H+: Thomas, you got into transhumanism at a very young age. What inspired you and why do you think you started thinking about such big issues? And did you have anybody in your physical proximity to talk to?
Thomas McCabe: I've always thought about big issues in general, going back to elementary school. The reason transhumanism and the Singularity caught my attention, back in 2003, was that they struck me as a way to have a very large impact on the world, starting from a relatively small resource base. Technology always works like that — the people and ideas that get in during the initial growth stages of the industry wind up dominating. Harvard is 400 years old, and it's still the #1 ranked university in America (disclaimer: I'm a Yalie). Ford is 100 years old and it's still the #1 American car company. Dell, Microsoft and Compaq still dominate the PC industry, and so forth.
I hated adolescence in general and middle/high school specifically. I do think a nontrivial portion (though certainly not all!) of the reason was that I had all of these interesting ideas about the future of humanity, and no one to talk to. The universe that we jam young people into nowadays is very small.
In my day-to-day life, of course, most people still aren't interested in transhumanism, but I don't really mind. If there are 6,000 students at Yale and 1% of them are interested — that's sixty people. But children don't really have that big pool to draw from. I think that's largely why so many geniuses disliked school and were mostly self-taught, most famously Einstein, and including our own Eliezer
Yudkowsky.
