropy Institute. More, Max (2003) “Principles of Extropy, Version 3.11.2003.” http://www.extropy.org/principles.htm. Original version: “The Extropian Principles.” Extropy 5/5 (May 1990). More, Max (2004) “The Proactionary Principle” (May). http://www.maxmore.com/proactionary.htm, http://www.extropy.org/proactionaryprinciple.htm

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) “The p66shc Adaptor Protein Controls Oxidative Stress Response and Life Span in Mammals.” Nature 402, pp. 309–313. More, Max (1998) “Self-Ownership: A Core Extropian Virtue.” Extropy Online (January), http://www.maxmore.com/selfown.htm. Nordin, Etik Ingemar (1992) Teknik & Samhälle: Ett Rättighetsetiskt Alternativ. Stockholm: Timbro. Sandberg, Anders (1997) “Amplifying

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Minsky I usually shock people by telling them about all sorts of possible wonders of the future, but it is probably impossible to shock an Extropian. If I am talking to a general audience I usually explain to them that if it weren’t for their bad habits and superstitions they

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to evolve and think of new things but is somehow never inclined to go into business for itself? In fact, how do we control the Extropians once they… I think I’ve over-talked, but I’ll be glad to start a fight with anyone who wants to. Originally published in

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united by a desire to transcend human limitations (see Regis 1990). They welcome the development of anti-aging medicines, smart drugs, and genetic modification. The Extropians – a group studded with bright, iconoclastic figures and a board of [advisors] that include Marvin Minsky, Ray Kurzweil, and Roy Walford – are active in this

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. It’s a view coming intuitively out of our vision for human dignity.”5 Such a reaction could not be further from those of the Extropians and others who eagerly welcome the emerging possibilities and see them as the flowering of humanity, the realization of what until now has been an

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trade, communication, and education. Note Vernor Vinge responded to many of the comments collected above. His thoughts and other comments posted on Extropy Institute’s Extropians email list in 1998 can be found here: http://hanson.gmu.edu/vi.html. 1 Damien Broderick’s book about the Singularity is The Spike

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, see human enhancement and healthspan and performance sensory technologies therapeutic transformative Enlightenment Esfandiary, F.M. Ettinger, Robert Event Horizon, see singularity evolution existential risk extinction extropian extropy Extropy, Principles of Extropy Institute Extropy The Journal of Transhumanist Thought Extropy Online, Fahy, Greg Fedorov, Nikolai Feynman, Richard Finot, Jean FM-2030, see

The Rationalist's Guide to the Galaxy: Superintelligent AI and the Geeks Who Are Trying to Save Humanity's Future

by Tom Chivers · 12 Jun 2019 · 289pp · 92,714 words

precursor of social media, for those of you under the age of 35; you just all chat in your emails – called the Extropians. One of the names on the Extropians’ mailing list was Eliezer Yudkowsky. ‘This was in the 1990s,’ says Robin Hanson, an economist at George Mason University and an important

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. ‘Myself, Nick Bostrom, Eliezer and many others were on it, discussing big future topics back then.’ But neither Bostrom nor Yudkowsky were satisfied with the Extropians. ‘It was a relatively libertarian take on futurism,’ says Hanson. ‘Some people, including Nick Bostrom, didn’t like that libertarian take, so they created the

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call everything.’ Humanity+ had a more left-wing, less utopian approach to the future. Yudkowsky, on the other hand, felt that the problem with the Extropians was a lack of ambition. He set up an alternative, the SL4 mailing list. SL4 stands for (Future) Shock Level 4; it’s a reference

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SL2), but not nanotechnology (SL3) or uploading (high SL3). They might believe you, but they will be frightened – shocked.’ He acknowledged that transhumanists like the Extropians were SL3, comfortable with the idea of human-level AI and major bodily changes up to and including uploading human brains onto computers. But he

