At one point, a large group of Segway riders in Day-Glo yellow helmets slowly roll toward us, promising an audience, and then right past us.ĭespite the meager turnout, Zoltan is happy. That’s why we are standing in the colossal shadow of the USS Midway, while Zoltan and his team hold up signs reading, “AI MUST BE SAFE!” and “TRANSHUMANIST PARTY PREVENTS EXISTENTIAL RISKS” and “MAKE LOVE NOT VIRUSES,” while posing for photos for the party’s various social media feeds.Īs will happen with almost every stop Zoltan makes on the campaign trail, journalists, photographers, and documentary film crews outnumber the people actually listening to his speeches. Which is why Zoltan and a small handful of volunteers from a San Diego transhumanist chapter are staging a protest to warn everyone about imminent catastrophic risks to our survival, and so, to our chances of achieving immortal life after the Singularity. However, there are many threats to be fended off before we can all live forever. His platform is nothing less than eternal life for everyone on Earth. This journey will eventually take him all the way to Washington, where he intends to deliver his Transhumanist Bill of Rights to Congress. It’s a Sunday in mid-September, and I’ve come to spend a week with Zoltan as he drives his coffin-shaped bus from San Diego to Arizona, making a case for why he should be elected the first ever transhumanist president.
Zoltan is his own assistant, secretary, receptionist, fundraiser, organizer, numbers man, stumper, and publicist. The phrase he will offer up more than any other is an upbeat, “No worries,” issued forth as he checks his constantly overflowing inbox, or fields calls from producers and volunteers, or attempts to mediate growing displeasures among his party advisors. Zoltan’s platform is nothing less than eternal life Zoltan is a prodigious and easy-going conversationalist who speaks in the deep and pleasant timbre of a born orator. At 42, he has the excitable demeanor of a late teenager barely constrained by the body of an adult. He is tall and broad shouldered, and the sun has bleached the hairs on the back of his neck white. Zoltan Istvan is blue-eyed and sandy blonde like the San Francisco surfer that he is. Everything will be plentiful.Īll this and more is the fantastical dream vision of the future according to transhumanism. When machine intelligence reaches the point at which it can infinitely improve itself, we will have reached the Singularity and there will be no more natural or physical limits to humankind. Robots will mine asteroids for resources to bring back to Earth, just one of thousands of planets that our new technologies will have terraformed and made habitable for the hundreds of billions of immortal human beings living in the universe. Interstellar travel will be cheap and common. Concepts of race, gender, and power will all disappear. Governments as we know them will be rendered obsolete, and disbanded.
With human intelligence having ascended to rational perfection, politics and religion will lose their current meaning. In a world without want, violence will become archaic: the weapons of the world will be disassembled and destroyed.
0 kommentar(er)
