“Something is destroying our forests. In tropical regions alone, we lose an area of forest the size of Austria every year.”
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.
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Yesterday was D-Day in the Bitcoin world: On Tuesday, Aug 1st 2017, Bitcoin Cash (BCH) forked off of Bitcoin (BTC). For anyone with control over their wallet and private keys, they now have an equal amount of BTC and BCH.
I have a Bitcoin wallet. Yet, I don’t have any new Bitcoin Cash—and I have no one to blame but myself. Will I ever get the BCH associated with my pre-fork coins? 
I think that it is likely, though certainly not assured. If not, it will still be my fault. After all, I had fair warning from the company that I trust as custodian of my assets.
A Cryptocurrency Mantra:
“Woe be the person who trusts decentralized cash to a custodian”
I trust Coinbase for good reason. I left my BTC in my Coinbase wallet and vault throughout the fork. Let me tell you how I view the risks of failing to remove my coins before August 1…
In a not-too-distant future city, superintelligent robots will carry out the majority of vital tasks. Driverless cars will ferry passengers to and from points of interest. Housing and healthcare will be affordable, if not free to all. Political leaders and technologists will speak the same language. And life is good.
Sam Altman, the 32-year-old president of Y Combinator, the most prestigious startup accelerator in Silicon Valley, has laid out this utopian vision over the years, and most definitively in a job listing posted on YC’s blog in June 2016.
“We’re seriously interested in building new cities and we think we know how to finance it if everything else makes sense,” the post read. “We need people with strong interests and bold ideas in architecture, ecology, economics, politics, technology, urban planning, and much more.”
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 week Financial Times columnist Janan Ganesh took up a similar theme.
Continue reading “Rethinking Radical Thoughts: How Transhumanists Can Fix Democracy” »
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.
Continue reading “Artificial Intelligence & Robots: Economy of the Future or End of Free Markets?” »
In the hopes of rising above the laws and regulations of terrestrial nations, a group of Silicon Valley millionaires has bold plans to build a floating city in Tahiti, French Polynesia. It sounds like the start of a sci-fi dystopia (in fact, this is the basic premise behind the video game Bioshock), but the brains behind the project say their techno-libertarian community could become a paradise for technological entrepreneurship and scientific innovation.
The Seasteading Institute was set up in 2008 by billionaire PayPal founder Peter Thiel and software engineer, poker player, and political economic theorist Patri Friedman. Both ardent libertarians, their wide-eyed mission is to “establish permanent, autonomous ocean communities to enable experimentation and innovation with diverse social, political, and legal systems.”
“Seasteading will create unique opportunities for aquaculture, vertical farming, and scientific and engineering research into ecology, wave energy, medicine, nanotechnology, computer science, marine structures, biofuels, etc,” their website reads.
Continue reading “Floating City Project Wants To Make An ‘Unregulated’ Hub Of Scientific Research” »
Artificial Intelligence (AI) represents both the biggest opportunity and potentially the greatest threat to the legal profession in history.
This is part of a bigger global revolution – where society, business and government are likely to experience more change in the next 20–30 years than in the last 500.
This large-scale disruption is being driven by the combined effects of AI and other disruptive technologies whose speed, power and capability are growing exponentially – or faster.
I’m really excited to announce a 5-page feature spread on my #transhumanism work and Libertarian Governor campaign in today’s Times of London Magazine, one of England’s oldest and largest papers. There’s a paywall for digital but I think you can get two articles free without registering. If you have access to the print, it’s in the magazine:
Zoltan Istvan is launching his campaign to become Libertarian governor of California with two signature policies. First, he’ll eliminate poverty with a universal basic income that will guarantee $5,000 (£3,800) per month for every Californian household for ever. (He’ll do this without raising taxes a dime, 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,” he…
Continue reading “Zoltan Istvan: the poster boy for immortality” »
