Early Adopter Psychological Trend towards…

I’m somewhat new to transhumanity and come from a background in human machine interface design.  In my entire nerdy-ness, I’m surprised it took this long for me to get connected with Transhumanism; but, let’s not get side tracked.  I want to write about an interesting trend, I think I found, that came out of additional analysis on a demographic study we did, as part of our work for the Foundation.

Let me give you the basis for the study, the idea was that to really build software systems, in particular UI or User Interfaces, using what I call UX or User Experience design requires things like key persona’s based on demographic data; but the problem was I couldn’t find any demographic data for ‘transhumanists’. Since I did that work before as part of my job in real life, we started the Transhumanist Demographic Survey; which attempted to survey across 14 various Transhumanist groups to get to know them better at a high level.

While the demographic studies done by marketing firms are not academically sound, they do tend to give you enough of a picture to create a persona model and do interaction and experience design. While I tried to keep it as clean as possible, I recognize the first round had flaws; but, at a high level, it is good enough to start that UX process.  The key thing I found was that there was not one single demographic, but wildly different demographics from different groups. Also, the more extreme the difference between demographics was, the less those groups seem to associate with one another.

A lot of Transhumanists talk about how we need to push society this way or that way, or the risk of this or that, or that we need to install this moral or ethical system or any number of other issues that various groups come up with; but a majority of them seem to say that we should have one voice or that we are one group.  I think this is wrong across the board and here is why.

Humanity doesn’t need Transhumanism.

Let’s take a closer look at why.

Major Trends

Now don’t get too excited, I’m not saying we should forget Transhumanism or anything.  Let’s start and take a closer look by looking at the trends or things going on in the market overall and I don’t mean Kurzweils predictions or anything else about what will happen.  We all know the Law of Accelerating Returns, but think about these specific details.  We clearly have seen and continue to see ‘orders of magnitude’ increases in the rise of computing power.  If you pick any average person off the street they carry more computing power on them now then existed on the planet 30 years ago. In the next 3 years everything we touch or use now will be at least one generation behind. By 2020, everything we know now will be technologically several generations behind.  I don’t even need to quote a source this is such common knowledge and we see it all the time. And then, what about the internet that Al Gore supposedly invented?  At least in the western world, most people with a smart phone are connected via a massive global network to every other living soul in the connected world and, what is more, this technology is changing us, from how we think to how we behave, but that isn’t the stat I wanted to focus on.  In the US alone, roughly 20% are currently what we call, in demographic study work, ‘early adopters’.  That means about 20% of the American population goes out and gets the latest tech as soon as possible just on principle… This trend seems to be across the board in all kinds of areas (see attached chart).

Let’s get back to this 20% in a second and also identify some subtler or even transient trends.

Subtle and Transient Trends

There is always how fast we went from cell phones to smart phones and currently we are looking at a trend away from desktop and laptops to slates… eventually we will move past our smart phones to something better.  Google glasses maybe?  We will see.  The specific trend to smart phones is transient but the trend that we get better tech is clearly here to stay.

Another trend, that people tend to miss, is the one toward what I call better ‘UX’ and technological ubiquity.  UX Design is the idea that we design human machine interfaces that are wrapped around a target demographic (this goes back to my need for that demographic data). The consumer sees this increasingly awesome looking application UI that is increasingly easier to use and with systems that are increasingly smarter. This is only part of what is leading to technological ubiquity in various ways such as the form factor of the computers becoming increasingly powerful and small to the point of going unnoticed in your purse.  They become part of our habitat or the habitat of what will be post humanity not too far off.

Let’s go back to that demographic study…  With only a few thousand inputs, I felt I had a good rough idea of each groups demographic.  As a rule in UX design, if we have enough to model a single persona (demographic) then we can predict, to some extent, how well they will interact with a given system; based on the type of demographic information we have identified.  The Transhumanist Demographic Study was very broad, and only covered things at a high level, so it really was about painting broad strokes for us. What I found was wildly unrelated demographic groups with members ranging from radical left wing to radical right wing in their beliefs.  You couldn’t safely get all of them into one room without a fight breaking out.

Why are said Transhumanists so disconnected?

I did some additional research on the size of the total Transhuman demographic and couldn’t pass about 40k for a conservative estimate.  This is a very small percentage of the total population and so Transhumanists are really, statistically, very much on the fringe.  Through analysis of this data they are forming along the edge of the transition in lots of areas of demographics thus evolving from different demographics and not from a single source.

How can such a small group affect the larger group? How can they really affect main stream thought?

40k is nowhere near the 8% needed of a population to affect main stream thought for something to go effectively viral so this is not enough to drive interest.  So why are we talking about Transhumanism at all then you might ask?  Can they affect main stream thought or is main stream actually creating Transhumanism?

Why are all these disconnected groups forming then?

Let us go back and look at the early adopter information again.  Early adopters make up 20% which is way past the 8% needed to change society’s thoughts or creating a trend.  Let me hypothesize then that early adopters are the trend and creating these waves of change through the psychology of the modern world.  Further then, would not these psychological waves create a form of pressure like any wave and in this pressure in various groups we have Transhumanism coalescing.

Given all the trends feeding these early adopters, we see they are creating the psychological landscape of humanity, Transhumanism which is only an outcrop of where we are going.  Wither Transhumanists like it or not it doesn’t matter, as civilization is already heading “there” as fast as they can.  One day we will wake up and we will all be ‘transhuman’, and all these groups are like little spots of oil that will grow and coalesce in to larger groups, all coming from different segments.  This is the big secret: that the early adopters and our technological advancement are really the driving force behind our societies’ ‘transhuman’ trend.

Related Links:

http://pratoriate.org/blog/understanding-the-transhumanist-demographic/

http://pratoriate.org/projects/

http://pratoriate.org/blog/evolution-of-transhumanity-to-mainstream-thinking-how-to-get-transhumanist-thought-to-go-mainstream/