Building a Services Market for the Transhuman Era

Abstract of Tony Greenberg / Eric Pulier/ Alex Veytsel June 12/13 at Harvard speaking at Humanity+

Building a Services Market for the Transhuman Era

Innovation, including transhumanist innovation, is mostly the domain of private enterprise, which operates in one of a few market models – goods or services, mass-market or custom, consumer or enterprise, etc. Of these, the services model is the one that is most broken. Of Consumerist’s 32 Worst Companies in America, 22 are pure-play services companies – including 7 of the 8 finalists, and the eventual winner, Comcast.

The big question is: how do we get further along the transhumanist path when so much of it – uploading, virtual reality, cryonics, and likely even consumer-accessible versions of nanotechnology – are, or will be, delivered as a service? How do we find and reward the companies that won’t accidentally unfreeze you after a power outage, lose your backup self, or jerk you out of paradise over a phony billing dispute when none of those things appear in the glossy brochure or the snazzy website? How can we tell the genuine article from marketing hype when our very selves depend on it?

The collective stakes for building an accountable and innovative market model are high. If we take a trip 60 years back, one model started off with expectations of a sub-20 unit world market and then gave us a computer in every home – and in every pocket. Another one promised us the Jetsons and instead gave us the Canyonero, fighting tooth and nail against every innovation from safety to fuel efficiency along the way.

The individual stakes may be even higher – especially if we ask someone trapped in a virtual reality built by Kafka, or AOL’s cancellation department.

Between Two Worlds: The Soul in the Service Agreement

We stand at a civilizational threshold, a liminal space between the world that was and the one that is rushing in to meet us. The very definition of what it means to be human is becoming a negotiable asset. We are architecting our own evolution, not with the slow, deliberate hand of nature, but with the frantic, brilliant, and often reckless pace of technological innovation. The transhumanist dream—of uploaded consciousness, of ageless bodies, of realities built from pure data—is no longer the stuff of pulp fiction. It is the blueprint for the next market, and the stakes are not merely economic. They are existential.

I have felt the cold, sterile hum of a server farm, a place where the digital ghosts of minds might one day reside, and the air itself feels thin, stripped of all but the electrical pulse of pure information. I have held the sleek, unsettlingly organic weight of a prototype neural interface in my palm, a device promising to bridge the chasm between thought and machine. And I have witnessed the dizzying, nauseating flicker of a poorly rendered virtual space, a digital purgatory that felt less like paradise and more like a cage. These are not abstract concepts; they are the sensory realities of the world we are building, one service agreement at a time.

The critical flaw in this emerging world is not in the technology itself, but in the archaic market structures we use to deliver it. We are trying to pour the torrential force of post-human potential into the cracked and leaking vessel of the 20th-century service economy. Think of the cable company, the bank, the airline—the very names are synonymous with frustration, with a systemic inability to align their interests with our own. Now, imagine that same corporate logic applied not to your internet connection, but to your cryonically frozen grandmother, your backed-up consciousness, or your access to a shared virtual existence. When the “service” is your very self, a billing dispute is not an inconvenience; it is an existential threat. How do we build systems of trust and accountability when the product is intangible, the provider is a faceless entity, and our recourse is a customer service algorithm designed to exhaust us into submission?

I confess, I am caught in the crosscurrents of this transition. Part of me feels an almost spiritual pull toward the horizon of human potential, a deep yearning to see what lies beyond the frailties of our biological inheritance. I have sat in boardrooms where the future is plotted on whiteboards and in financial models, and I have felt the intoxicating thrill of that creation. But another part of me is gripped by a primal fear. I have seen the carelessness, the corner-cutting, the sheer lack of reverence with which we treat things that matter. We are building our gods, and we are giving them the operational logic of a call center.

Our future is a service, and we are the ones signing the contract.