My new interview on Engadget, which goes over a lot of transhumanist and political policy terrain:
Zoltan Istvan wants to create a movement, not a moment.
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Category: transhumanism – Page 108
The strength of spinach isn’t only in its nutrients, but also in its ability to be hacked to function as a sensor, according to researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. An MIT team used wonder-material carbon nanotubes to give the greens the ability to detect explosives and wirelessly transmit information to a mobile device.
MIT engineers applied a solution of nanoparticles to the underside of the leaves, allowing them to be taken up into the mesophyll layer where photosynthesis takes place. The embedded nanotubes then acted as sensors able to detect nitroaromatic compounds – which are often used in explosives like land mines – in the groundwater taken up by the plants’ roots.
If the chemicals are present in the water the plant is feeding from, the carbon nanotubes in the leaves emit a fluorescent signal that can be picked up with an infrared camera when a laser is shined on the leaves. The researchers hooked up such a camera to an inexpensive Raspberry Pi system and set it to email the user when the compounds were detected.
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What I Learned
Posted in biotech/medical, food, geopolitics, internet, transhumanism
My new story for Vice Motherboard on lessons learned running for President as a transhumanist. It’s also my endorsement of a ranked voting system:
Campaigning in Times Square.
With such overwhelming odds against my candidacy and tiny political party from the start, I chose to bypass the battle to get on state ballots and instead focus using media to move the transhumanism movement ahead. After all, only very rarely have third parties in America affected the outcome of the elections anyway. Like it or not, you are stuck with an elephant or a donkey-headed leader.
The good news, though, is the internet is making a run for the presidency a good way to get attention for a cause like transhumanism. It may only take five minutes to file a candidacy form with the FEC to run for US president, but the legitimacy in many people’s minds is real. Some candidates out there are using this for real good for the country, like the Nutrition Party and its candidate Rod Silva, which is trying to improve the way America eats. Or the Marijuana Party, which wants to legalize pot and end the asinine War on Drugs.
I’ve been honored to watch transhumanism grow a lot under my candidacy. My main goal all along has been to tell the world that science and technological innovation is coming far more quickly than ever before, and as a nation, we must answer to it with practical and forward-thinking policies. If we don’t, it could lead to increased inequality, a blatantly dystopian future, and a severe planetary environmental crisis.
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Politico: Write a transhumanist in in New York! http://www.politico.com/states/new-york/albany/story/2016/10…-in-106729 #transhumanism #Election2016 #ScienceCandidate
ALBANY — While Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump have debated issues such as immigration, gun control, and health care, neither of them has weighed in on the topic of a bill of rights for cyborgs.
Voters chagrined by that oversight do, however, have another option.
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Zoltan Istvan thinks that not-too-distant technology will make it possible for humans to live for up to 10,000 years, and he’s running as the Transhumanist Party’s presidential candidate in order to bring public attention to the need to speed up this process and prepare for the eventual societal impacts of immortality.
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Last week my presidential candidacy (an openly nonreligious and transhumanist one) got a big boost when it was added to ISideWith, the most popular site for helping to match you with your best candidate. They currently only have 8 candidates featured still running. Take the 3-minute survey on their site to see who you side with now that I’ll be in the results. https://www./ And, I also participated alongside Gary Johnson, Jill Stein, Eric McMullin and others in their online debate in real time that tracked the 3rd Clinton/Trump debate last Wed. (I didn’t give many answers as I was in the middle of a campaign event that exact same moment in Baltimore, but I still chimed in some supporting science and reason). My answers start about 15 min into the debate:
http://secure.isidewith.com/debate-stream/20161019
ISideWith shows which political parties, candidates, and ballot initiatives match your beliefs based on the 2016 issues that are most important to you.
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Lots of topics discussed including my campaign, transhumanism, and my support of a Universal Basic Income:
We’re with 2016 Presidential candidate, Zoltan Istvan, who is running under the Transhumanist Party. What’s transhumanism? Find out and let us know what your questions are for Zoltan.
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Athletes with disabilities have been competing in a range of challenges that use assistive technology to overcome day-to-day practical challenges.
Bionic arms, powered exoskeletons, brain-controlled computer interfaces and supercharged wheelchairs all featured at the world’s first Cybathlon, near Zurich, Switzerland.
One of the races saw functional electrical stimulation (FES) used to activate the leg muscles of paralysed competitors to ride bikes.
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I’m excited to share I’ve been interviewed by the podcast of Anonymous, whose Facebook page has over 5 million likes. I believe I’m the only Presidential candidate to be interviewed by them. We go over all the areas of my 20-point political platform. I’m a supporter of many of the goals of Anonymous, and I believe in activist organizations aiming to better the world that listen to their conscience and not rules or the status quo: http://anonhq.com/anoncast-episode-17-zoltan-istvan-transhum…ed-states/ #transhumanism #ScienceCandidate #Election2016 #equality #Future #Anonymous
On this episode of The Anoncast, Alek had the chance to speak with Transhumanist Party Presidential Candidate Zoltan Istvan.
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My new story for Vice Motherboard on The Venus Project, Jacque Fresco, and a Resource Based Economy. I had the honor of visiting 100 year old Jacque Fresco last week. This story is also on the cover of Vice right now: http://motherboard.vice.com/read/eliminating-money-taxes-and…chnoutopia #transhumanism #Election2016 #ScienceCandidate #ResourceBasedEconomy #JacqueFresco #VenusProject
Futurist and architect Jacque Fresco speaks in parables. If he goes on too long with a story, his 40-year partner Roxanne Meadows interjects facts to keep him on track. Fresco recently turned 100 years old, and is the oldest celebrity futurist in the world. His magnum opus is The Venus Project, a 21-acre Central Florida Eden with white dome-shaped buildings that Meadows and he hand built over three and a half decades. The sanctuary and research center is where Fresco still leads weekly seminars, which includes a tour of 10 buildings—some filled with hundreds of future city models inside them—that highlight the promise of a future world where equality and technology abound.
How I met Fresco at The Venus Project this month starts with income taxes —something I hate and aim to one day eliminate altogether for humanity. Fresco doesn’t like taxes either. While searching online about taxes, I stumbled upon Fresco’s voluminous work: over 80 years of essays, filmed lectures, books, documentaries, models, and architectural drawings. Much of Fresco’s work is anchored by his main philosophical idea: a resource-based economy, where there’s not only zero taxes, but no ownership or money either.
It sounds fanciful, but the more I read about Fresco’s work and ideas, the more intrigued I became. Here was a man with a vision, one not dissimilar from my own. The timing of my meeting with Fresco and Meadows was serendipitous. As I neared the end of my US presidential campaign, I was looking to build out the Transhumanist Party’s 20-point platform with a more aggressive futurist platform—one that looked not only 10–20 years into the future, as I generally focus on, but one that also examines what could and should happen in 50 years or even the next century.
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In Brief:
This newly developed bionic eye sends images directly to the brain to restore a tiny fraction of the pixels a normal eye can produce.
There are about 285 million people in the world who suffer from some type of visual impairment. For many years, researchers have been looking for ways to restore eyesight. This year, Australian volunteers are set to receive bionic eyes which should help restore their vision.
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