A new article on visiting Alabama’s largest megachurch on the Immortality Bus and discussing transhumanism. Make sure to check out the 2-min YouTube video embedded in the story:
The pastor considered whether robots could be saved.
Here’s a very in depth, approximately 6,000 word story (broken into 5 articles) with many pictures on transhumanism–from one of the world’s leading tech sites: The Verge.
Zoltan Istvan is very worried about the superintelligent machines.
He says the war over artificial intelligence will be worse than the Cold War nuclear arms race — much worse. It will be far more deadly, and whoever wins will control the world, eternally. This artificial intelligence might be being developed right now, he says, for all we know. At a government facility in the middle of the Arizona desert, perhaps.
Continue reading “Can Zoltan Istvan beat Hillary, Trump, and Death itself?” »
Excited to have a full feature on the BBC homepage on transhumanism and my growing presidential campaign. Transhumanist Party, speech at the World Bank, Immortality Bus, and universal basic income issues discussed:
Not many politicians running for the White House promise to end death. But not many politicians are Zoltan Istvan. Tim Maughan meets a man travelling America in a giant coffin-shaped bus to make his point.
Humai, a technology company based in Los Angeles, says that it is working on a project known as “Atom & Eve” that would let human consciousness be transferred to an artificial body after their death.
Artificial intelligence, the most important and major discovery of science will be one of the most helpful things in the whole project. The Humai have already started working on human rebirth using artificial intelligence.
The three technologies collectively used by the tech giant company are “Nanotechnology, bionics & artificial intelligence”. The company is expecting the whole system to be ready in 3 decades and, of course, this type of work requires this much time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q9Ec7AvnufQ
Ray Kurzweil: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Kurzweil#Health_and_aging
Raymond “Ray” Kurzweil is an American author, computer scientist, inventor and futurist. Aside from futurology, he is involved in fields such as optical character recognition (OCR), text-to-speech synthesis, speech recognition technology, and electronic keyboard instruments. He has written books on health, artificial intelligence (AI), transhumanism, the technological singularity, and futurism. Kurzweil is a public advocate for the futurist and transhumanist movements, and gives public talks to share his optimistic outlook on life extension technologies and the future of nanotechnology, robotics, and biotechnology.
A new article on my campaign with a provocative headline, but most of the story is nice. I’ll be speaking in Florida on Saturday as part of the Immortality Bus tour. We visited Alabama’s largest megachurch yesterday:
His name sounds funny to Americans, but presidential candidate Zoltan Istvan says it’s totally normal in Hungary, from where his parents hail. Istvan himself was born in Los Angeles and worked for National Geographic for years — a job that led him to explore science, particularly the concept of transhumanism, which posits that people will merge with technology.
Today, Istvan continues to write for Vice, Psychology Today, Gizmod o, and more — when he’s not campaigning across the country and promoting the Transhumanist Party platform, which promises better lives — and hopefully immortality — through science. Istvan will speak this Saturday at the Church of Perpetual Life in Hollywood, which promotes the same ideals and which New Times featured in a cover story earlier this year.
Continue reading “Presidential Candidate Suggests We Microchip Syrian Refugees” »
New article for Vice Motherboard on why society should support legalization of all drugs–and a short video of the Immortality Bus in Arkansas talking to marijuana supporters (a state where it’s totally illegal):
The “Mount Rushmore of the Drug War” featuring founding prohibitionists Harry Anslinger, Billie Holiday, and Arnold Rothstein. Image: Donkey Hotey/Flickr
Continue reading “Legalization of Drugs Should Be Part of a Transhumanist Agenda” »
A new story out in Breitbart that’s about AI, transhumanism, and politics: http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2015/11/08/trans-humanist-pres…overlords/
Zoltan Istvan is running for President in 2016, and hoping he might be one of the last humans to hold the job.
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This piece is dedicated to Stefan Stern, who picked up on – and ran with – a remark I made at this year’s Brain Bar Budapest, concerning the need for a ‘value-added’ account of being ‘human’ in a world in which there are many drivers towards replacing human labour with ever smarter technologies.
In what follows, I assume that ‘human’ can no longer be taken for granted as something that adds value to being-in-the-world. The value needs to be earned, it can’t be just inherited. For example, according to animal rights activists, ‘value-added’ claims to brand ‘humanity’ amount to an unjustified privileging of the human life-form, whereas artificial intelligence enthusiasts argue that computers will soon exceed humans at the (‘rational’) tasks that we have historically invoked to create distance from animals. I shall be more concerned with the latter threat, as it comes from a more recognizable form of ‘economistic’ logic.
Economics makes an interesting but subtle distinction between ‘price’ and ‘cost’. Price is what you pay upfront through mutual agreement to the person selling you something. In contrast, cost consists in the resources that you forfeit by virtue of possessing the thing. Of course, the cost of something includes its price, but typically much more – and much of it experienced only once you’ve come into possession. Thus, we say ‘hidden cost’ but not ‘hidden price’. The difference between price and cost is perhaps most vivid when considering large life-defining purchases, such as a house or a car. In these cases, any hidden costs are presumably offset by ‘benefits’, the things that you originally wanted — or at least approve after the fact — that follow from possession.
Now, think about the difference between saying, ‘Humanity comes at a price’ and ‘Humanity comes at a cost’. The first phrase suggests what you need to pay your master to acquire freedom, while the second suggests what you need to suffer as you exercise your freedom. The first position has you standing outside the category of ‘human’ but wishing to get in – say, as a prospective resident of a gated community. The second position already identifies you as ‘human’ but perhaps without having fully realized what you had bargained for. The philosophical movement of Existentialism was launched in the mid-20th century by playing with the irony implied in the idea of ‘human emancipation’ – the ease with which the Hell we wish to leave (and hence pay the price) morphs into the Hell we agree to enter (and hence suffer the cost). Thus, our humanity reduces to the leap out of the frying pan of slavery and into the fire of freedom.
Continue reading “Humanity on a Budget, or the Value-Added of Being 'Human'” »
