The 2nd part of my interview with Breitbart on transhumanism, the future, and robots is out.
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Category: transhumanism – Page 119
An extensive new 2-part interview with Breitbart on the future and transhumanism. Here’s part 1:
Zoltan Istvan is the most intriguing presidential candidate you’ve never heard of. While those at the forefront of the 2016 race talk about defeating ISIS, Istvan is taking on beating death itself. Recently, I had a chance to talk to him.
In approaching the interview, I was unsure of what to expect. Istvan is a dynamic personality, as polarizing as he is engaging. His enthusiasm for the future is contagious, and he’s not afraid to make seemingly outrageous statements to get people engaged in a conversation he believes is vital — not only to our country’s future, but humanity’s.
I’ve been following your articles on Motherboard, but I’d like to more formally introduce you to our readers. Even considering the current, shall we say “eclectic” roster of candidates, your campaign remains particularly unique.
Istvan: You know, when you’re a third-party, you do wacky things to try to get some attention and spread your message. I think one thing I’ve been a little bit more open about recently, is while I have aimed to make the political side of my things kind of centric, I think most people know me basically as someone who has sort of some Libertarian values, even if they’re a little bit left-leaning Libertarian values, but they’re ultimately that.
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My new article for The Hufffington Post on whether transhumanism will change racism in the near future:
A future transhumanist? — CCO Public Domain
Despite decades of progress, racism and bigotry are still prevalent in the United States. Often, they even dominate the news in American media, like during the Baltimore riots or the Ferguson shooting. Movements like Black Lives Matter remind us that the society we live in still has many biases to be fought against, but that good work can be done to combat bigotry if people unite against it.
Despite this, the quest to find true equality in the world is about to get more complicated. It’s possible the ability to completely change skin color may arrive in the next 15–30 years. Like a chameleon, expect humans to literally change their skin color soon through coming technologies—most that will probably be based on genetic editing.
Already, humans have the technology to change the color of eyes and choose the sex of their offspring. But on the horizon are new techniques—based on CRISPR technology—that may permanently or temporarily alter the melanin in our skin (the pigment mostly responsible for its color). And like some characters in the X-Men film series, we may even be able to do this in real-time someday.
A lot of transhumanism friends have asked me to write about Bernie Sanders, so here are my thoughts:
The transhumanism movement has been dramatically growing in size—and most of that growth is from millennials and youth joining. Transhumanists want to use science and technology to radically improve the human race, and the onslaught of new gear and gadgets to do that—like virtual reality, robots, and chip implants —are giving them plenty of ammunition to do that.
But what has caught many people off guard—including myself who probably best fits into the category: left-leaning Libertarian—is the amount of support transhumanists are giving to Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign. Historically, transhumanism (and its de facto home: Silicon Valley) has been Libertarian-minded —with a hands-off attitude towards the government, religion, and basically any authority trying to tell them what to do or how to innovate. But with the demographics of the transhumanism movement sharply changing from older academics and technologists to young people—especially those in college—the push towards more leftist and progressive-leaning ideas is strong. For many young transhumanists, they believe they have found an ideal in Sanders.
While I like the charisma of Sanders and his long standing devotion to the people—and that is enough for me to say he’d be a good president for change—the reality is capitalism is still a hallmark of the American way. For the next four and maybe even eight years, capitalism won’t be going anywhere. Afterward, though, within 10–25 years, when robots, software, and AI really start dismantling capitalism as we know it (see my latest TechCrunch article and thoughts on a Universal Basic Income), it will be a totally different story.
Like it or not, millennials and youth obsess over this type of economy stuff—especially machines taking jobs. They know future employment statistics better than many 30-year veteran business executives running publicly traded companies. The dangerous truth is many young people know they likely won’t have jobs in the future. And neither will most of the executives for that matter, since they too can (and will) be replaced by super intelligent machines programmed to make sound mathematical business decisions.
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A live interview on transhumanism for PC Mag, part of Facebook’s new live steam tech (a few glitches but still fun): https://www.facebook.com//videos/10154011436098396/
Evan Dashevsky — PCMag interviews Zoltan Istvan, Transhumanist Party presidential candidate.
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A crowd gathers to hear about transhumanism and life extension technologies — Photo by Roen Horn
Recently I was asked to be a part of a debate for British think-tank Demos and their quarterly magazine. In the debate, The University of Sheffield Professor Richard Jones and I faced off over the merits and faults of transhumanism. You can read the entire debate here, but I wanted to focus on one part of it, where Jones questions why there’s a need for a transhumanism movement at all.
