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Worried about rights for cyborgs? There’s a write-in candidate for that

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.

America’s most popular voting guide for elections, political issues, candidates, and poll data

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.

Assistive tech helps paralysed man cycle competitively

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.

The Anoncast — Episode 17 — Zoltan Istvan Transhumanist Candidate for President of the United States

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.

Eliminating Money, Taxes, and Ownership Will Bring Forth Technoutopia

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.

This Revolutionary Bionic Eye Sends Images Directly To Your Brain

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.

22 Minutes: The Independents

Canada’s favorite comedy show 22 Minutes of CBC (similar to The Daily Show) is out tonight with a new broadcast. My campaign and transhumanism is in it for a few minutes. Here’s a 4 minute YouTube clip from the TV broadcast that’s quite funny. Shows sometimes get a million views across Canada:


Is America ready for the first redneck, gun toting, mullet sporting, tiger tackling, gay polygamist president? Shaun Majumder investigates.

This Hour Has 22 Minutes airs Tuesdays at 8:30pm (9:00 NT) on CBC.

Watch full episodes online: http://bit.ly/watch22mins

Check out http://www.cbc.ca/comedy for more original comedy.

Brexit for Transhumanists: A Parable of Getting What You Wish For

For the past two years, Zoltan Istvan has been campaigning for the US presidency on the Transhumanist Party, a largely one-man show which nevertheless remains faithful to the basic tenets of transhumanism. Now suppose he won. Top of his policy agenda had been to ensure the immortality of all Americans. But even Zoltan realized that this would entail quite big changes in how the state and society function. So, shortly after being elected president, he decides to hold a national referendum on the matter.

The question on the ballot is one that makes the stakes crystal clear: ‘The government shall endeavour to release all Americans from the constraints of mortality’. Zoltan liked this way of putting things because were he to lose to the referendum, which he half-presumed, the opportunity to air publicly the relevant issues would continue to shift naysayers in Congress to increase funding for broadly anti-death research and treatments — a step in the right direction, as far as he’s concerned.

Zoltan also liked the idea that the referendum effectively ‘rotated the political axis’, from left-right to up-down, a turn of phrase he picked up from some philosopher whose name he couldn’t remember. But this also meant that the ensuing campaign, which was fierce, attracted a motley crew of supporters on both sides.

The ‘Remainers’ (as the anti-immortalists call themselves) were composed of a mix of traditional religious believers, environmental activists and hard-headed sceptics who distrust all transcendental hype, whether it comes from religion or science. In other words, those who wanted us to remain in our normal bodies held that our fate either is confined to our current circumstances or requires that we remain in those circumstances in order for something better to happen post mortem. The stakes were so high that even the Pope was called out to argue the case, which of course he was more than happy to do, Obama-style.

On the other hand, the ‘Leavers’ who espouse immortality were an even more mixed bag. Some on the ‘soft’ side of the argument wanted us to remain in our biological bodies, but in a fortified form that makes us forever resistant to foreign agents. Thus, the prospect of reversing the ageing process got sold as an indefinite productivity booster, allowing us to do what we already do but without the constraints imposed by age and death. In contrast, the ‘hard’ side wanted us to leave our biological bodies altogether and enter into the relatively unregulated realm of ‘digital immortality’, which was sold as enabling us to interact with a broader range of agents than we could otherwise do, both on Earth and maybe even in the cosmos. Indeed, various interfaces were being developed that would enable us to exchange data easily with all sorts of non-human beings to mutual benefit. And matters could go much further – even towards a ‘Singularity’, a universal free trade data zone! However, none of this could be brought to fruition unless we first release ourselves from various codes and norms that inhibit their development and use.

It turns out that the Leavers managed to suppress their differences during the campaign and surprisingly eked out a narrow win. But what was President Zoltan to do? Understandably he wanted to keep his options open with regard to how immortality is implemented. So the first thing he did was to appoint a cabinet with a broad church of Leavers on board, and so both Aubrey de Grey and Ray Kurzweil figured prominently. But these guys pulled the implementation of Leave in opposing directions. De Grey wanted to focus on a radical extension of conventional medical research. Indeed, when de Grey first heard that President Zoltan was holding a referendum, he was concerned that ‘immortality’ might mean only the digital immortality favoured by Kurzweil, which de Grey regards as a complete fantasy.

By the time the referendum campaign began, Zoltan had managed to get Congressional approval to increase funding and loosen regulation in ways that enabled various pro-immortality research projects to move forward at an unprecedented pace. However, as the campaign progressed, it became clear that the soft immortalist side was lagging: There appeared to be much greater cellular complexity to the reversal of ageing than de Grey and his colleagues had imagined.

Meanwhile a clever tech entrepreneur, inspired by the economist Robin Hanson, had figured out a way to scan living brains for purposes of uploading them into machines capable of enhancing their computational power indefinitely. These brain emulations (or ‘ems’) are indeed at least in principle immortal, but at the cost of leaving the original human in a state of disorganized mush, which is to say, biologically ‘dead’. Because Zoltan had already de-regulated all transhumanist-related industries, the ‘ems’ end up dominating the market, with large public relations firms emerging to persuade people that they will live better lives by abandoning their biological bodies and uploading into what some liken to Star Trek’s Borg.

After a few generations, Earth had earned a reputation as the most rational death cult in the cosmos.

And they all ‘lived’ happily ever after…