…and we could all change our physical appearance at will…
Edit: Damn it! :smack: :smack: I hit “enter” accidentally before finishing the OP or even the thought. Let me at least scramble together a coherent paragraph, before the edit window expires:
What would be the result? Would everyone always walk around looking like supermodels? Would everyone all look like the *same *supermodel?
To continue:
Would ethnic minorities choose to all look like the majority, to blend in? Would diversity and variation go away? That sounds like a horrible dystopia. Or am I being too pessimistic?
I wouldn’t have needed to buy all those tools cluttering up my garage.
We’d all shape ourselves to flat stomachs, the height we like, the hair we like, possibly perfect vision and hearing, the smile/teeth that we like best, and the eyes and nose of the size and distance apart that we’d prefer.
All our limbs would work and they’d all be proportionate to each other.
That said, in the end, its what we do with what we have that matters. 
I think you’re being too pessimistic to worry that diversity would go away. Think about clothes today. Even when there is pressure to be wearing the right brand or designer, no one wants to show up wearing the exact same outfit as someone else. (Unless it’s a uniform).
I agree that most people would settle on supermodel looks or maybe humanly impossible caricatures like He-Man and Barbie, but I also think that we’d quickly learn to focus on some other standard of beauty that isn’t as easy to control. Posture or gracefulness of movement, for example.
In Tom Holt’s 1987 fantasy novel Expecting Someone Taller, a nerdy British clerk gets hold of the Nibelungs Ring (giving him all the power of the World) and the Tarnhelm (giving him shape-shifting powers).
He uses the Tarnhelm to change himself into the Most Beautiful Woman in the World and the Most Handsome Man in the World, and ends up looking first like Brunnhilde and then Siegfried, 'cause that’s who the Tarnhelm considers those persons to be.
Various sci-fi story universes have this idea as part of their set-up, The Culture by Iain M. Banks for example.
As he described it there was a little of what you worry about at first but then things settle down and its pretty much like clothing fashion for bodies, forms go in and out of style, most people are generically attractive and a lot take different forms to greater or lesser extremes to stand out, as a fashion statement, or just because they feel more comfortable looking a certain way.
Some people find a body they like and stick to it, others spend their lives experimenting. One character spends likes to spend five years as a female, five years as a male and five years as a neuter for example.
Personally I think it would be one of the greatest benefits we can imagine, both for individuals and society as a whole.
Take gender for example, a person would be male or female (or both, or neither) because they want to be, not because of a fifty/fifty coin toss they have no control over.
What a person is inside would quickly become more important than their external appearance, who they are, not what they appear to be.
A lot of ‘isms’ (racism, sexism etc) would go away, of course people being people we would probably come up with new ones…
Injury, disease and genetic problems would go out the window, if we can change form there should be no problems choosing or being given a healthy body.
Anyway, yes, personally I would love for this to happen. I think it would be fascinating and a lot of fun to change my form at whim. I really don’t see any downsides, at least none that can’t be overcome.
At first people would transform into supermodels. But it wouldn’t take long for the supermodel aesthetic to get old. I mean, the only reason it is put up on a pedestal is because it is so uncommon and hard to achieve. If everyone looks like a supermodel, then it’s no longer special.
I think attractiveness would be predicated on the creativeness of one’s look rather than conformity to a single ideal. Show up at the club looking like a supermodel and you’ll be pegged as boring. But show up looking like a fabulous monstrosity of your own imagination, and you’ll be the hottest person there.
There would be a lot more people getting laid, beware that busty chick down at the end of the bar is really a 90 year old man!
It would be great; I wouldn’t need a ladder to reach the top shelf in the kitchen.
Heck, I wouldn’t need a pan in which to cook my eggs. I could just mold my hand into one.
Agreed. We’d divide ourselves on the basis of which end of the egg we crack, rather than on skin color. But, being human, we’d still divide ourselves! It would just be more aligned with choice and less with unchangeable intrinsics.
One big division would be between traditionalists and experimentalists. Some would demand that people still resemble people, while others would want to mess around, looking like Picasso paintings…or farm machinery. The two groups would spend a lot of time calling each other rude names.
The only drawback I see is in fraudulent impersonation. I might show up at your lawyer’s office and ask to draft a new will, or show up at your workplace and resign from your job. Eventually, society would evolve protections against this, but it would be a low-level annoyance forever. (Protect your passwords!)
Why would anyone care? A 90 year old man would know more mind-blowing sex moves than an 18 year old woman. And if he had her body…
Trinopus: Farm machinery? Can do. Hard to decide whether I would turn myself into the tractor or the girl.
I think you would quickly end-up with a height race. I think most people would prefer to be a bit above average height, but with everybody trying to be over-average, it would get crazy unless there is some thing limiting it.
They’d have never existed in the first place. The concept of “ethnic minority” implies a fixed, inherited appearance.
Physical appearance would be like clothing, something you change at will. There’d be identifying trademark appearances probably but they’d be chosen, not “ethnic”. Like a gang or club membership, except with something like horns or purple hair instead of a badge or clothing color as identification.
Hipster style would eventually take over, and we’d all decide to have pig faces. Then some poor woman would be born conventionally beautiful but without the ability to shape-shift. She’d have to undergo surgery in some dark hospital to try to fit in. The dramatic reveal of her face as the bandages come off among pig-faced doctors and nurses would potentially be quite shocking.
Good point… We’d have to alter some of our traditional prejudices and preferences.
But think of the advantages: we can cram a lot more people onto a passenger aircraft. “Okay, everybody, cube up!” We can save a lot of money on building construction: lower ceilings and shorter stories. “Let’s get small!”
And…drawbacks. It’s easy, now, for people to squeeze through security bars, or (in the T-1000 example) even ooze through security fences. Burglary will be a lot easier: we just seep under doorways, or down ventilator shafts. (The Strange World of Alex Mack.)
Advantages! No one would have had to jump to their death from the burning World Trade Center: just extrude parasail wings and glide to safety.
Or totally interprenetrative sex acts. “Hey, kid, wanna melt together?” Growing twenty sets of genitals, of male, female, and totally original varieties. “That wasn’t a zit you just popped…”
It’d be wonderful…and weird!
We had a divorce case over here in the UK a few years back caused by a “virtual affair” on Second Life. Amazingly, the participants weren’t quite as glamourous as their alter egos.
Make of that what you will…
Slavery would probably have been never a significant issue since restraining and controlling people enough for that would be nearly impossible.
By the same token serious crimes would likely all be punished by summary execution since not only couldn’t you keep criminals in prison very well, you wouldn’t be able to tell who they were as soon as they got away from the crime scene and changed shape.
Keeping public order is likely to be a huge challenge.
I don’t think so. Most people would prefer to look distinctive. Hence, tattoos, hairstyles, and fashion, to accentuate the individual in a population that is already seen as too homogeneous. If people could shapeshift, particularly among the not-yet-mature, human form might begin to resemble the bar scene in Star Wars. And then, with maturity, there would no longer be an archetype to conform to. Then each individual would settle into a shape they had become comfortable with.