I used to get asked the question Jones raised all the time. Luckily, the amount of people that ask it has declined, partially because transhumanism has grown so much in popularity. Many people nowadays simply accept transhumanism as part of tech and science culture.
That said, I believe it’s worth sharing my thoughts on why a “transhumanism movement” is needed. Here was my answer in the debate:
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When the apocalypse comes, it won’t do so on four rotors. Drones, especially drones-as-we-know-them—the affordable, commercially available quadcopters—are only really engines of their own destruction. Zoltan Istvan, transhumanist candidate for President, wrote today that the American constitution is unprepared for the challenges of swarming robots. With all due I respect, I couldn’t possibly disagree more.
“The Second Amendment Isn’t Prepared for a 3D-Printed Drone Army”, Istvan argues, and vividly sets a scene of total despair:
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“He is not here; He has risen,” — Matthew 28:6
As billions of Christians around the world are getting ready to celebrate the Easter festival and holiday, we take pause to appreciate the awe inspiring phenomena of resurrection.
In religious and mythological contexts, in both Western and Eastern societies, well known and less common names appear, such as Attis, Dionysus, Ganesha, Krishna, Lemminkainen, Odin, Osiris, Persephone, Quetzalcoatl, and Tammuz, all of whom were reborn again in the spark of the divine.
In the natural world, other names emerge, which are more ancient and less familiar, but equally fascinating, such as Deinococcus radiodurans, Turritopsis nutricula, and Milnesium tardigradum, all of whose abilities to rise from the ashes of death, or turn back time to start life again, are only beginning to be fully appreciated by the scientific world.
In the current era, from an information technology centric angle, proponents of a technological singularity and transhumanism, are placing bets on artificial intelligence, virtual reality, wearable devices, and other non-biological methods to create a future connecting humans to the digital world.
This Silicon Valley, “electronic resurrection” model has caused extensive deliberation, and various factions to form, from those minds that feel we should slow down and understand the deeper implications of a post-biologic state (Elon Musk, Steven Hawking, Bill Gates, the Vatican), to those that are steaming full speed ahead (Ray Kurzweil / Google) betting that humans will shortly be able to “transcend the limitations of biology”.
However, deferring an in-depth Skynet / Matrix discussion for now, is this debate clouding other possibilities that we have forgotten about, or may not have even yet fully considered?
Today, we find ourselves at an interesting point in history where the disciplines of regenerative sciences, evolutionary medicine, and complex systems biology, are converging to give us an understanding of the cycle of life and death, orders of magnitude more complex than only a few years ago.
In addition to the aforementioned species that are capable of biologic reanimation and turning back time, we show no less respect for those who possess other superhuman capabilities, such as magnetoreception, electrosensing, infrared imaging, and ultrasound detection, all of which nature has been optimizing over hundreds of millions of years, and which provide important clues to the untapped possibilities that currently exist in direct biological interfaces with the physical fabric of the universe.
The biologic information processing occurring in related aneural organisms and multicellular colony aggregators, is no less fascinating, and potentially challenges the notion of the brain as the sole repository of long-term encoded information.
Additionally, studies on memory following the destruction all, or significant parts of the brain, in regenerative organisms such as planarians, amphibians, metamorphic insects, and small hibernating mammals, have wide ranging implications for our understanding of consciousness, as well as to the centuries long debate between the materialists and dualists, as to whether we should focus our attention “in here”, or “out there”.
I am not opposed to studying either path, but I feel that we have the potential to learn a lot more about the topic of “out there” in the very near future.
The study of brain death in human beings, and the application of novel tools for neuro-regeneration and neuro-reanimation, for the first time offer us amazing opportunities to start from a clean slate, and answer questions that have long remained unanswered, as well as uncover a knowledge set previously thought unreachable.
Aside from a myriad of applications towards the range of degenerative CNS indications, as well as disorders of consciousness, such work will allow us to open a new chapter related to many other esoteric topics that have baffled the scientific community for years, and fallen into the realm of obscure curiosities.
From the well documented phenomena of terminal lucidity in end stage Alzheimer’s patients, to the mysteries of induced savant syndrome, to more arcane topics, such as the thousands of cases of children who claim to remember previous lives, by studying death, and subsequently the “biotechnological resurrection” of life, we can for the first time peak through the window, and offer a whole new knowledge base related to our place, and our interaction, with the very structure of reality.
We are entering a very exciting era of discovery and exploration.
About the author
Ira S. Pastor is the Chief Executive Officer of Bioquark Inc. (www.bioquark.com), an innovative life sciences company focusing on developing novel biologic solutions for human regeneration, repair, and rejuvenation. He is also on the board of the Reanima Project (www.reanima.tech)
Bionic Fingertip
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