Like Jeb Bush, Zoltan Istvan is not going to be President. The difference between the two is that the Transhumanist Party candidate has actually brought to the trail a lot of interesting ideas on radical life extension, bio-hacking, designer babies, algorithmic governance, etc.

It can be shocking stuff, but since none of it’s theoretically impossible, it’s useful to spend time on the topics. Some of Istvan’s vision for tomorrow strikes me as ethically unsavory, and the timeframe he suggests for the mass acceptance of this future is almost always far too aggressive (e.g. people will electively be having their eyeballs replaced with robotic ones within a dozen years). But I do enjoy considering his outré observations. 

From Ian Allison’s piece on Istvan at IBT:

“It’s amazing to me that Hilary Clinton or Jed Bush or Trump will not say anything about designer babies, even though virtually every scientist you talk about says the genetic editing, the gene editing innovations in the last two years have the potential to forever change the human race.

“I mean I have got friends that are trying to grow tails. I have friends that are literally trying to splice plant DNA into their own DNA so that they can go out in the sun and get energy into their cells directly from the sun, so they’d have photosynthesis capabilities.”

Istvan said we are slowly seeing a discursive space where biohackers and transhumanists can share the potential to “mess with themselves”, especially now with DIY DNA CRISPER kits.

“If you think losing our jobs to robots is crazy, I mean people walking around with tails and horns coming out of their head, that’s really crazy and yet, we now have this possibility. I think Transhumanism is wonderful but a lot of the questions are going unanswered because it’s coming so fast and nobody is really quite ready for it.

“I think I shock a lot of people when i say there are six companies out there that are working on a robotic eye and probably within 12-15 years people will start electively replacing one eye so they can have a robotic eye that can then stream media inside that eye that will be tied directly to their optic nerve, they will be able to see literally with accuracy 100 miles, they will be able to see germs on your partner’s body. We are talking about upgrades that people are going to get because they are so much more functional, in the same way that we now carry a smart phone everywhere with us. This is not science fiction anymore – this is very, very close.”•