As one of the most visible 2016 presidential candidates—and now as a leading 2018 contender for Governor in California—Zoltan Istvan has been the “Science Candidate,” traveling around America to discuss the issues of transhumanism and radical longevity that are transforming humanity. Soon the issues of AI, genetic editing, designer babies, bionic organs, automation, and neural prosthetics will challenge and dominate political discourse. America must embrace radical science with bold polices.
The study of consciousness and what makes us individuals is a topic filled with complexities. From a neuroscience perspective, consciousness is derived from a self-model as a unitary structure that shapes our perceptions, decisions and feelings. There is a tendency to jump to the conclusion with this model that mankind is being defined as self-absorbed and only being in it for ourselves in this life. Although that may be partially true, this definition of consciousness doesn’t necessarily address the role of morals and how that is shaped into our being. In the latest addition to The Galactic Public Archives, Dr. Ken Hayworth tackles the philosophical impact that technologies have on our lives.
But a British PhD candidate has warned of the darker side of a transhumanist future.
Sociologist Alex Thomas of East London University believes that transhumanism will further enforce a societal obsession with “progress” and “efficiency” at the expense of social justice and environmental sustainability. In an article published this week in The Conversation, Thomas argues that unbridled technological progress, in which technology “become more intrusive and integrate seamlessly with the human body”, could lead to a loss of basic societal values such as compassion and a concern for the environment.
Transhumanism and advanced capitalism are two processes which value “progress” and “efficiency” above everything else. The former as a means to power and the latter as a means to profit. Humans become vessels to serve these values. Transhuman possibilities urgently call for a politics with more clearly delineated and explicit humane values to provide a safer environment in which to foster these profound changes.”
Thomas interweaves examples ranging from new military technologies to powerful enhancement medications, arguing that, rather than assisting humanity, these technologies could potentially lead to a “mechanisation” of humanity and facilitate a subtle form of authoritarian control.
In step forward for Elon Musk’s neural lace and transhumanists everywhere, a new paper published this month by researchers at Harvard University reports on the successful implantation of an electronic neuromorphic mesh in the brains of mice without triggering an immune response.
Neuroprostheses show promise in the treatment of Alzheimer’s Disease, Parkinson’s Disease, epilepsy, traumatic brain injury and for the creation of brain-machine interfaces such as the neural lace, but a major stumbling block for researchers has been the propensity of these implants to induce an immune response, inflammation and scaring in the brain, severely limiting their potential use.
The Harvard team’s new neuromorphic mesh is delivered to specific brain regions via syringe injection and overcomes the problem of immune response in the brain. Their observations of the brain’s of the injected mice showed little to no immune response and they found the neuromorphic mesh had merged with the brain tissue.
Robert Stark and co-host Sam Kevorkian talk to Zoltan Istvan about his proposal for a California State Basic Income. Zoltan is a Trans-Humanist and futurist writer, philosopher, and journalist. He was the Transhumanist Party’s candidate for president in 2016, has written for Vice, Newsweek, the Huffington Post, and Psychology Today, was a reporter for the National Geographic Channel, and is the author of The Transhumanist Wager.
The rapid development of so-called NBIC technologies – nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology and cognitive science – are giving rise to possibilities that have long been the domain of science fiction. Disease, ageing and even death are all human realities that these technologies seek to end.
They may enable us to enjoy greater “morphological freedom” – we could take on new forms through prosthetics or genetic engineering. Or advance our cognitive capacities. We could use brain-computer interfaces to link us to advanced artificial intelligence (AI).
Nanobots could roam our bloodstream to monitor our health and enhance our emotional propensities for joy, love or other emotions. Advances in one area often raise new possibilities in others, and this “convergence” may bring about radical changes to our world in the near-future.
O n a recent evening at a start-up hub in Spitalfields, London, journalist and author Jamie Bartlett spoke to a small group of mostly under 40, mainly techie or creative professionals about his book Radicals: Outsiders Changing the World. The book, which Bartlett started to research in 2014, before Brexit and Trump, chronicles his time with a series of different radical groups, from the Psychedelic Society — who advocate the “careful use of psychedelics as a tool for awakening to the unity and interconnectedness of all things” — to Tommy Robinson, co-founder of the unabashedly far-right English Defence League, to the founder of Liberland, a libertarian nation on unclaimed land on the Serbian/Croatian border, to Zoltan Istvan, who ran as US transhumanist presidential candidate on a platform of putting an end to death. He campaigned by racing around America in a superannuated RV which he’d modified to look like a giant coffin, dubbed “the Immortality Bus.” His efforts were in vain, and illegal, as it turned out: his campaign was in breach of the US’ Federal Electoral Commission rules.
