An Immortality Bus campaign report today on CNET from South Carolina and transhumanism discussed. http://www.cnet.com/videos/the-cravecast-visits-the-future-with-u-s-presidential-candidate-zoltan-istvan/ And here’s the original story: http://www.cnet.com/news/the-cravecast-welcomes-the-presidential-candidate-who-speaks-for-the-robots/
The Transhumanist Party candidate called in from the campaign trail and his “Immortality Bus” to help us look forward to 2016… and to 2050.
Posted in biotech/medical, business, computing, cyborgs, life extension, neuroscience, robotics/AI, transhumanism | Leave a Comment on Transhumanism Solving Violence and Improving the Human Condition: IQ, EQi, and Intelligence Upgrades
Can we end violence? Can we create greater emotional well being and intellectual equality for the greater well being of humanity? Will we be able to keep up with machines? How can we augment our intelligence? Could we cure mental illness? After advancements in aging the next major area of research from a standpoint of eliminating personal and global suffering would be upgrades in intelligence. Transhumanist values at their core want to eliminate suffering and existential risk to people’s lives. With well founded logic, these goals are not completely out of reach, it is possible but as usual, we will have to take the complex issue from many angles and from the standpoint of a systems engineer, but let’s look at some fun stuff before we get into the heavy stuff.
The Benefits of Intelligence Upgrades
So, what is the benefit for intelligence upgrades for every day people? We live in a time of exponential technology and vast amounts of face paced information, breakthroughs and invention. So, the most obvious answer to what is the benefit of intelligence upgrade is dealing with the massive amount of information one needs to keep up with daily to be on top of the game for work, for research or for business. Sometimes it can be our mere storage capacity that limits us in our abilities to interact with this information, at other times it is our processing speed, and most fundamentally the rate at which we can interact with new information. In 2012, a prosthetic chip was invented that uses electrodes to expand one’s memory storage. Now, with biotechnology predicted to move more quickly in 2016 and Google ready to back more companies in biotechnology, it may be possible to augment or program selective photographic memory. This is just an example of what one could imagine and begin working with, when combining electronics and gene editing. Many big breakthroughs in enhanced intelligence could be achieved in the future. The implications for business professionals, scientists, and the progress of technology would be astounding if upgrades like these were available. Personally, I can’t wait for the day when me and my personal A.I. through my Google Glass or some sort of eye wear or ear piece could read my brainwaves so I can type and do all my work through what would be a virtual form of telepathy. I could store everything I will need later instantly in the cloud and exactly where I want on my computer, there would be almost no delay because, well, how could there be? Time is everything.
A informative article by Vice Motherboard:
The biggest debate at the International Summit on Human Genome Editing is where to draw the line between “medical treatment” and “body enhancement.”
Posted in geopolitics, life extension, robotics/AI, transhumanism | Leave a Comment on I visited one of the largest megachurches in the US as an atheist Transhumanist presidential candidate — here’s what happened
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.
But this is not what Zoltan Istvan is most afraid of, and neither is it the weirdest thing he will tell me in our week together driving 400 miles across the Southwest in his 40-year-old “Immortality Bus,” crudely fashioned into the shape of a coffin. As the presidential candidate of the Transhumanist Party, Zoltan Istvan is dedicated to spreading transhumanism’s gospel, like some modern day Ken Kesey who doesn’t even need acid for his trip.
Zoltan Istvan very much wants to be the next president of the United States.
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.
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.
Kurzweil admits that he cared little for his health until age 35, when he was found to suffer from a glucose intolerance, an early form of type II diabetes (a major risk factor for heart disease). Kurzweil then found a doctor (Terry Grossman, M.D.) who shares his non-conventional beliefs to develop an extreme regimen involving hundreds of pills, chemical intravenous treatments, red wine, and various other methods to attempt to live longer. Kurzweil was ingesting “250 supplements, eight to 10 glasses of alkaline water and 10 cups of green tea” every day and drinking several glasses of red wine a week in an effort to “reprogram” his biochemistry. Lately, he has cut down the number of supplement pills to 150.
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/agingreversed
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.
Istvan says that as a journalist, he used to cover nature, until “we were in Vietnam and I had a very close call with a land mine. I thought, ‘Why don’t I write less about nature and the environment and more about science, medicine, and future uses of science to conquer death?’” After leaving Nat Geo circa 2004, when he was about 28, to take care of his ailing father, he says he made some money in real estate and in 2013, “I wrote a novel called The Transhumanist Wage r, which launched my career as a futurist.”
Now he’s onboard with the Transhumanist Party, which has been established for about 14 months, he says. “It’s an actual, organized national party,” he says, though you’re unlikely to see it on a ballot because it’s nearly impossible for small political parties to get on “unless you have almost 50 or 60 million dollars lying around.”
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
I’m from San Francisco. Doing drugs—especially smoking pot—seems second nature to me. I’ve made a point of trying nearly all drugs, and I’m unabashedly proud of that fact. I consider Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception one of the most important books I read in my youth, and I’ve often wondered if it should be mandatory that everyone try a hallucinogenic drug at least once in their lives.
Almost all transhumanists welcome and endorse mind-altering substances. We thrive off change, experimentation, and new experiences, including wild drug trips with friends. For transhumanists, trying drugs is not just about having fun, but about self-amelioration and becoming the best, most enlightened versions of ourselves.
I’m driving a bus across the country to deliver a Transhumanist Bill of Rights to the US Capitol. One of those rights will certainly include language that advocates for citizens being able to take any drugs they want, so long as the taking of it doesn’t directly hurt someone else.
