Thirteen years ago, I sat down with a writer who had just published his first novel.
It was Zoltan Istvan’s very first media interview as a book author.
The book was The Transhumanist Wager. The question behind it was simple and almost unbearable: what would you do, and what would you give up, to live forever?
I loved half of it. I argued with the other half. That tension is exactly why I think it still matters.
Zoltan built his story out of Plato and Nietzsche, out of Thomas More’s Utopia and Zen Buddhism, then wrapped it all in an Atlas Shrugged plot of lone heroes and evil states. The philosophy is sophisticated. The framing is stark. The contradictions are not a flaw. They are the point.
One line from our conversation has stayed with me for more than a decade:
Morality is often defined by the amount of time we have left.
Sit with that. If your timeline were infinite, would your ethics still hold? Or are most of our values quietly built on the fact that we die?
We covered #transhumanism and the technological #singularity, Jethro Knights and Ayn Rand, and the coming friction between those who want to transcend biology and those who will refuse.
This was 2013. Somehow it reads more urgent now than it did then.
Watch the full interview and decide for yourself which half you stand on.
The Transhumanist Wager maps out the dangerous period humanity has to navigate in the 21st century. Check out what Zoltan Istvan has to say about his book.