Immortality: Silicon Valley’s latest obsession ushers in the transhumanist era
Enter Zoltan Istvan, the wannabe governor of California whose transhumanist agenda has influential fans, including dotcom billionaires hoping to live forever
Zoltan Istvan is launching his campaign to become Libertarian governor of the American state of California with two signature policies. First, he’ll eliminate poverty with a universal basic income that will guarantee US$5,000 per month for every Californian household for ever. (He’ll do this without raising taxes, he promises.)
The next item in his in-tray is eliminating death. He intends to divert trillions of dollars into life-extending technologies – robotic hearts, artificial exoskeletons, genetic editing, bionic limbs and so on – in the hope that each Californian man, woman and AI (artificial intelligence) will eventually be able to upload their consciousness to the Cloud and experience digital eternity.
“What we can experience as a human being is going to be dramatically different within two decades,” Istvan says, when we meet at his home in Mill Valley, California. “We have five senses now. We might have thousands in 30 or 40 years. We might have very different bodies, too.
“I have friends who are about a year away from cutting off their arm and replacing it with a prosthetic version. And sure, pretty soon the robotic arm really will be better than a biological one. Let’s say you work in construction and your buddy can lift a thousand times what you can. The question is: do you get it?”