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roles in the story – Michael Vassar, Michael Anissimov – are contributors. Nick Bostrom did a minor double-take when I asked him about SL4 and the Extropians, as though he hadn’t thought about it in a long time. I think he gave a sort of chuckle. ‘Yeah, it was humble beginnings

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the key concepts that do the rounds in the Rationalsphere these days first arose on SL4 and the Extropians. The aforementioned ‘paperclip maximiser’ was first mentioned there, possibly by Yudkowsky: ‘Someone searched [the Extropians’ archive] recently and found a plausible first mention by me,’ he told me by email; he was and

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use Bayes’ Theorem, he went largely quiet from SL4 to work on AI safety research directly’.17 Then Robin Hanson, the economist and fellow SL4/Extropians commenter, set up a blog of his own called Overcoming Bias. ‘I started this blog after I got tenure at George Mason,’ Hanson told me

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thinking, and our bias to believe we have corrected for such biases, when we have done no such thing’.18 He invited a few old Extropians/SL4 veterans to come and join him, people who’d impressed him with the quality of their thinking. Among them were Nick Bostrom and Eliezer

Singularity Sky

by Stross, Charles · 28 Oct 2003 · 448pp · 116,962 words

of merry hell around town, and so are the Radicals. I tried to have the usual suspects taken into custody, but they've declared an Extropian Soviet and refuse to cooperate. The worst elements are holed up in the Corn Exchange, two miles south of here, holding continuous committee meetings, and

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soldiers of the First and Fourth Regiments shot their officers and deserted en masse to the black flag of Burya Rubenstein's now-overt Traditional Extropian Revolutionary Front. (Many soldiers burned their uniforms and threw away their guns; others adopted new em-blems and took up strange silvery arms churned out

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of misdoing, that was sure enough. But what kind of misdoing? Burya Rubenstein sat in the Ducal palace, now requisitioned as the headquarters of the Extropians and Cyborgs' Soviet, sipping tea and signing proclamations with a leaden heart. Outside the thick oak door of his office, a squad of ward-geese

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or maintenance. A hard take-off singularity ripped up social systems and economies and ways of thought like an artillery barrage. Only the forearmed—the Extropian dissident underground, hard men like Burya Rubenstein— were prepared to press their own agenda upon the suddenly molten fabric of a society held too close

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a vanguard party to lead the people to a full understanding of the principles of ideological correctness and posteconomic optimization." "But Marxism-Gilderism and Democratic Extropianism is anarchist aesthetic. Why vanguard party? Why committee? Why revolution?" "Because it's traditional, dammit!" Rubenstein exploded. "We've been waiting for this particular revolution

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Of Death The committee for the Revolution had taken over the onion-domed orthodox cathedral in Plotsk, making it the headquarters of the Commissariat for Extropian Ideology. All those who rejected the doctrine of revolutionary optimization and refused to flee the town were dragged before the tribunal and instructed boringly and

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to the cyborg whom the rabbit had confronted. "What did you say?" The revolutionary looked bashful; her fully extended claws retracted slowly. "Is not good extropian. This creature—" her gesture at the rabbit brought another show of teeth—"believe cult of personality! Is counterrevolutionary dissident. Head-launch now! Headlaunch now!" Burya

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her inquiringly: Rachel glanced sideways. I'll explain later, she thought at him. "Knows Sister Burya. Sister Seventh of Stratagems. You business with have the Extropian Underground?" "That's right." Rachel nodded. "Can you tell me where he is?" "Do better." The thing in the screen grinned. "You accept orbital elements

Accelerando

by Stross, Charles · 22 Jan 2005 · 489pp · 148,885 words

VC track record, lately moving into micromachining and space technology. Franklin made his first million two decades ago, and now he's a specialist in extropian investment fields. Operating exclusively overseas these past five years, ever since the IRS got medieval about trying to suture the sucking chest wound of the

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raison d'être. And, um, more importantly dying and not trying to hang on to their property and chattels. Sitting up in the coffin singing extropian fireside songs, that kind of thing. The actuaries are to blame, predicting life expectancy with intent to cause people to buy insurance policies with money

