Zoltan Istvan, an original Presidential candidate, is riding around the United States in the "Immortality Bus" coffin-shaped vehicle in its elections campaign that focuses on the surprising and ambitions goal of completely eradicating death in America.
The Transhumanist Presidential Candidate
According to Digital Trends, the independent candidate and leader of the Transhumanist party, Zoltan Istvan, campaigns for the forthcoming U.S. elections with a platform that promises Americans to live forever. Istvan told the publication that the number one goal of the Transhumanist party and the elections platform his campaign is focused on is to overcome death with the help of science and technology.
The 43-year-old Istvan is funding his own presidential elections campaign, same as David Trump. But unlike Trump, despite the fact that Istvan "isn't super rich," according to his website, the campaign is being paid for from his own pocket.
There are certainly big ambitions in the Transhumanist party but they think everything can be answered best by a scientific or technological solution. The main goal of the Transhumanism movement is to overcome death and "become godlike through technology."
In Istvan's vision, transhumanism and life extension science are "a matter of life and death." The Presidential candidate calls for the implementation of a Transhumanist Bill of Rights that would ensure the basis for the future rights of "conscious robots and cyborgs." The unconventional candidate also proposes the legalization of recreational drugs, a flat tax until robots take all the jobs in 25 years, plenty of funding for cutting-edge AI experiments, a "Transhumanist Olympics" and more.
With the advances in EEG brainwave technologies in the last few years, telepathy is not as farfetched anymore. Istvan's conviction is that within 5-10 years the science and technology is going to start making some real progress in being able to upload our own thoughts on computer platforms and providing basic algorithms that run them.
According to TechCrunch, one of Ray Kurzweil's proposed solutions to achieve immortality consists in transfering our consciousness to machines. This kind of digital immortality is might be possible within three decades, according to a transhumanist blog post.
Aside of the emphasis on overcoming death, the transhumanist Presidential candidate is also talking about more immediate goals such as gene editing as a way to eliminate cancer, human augmentation for disabled people, a universal basic income and progress in the artificial intelligence field.
