"Apparent sex" here includes voice timbre, facial appearance, body shape, and genitals. It does not include reproductive system, DNA, hormornes, or qualia. The procedure needs to be good enough that a stranger can't tell someone has undergone the procedure just by looking at them.
"Easy" means it's not significantly more prohibitive for the middle class than other big life changes such as moving, getting a new job, etc.
In order for this to resolve YES, there must be many people who are not super-wealthy and have changed their sex back and forth several times, being largely indistiguishable from people born as that sex each time.
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yeah Michael Levin's research track will allow de-aging once we have a couple more generations of biotech, this market is relatively trivial compared to that. and 2050 is a long way off. this market is effectively "given that humanity survives hard ai-powered biotech, will we get the benefits of that biotech?"
@L 2050 is just over 27 years off. The same timespan going backwards takes us back to mid-1995. I'm sure futurists back then imagined bold fundamental strides in medicine by the distant future of 2022 that have largely failed to materialise (although more incremental improvement has made quietly impressive gains). The pace may pickup somewhat but 'trivial sex change' is clearly beyond a reasonable projection for anything short of an AGI revolution in that timeframe - and if that happens all bets for humanity's future are off.
@AngolaMaldives agreed; agi revolution is on our doorstep, and programming ais will be starkly superintelligent by the end of next year, but this is much harder than agi, so it'll take a while after agi before it materializes.
programming ais will be starkly superintelligent by the end of next year
Mind defining this a little more specifically?
@Nikola Good question. I'll say it depends on whether the majority of the population has gone digital. If they have, then that counts. If digital people are still fringe and most people don't want to move over, it doesn't count.
@IsaacKing I think digital people are easily distributable from people born as some sex, at least until we have digital births.