Very interesting new feature in Aeon on AI that also discusses my short fiction The Jesus Singularity: https://aeon.co/essays/why-is-the-language-of-transhumanists-and-religion-so-similar #transhumanism
The most avid believers in artificial intelligence are aggressively secular – yet their language is eerily religious. Why?
I’ll be on a panel and also doing an author’s roundtable (The Transhumanist Wager) at FreedomFest in Las Vegas on July 21. It’s one of the largest gatherings of free minds in the world and this year is the 10th anniversary. If you’re there, please say hello! Others are speaking on life extension and AI. Here’s my speaker’s page:
Check out what Zoltan Istvan will be attending at FreedomFest 2017.
The Evening Standard reviews the new book Radicals whose opening chapter is about transhumanism and my 2016 presidential campaign:
With the apparent collapse of Ukip and the defeat of Marine Le Pen, perhaps those of us fretting about the decline of liberal democracy may breathe easier. Still, many established Western parties remain in decline. And we have yet to deal with the consequences of the “populist” spasms that gave us Brexit and the absurd President Trump. This is the climate that impels Jamie Bartlett, of think tank Demos, to examine some of the new “radicals”.
Radicalism is important, he believes, because it is a source of new ideas: even if liberal democracy is forced to argue with racists or anti-democratic radicals, that should help make it stronger.
He is inevitably selective in his choice of seven different figures or movements, plus the anti-radicalisation work of the Prevent programme: there is an uneasy bracketing of political radicals and wacky futurists.
Thus in the latter group we meet US transhumanist presidential candidate Zoltan Istvan, leader of assorted “biohackers” attempting to merge humans and machines. Bartlett spends time with the Psychedelic Society, organising supervised psilocybin trips; with the German Tamera commune in Portugal, practising free love; and with the scarcely less loopy Vit Jedlicka, founder of a putative libertarian state on the Serbian/Croatian border.
There’s been a few thousand comments between the various releases of the video too. It’s great to see so many people considering a Federal Land Dividend as a way to live and thrive in a challenging future tied to widespread automation, transhumanism, and AI: https://www.facebook.com/NowThisFuture/videos/1600120853362422/?fref=mentions
Join me today for this! https://www.meetup.com/transhumanism-78/events/240040904/ #transhumanism
The Transhumanist Party presidential candidate and a Libertarian candidate for California governor, Zoltan Istvan, will join Agah Bahari in a 45-minute conversation for the live recording of an episode of “NEOHUMAN with Agah Bahari” podcast, following by 30-mins of Q&A (predetermined based on prior submissions).
With his wildly popular US Presidential run as a science candidate, bestselling book The Transhumanist Wager, and powerful speeches at institutions like the World Bank, Zoltan Istvan has literally transformed transhumanism into a thriving worldwide phenomenon. He is often cited as the global leader of the radical science movement. A humanitarian activist and former journalist for National Geographic, Zoltan has been compared in major media to a young Al Gore and described as a modern-day Ayn Rand.
“NEOHUMAN with Agah Bahari” is a Toronto-based podcast, produced and hosted by futurist, philosopher, artist, and entrepreneur, Agah Bahari. It was launched on January of 2016 and have generated more than 150,000 downloads in Canada, USA, Europe, and Australia since. NEOHUMAN podcast covers wide variety of subjects and issues, with some of the past guests include Kevin Kelly (editor-in-chief of WIRED magazine), Zoltan Istvan (Founder & 2016 Presidential candidate of The Transhumanist Party), Mark Perlin (Chief Scientific and Executive Officer of Cybergenetics), James Hughes (Executive Director of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies), Lincoln Cannon (Founder of the Mormon Transhumanist association), and Reverend Christopher Benek (Founder of the Christian Transhumanist Association), among others.
This film was compiled from audio of a discussion futurist FM-2030 held at the University of California on February 6th, 1994. In this discussion 2030 laid out an overview of his ‘transhuman’ philosophy and held a back and forth with other people present in the discussion. Discussion and debate included items such as the value of researching ‘indefinite lifespan’ technologies directly as opposed to (or in addition to) more traditional approaches, such as researching cures for specific diseases.
The excerpts in this archive file present a sort of thesis of FM 2030’s transhuman ideas.
About FM 2030: FM 2030 was at various points in his life, an Iranian Olympic basketball player, a diplomat, a university teacher, and a corporate consultant. He developed his views on transhumanism in the 1960s and evolved them over the next thirty-something years. He was placed in cryonic suspension July 8th, 2000. For more information about FM 2030, view the GPA Archive File: ‘Introduction to FM 2030′ or visit some of the following links:
Wikipedia:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FM-2030
Institute for Ethics & Emerging Technologies:
ieet.org/index.php/tpwiki/Transhuman
The New York Times:
nytimes.com/2000/07/11/us/futurist-known-as-fm-2030-is-dead-at-69.html
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I finally found a copy of my radio interview at Stanford University last month discussing how I’d pay for a #basicincome by leasing out federal land (called a “Federal Land Dividend”). It’s an hour long interview with a guests asking questions: We discuss transhumanism too.
In this April 18, 2017 episode, we speak with Zoltan Istvan, who ran for President in the Transhumanist party, and is now running for California Governor as a Libertarian. He proposes a Universal Basic Income, funded by the leasing of federal lands. How does this compare to the Georgist ideal of a citizen’s dividend funded by land rents?
Implants, transhumanism, & the US Navy in this new article: http://akashictimes.co.uk/brits-line-up-to-be-microchipped/ #transhumanism #implants
Is this the mark of the beast?
A growing number of people in the UK are getting microchipped, according to new findings.
The BBC recently featured video stories from a number of people – some of them from Leeds – who call themselves “bio-hackers”.
One lady known only as ‘Holly’ said she had a microchip implanted in her hand, which goes into her Facebook Art Page to use as a “digital business card”.