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you so uptight?" asks Monica idly. Amber sighs, and subsides. "Nothing. It's not that I'm ungrateful or anything, but he's just so extropian, it's embarrassing. Like, that was the last century's apocalypse. Y'know?" "I think he was a really very forward-looking organic," Monica, speaking

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crowded ghetto with limited resources, then you decide those resources aren't worth spending on them, and bullets are cheaper than bread. 'Mind children' the extropians called the posthumans, but they were more like Vile Offspring. There was a lot of that, during the fast sigmoid phase. Starving among plenty, compulsory

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the deadhead you were busy with today?" asks Amber. Rita shrugs. "Some boringly prolix pulp author from the early twentieth, with a body phobia of extropian proportions – I kept expecting him to start drooling and rolling his eyes if I crossed my legs. Funny thing is, he was also close to

To Be a Machine: Adventures Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death

by Mark O'Connell · 28 Feb 2017 · 252pp · 79,452 words

the range of human experience and potential. This was a man who, before he left Britain for the U.S. in his twenties, started the Extropian movement, named in defiance of an entropic principle whereby all that exists tends toward disintegration and disorder and decline, in a universe in which the

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Journal of Transhumanist Thought, and soon afterward set up a nonprofit they called the Extropy Institute. Although Max is the figure most closely associated with Extropianism, which is generally seen as an early version of the transhumanist movement, it was Bell, he says, who coined the term. In those days, he

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the late 1990s he has reverted to the less hurtlingly dynamic Tom W. Bell. Max maintains that a document he wrote in 1990 called “The Extropian Principles”—laying out the movement’s ideals of “Boundless Expansion,” “Self-Transformation,” “Dynamic Optimism,” “Intelligent Technology,” and “Spontaneous Order”—constitutes the “first comprehensive and explicit

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for the name change at the time, in an announcement about it in the Summer 1990 issue of Extropy magazine, the house publication of the Extropian movement: “I am no longer ‘Max O’Connor.’ I’ve changed my name to ‘Max More’ in order to remove the cultural links to Ireland

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(which connotes backwardness rather than future-orientation) and to reflect the extropian desire for MORE LIFE, MORE INTELLIGENCE, MORE FREEDOM.” *2 In the 1970s, while incarcerated for a range of drug offenses, Leary developed a set of

Live Work Work Work Die: A Journey Into the Savage Heart of Silicon Valley

by Corey Pein · 23 Apr 2018 · 282pp · 81,873 words

called the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, which promised to freeze the dead for later resuscitation. Max More, an Alcor employee and self-proclaimed guru of “extropian” futurism, had given a presentation on “cryonics as a bridge to an indefinitely extended life” at the same BIL conference where Thiel donee Curtis Yarvin

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Lev Grossman, “2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal,” February 10, 2011, time.com. an online forum of futurists who called themselves extropians. Max More For more on cryonics and the extropians, see my report, “Everybody Freeze!,” 2016, Baffler (no. 30). a procedure called parabiosis Jeff Bercovici broke the news of Thiel’s

Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era

by James Barrat · 30 Sep 2013 · 294pp · 81,292 words

investigator for the DeepQA/Watson Project. Eliezer Yudkowsky always speaks, and there’s usually an ethicist or two as well as spokespeople for the extropian and transhuman communities. Extropians explore technologies and therapies that will permit humans to live forever. Transhumans think about hardware and cosmetic ways for increasing human capability, beauty

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Drake, Francis drives creativity efficiency resource acquisition self-preservation Dugan, Regina Duqu Dyson, George ecophagy efficiency Einstein, Albert emotions energy grid Enigma Enron Eurisko evil extropians Fastow, Andrew Ferrucci, David financial scandals financial system Flame Foreign Affairs Freidenfelds, Jason Friendly AI Coherent Extrapolated Volition and definition of intelligence explosion and SyNAPSE