Zoltan Istvan is running for President of the United States with a promise that no other candidate has ever made: he's offering the possibility of eternal life.
Istvan is the candidate for the Transhumanist Party, which he himself founded in the fall of 2014, just before announcing his candidacy. Transhumanism is an older and far more widespread philosophy, however. Its adherents believe that people should use whatever technology they can to improve the species and fight mortality, including everything from robotic limbs and organs to cloning and genetic engineering. Istvan is joined in his campaign by other Transhumanist candidates running for local office in New York and Washington.
Istvan campaigns in the Immortality Bus, a 1978 Blue Bird Wanderlodge RV, decorated to look like a coffin to remind people what's at stake in his campaign. Bolstering his campaign credentials is an impressive roster of consultants including gerontologist Aubrey de Grey as his anti-aging advisor, Humanity+ chair Natasha Vita-More as his Transhumanism advisor, Singularity University professor Jose Cordeiro as his technology advisor, and former Democratic Congressional candidate Gabriel Rothblatt as his political advisor.
In a campaign statement he wrote for Gizmodo in May, Istvan explained the motivation behind his presidential run. "I’ve only focused on one thing through it all—the same thing I’ve focused on with all my work for much of the last decade: I don’t want to die," he wrote. "Like most transhumanists, it’s not that I’m afraid of death, but I emphatically believe being alive is a miracle. Out of two billion planets that might have life in the universe, human beings managed to evolve, survive, and thrive on Planet Earth—enough so the species will probably reach the singularity in a half century’s time and literally become superhuman."
In another plank surely unique among presidential candidates, Istvan has advocated using artificial intelligence to one day replace the president of the United States. "The reason is that you might actually have an entity that would be truly unselfish, truly not influenced by any type of lobbyist," he explained in a Q&A with Esquire.
While Istvan admits that he has almost no chance of winning the 2016 election, he says that his main goal is to build the Transhumanist Party into a stronger contender for the future. "That doesn't mean it's going to win in 2020 and 2024, of course, but I think we can bring the Transhumanist Party on par with the libertarian party or the green party, with the sizes of other third parties that can actually make a difference," he said.
[via Vox]