Bartlett’s book has been damned with faint praise — he has been called “surprisingly naive about politics,” and defining ‘radical’ so broadly as to make the term “meaningless.” The general consensus goes that Bartlett’s journey through the farthest-flung fringes of politics and society is entertaining and impressively dispassionate, but not altogether successful in making a clear or convincing case for radicals or radicalism. But at the talk that night Bartlett challenged what he sees as the complacent acceptance and defense of our current political and governmental systems, institutions and ideas, of the kind of technocratic centrism that prevailed throughout the global North until very recently. Perhaps they need some radical rethinking. Many of the radicals Bartlett spent time with may be flawed, crazy or wrong — literally, legally and morally — but they can also hold up mirrors and magnifying glasses to political and social trends. And sometimes, they can prophesize them…
Bartlett began the evening by saying, “If democracy were a business, it would be bankrupt.” A provocative statement, but one that he backs up. He pointed to research showing that only 30% of those born after 1980 believe that it is essential to live in a democracy. That rate drops steadily with age. A closer look at the research around peoples’ attitudes reveals widespread skepticism towards liberal institutions and a growing disaffection with political parties. Freedom House’s annual report for 2016 shows that as faith in democracy has declined so too have global freedoms — 2016 marks the “11th consecutive year of decline in global freedom.” While a lot of attention has been given to violent polarization, populism and nationalism rising out of anger at demographic and economic changes, Bartlett suggests that perhaps comfort and complacency are culprits too, and he is not the only one: only last weekFinancial Times columnist Janan Ganesh took up a similar theme.
What are the fringe ideas of today that might become ideas of the future? We cannot, of course, say, but Bartlett’s point is we should be paying much closer attention to the crazed hinterlands of human thought. In 2015 transhumanist Zoltan Istvan was talking about using technology to fundamentally change what it is to be human — to augment our fleshy bodies with steel and silicon. One of Istvan’s favored refrains is the transformative effect of artificial intelligence on the way that we work, and the way that we live. In the past six months, it has become near-impossible to read a newspaper or a magazine without stumbling across a take on how AI is set to change our economy. Istvan’s other hobby-horse is immortality, and using technology to drastically expand the human lifespan — ultimately to the point where it increases so fast that time can’t catch up with us and we reach a kind of “escape velocity.
Eric Shuss, Ed Hudgins, Peter Voss, Zoltan Istvan, Gennady Stolyarov; Michael Shermer (mod) discuss artificial intelligence and robots. Will these developments lead the economy of the future or end capitalism as we know it?
Gennady Stolyarov II, FSA, ACAS, MAAA, CPCU, ARe, ARC, API, AIS, AIE, AIAF, is the second Chairman in the history of the U.S. Transhumanist Party and the Chief Executive of the Nevada Transhumanist Party. Mr. Stolyarov is an actuary, independent philosophical essayist, science-fiction novelist, poet, amateur mathematician, composer, and Editor-in-Chief of The Rational Argumentator, a magazine championing the principles of reason, rights, and progress. Mr. Stolyarov regularly produces YouTube videos discussing life extension, libertarianism, and related subjects, In December 2013, Mr. Stolyarov published Death is Wrong, an ambitious children’s book on life extension illustrated by his wife Wendy Stolyarov. Death is Wrong can be found on Amazon in paperback and Kindle formats, and can also be freely downloaded in PDF format in the English, Russian, French, Spanish, and Portuguese languages.
Dr. Edward Hudgins is research director at the Heartland Institute, which seeks to develop and promote free-market solutions to social and economic problems. Hudgins has written extensively on the promise of exponential technologies and the need for a human achievement and entrepreneurial ethos. Before joining Heartland, he worked at The Atlas Society, which promotes the philosophy of reason, freedom, and individualism developed by Ayn Rand. During his stint at the Cato Institute, Hudgins directed regulatory studies and produced the book, Space: The Free-Market Frontier. He has also worked at the Joint Economic Committee of Congress and at The Heritage Foundation, where he pioneered the concept of an Index of Economic Freedom. Hudgins has a BA from the University of Maryland, an MA from American University, and a PhD from the Catholic University of America. He has taught at universities both in the United States and Germany.
Zoltan Istvan is a Libertarian candidate for California Governor in 2018. He is often considered one the world’s leading transhumanists after his popular run in the 2016 US Presidential race as a science and technology candidate. Zoltan began his futurist career by publishing The Transhumanist Wager, an award-winning, #bestseller in philosophy that has been compared to Ayn Rand’s work. Zoltan is also a leading technology journalist, a successful entrepreneur, and a former filmmaker and on-camera reporter for the National Geographic Channel. His futurist work and promotion of radical science has reached over 100 million people. He is a graduate of Columbia University, and lives in San Francisco with his physician wife and two young daughters. Breitbart wrote, “Istvan is a dynamic personality, as polarizing as he is engaging.” The New York Times wrote Zoltan has “a plausibly presidential aura.”
The Eureka science show recently featured one of the leaders of the Transhumanist movement which believes humans will transcend disease and delay mortality indefinitely.
