Zoltan Istvan is the presidential candidate Americans need to take seriously

For starters, Zoltan Istvan is some guy interested to become the 45th President of US. If you haven’t heard of him don’t mind, he is just like any other ordinary guy out there – a guy promising the impossibility to get some goodies. He is like an ordinary guy because when an ordinary guy promises his lady  that he will cross the oceans for her – that he will go and bring her the moon – that he will cloth her with the sun – that he will buy her an airplane for her next birthday – he is believed. An ordinary guy is basically a politician.

A politician is that guy who will promise every five year old kid that by the time they join class one, they will have laptops to their names. A politician, just like an ordinary man, will promise the impossibility as long as he lays his fingers on the goodies.

Just like an ordinary guy will try to promise bigger than the previous unsuccessful vote/goodie hunter, Zoltan Istvan is promising the Americans what a normal thinking upright person will term ridiculous and outright stupid. He is running on the platform that if elected, he will make Americans, and possibly the rest of the world, live indefinitely. Can you believe that nonsense?

Politicians always run on the platform that with them life will be much better. That if elected they will provide better health services, lower the cost of living, make education accessible to everyone, and invest more on science and technology (research and development). Politicians promise to improve infrastructure, transform agriculture, and change our job hunting culture. Zoltan on the other hand, is running on the platform that if elected, his focus will be to eliminate life threatening diseases like Ebola, birds flu, cancer and heart complications. The problem is, he is damn serious.

Zoltan Istvan

For example, he says, that if given one billion dollars, he will direct that money to ensuring that all Americans have access to robotic hearts – hearts that can’t get sick. This way – heart disease shall have been dealt with once and for all. If given one trillion dollars, he will ensure that all sorts of antiaging drugs, age-reversing procedures, and organ printing techniques go mainstream. When organ printing becomes successful, he says, the average person would have a much better chance of living, well, a chance of living indefinitely – and he is not kidding.

He is not kidding – read Technological Immortality: Science and Technology on track to eradicate death

There is a cartoon I have searched for but I can’t trace it. If you have it please share with me. It is about this couple that meet on a dating site, take their relationship to a social site like Facebook, make love (sex-chat) via a platform like WhatsApp, and print a baby via a typical printer. The joke predicts that probably that’s how people will make babies in the future. That joke is similar to something serious, the Matrix. Zoltan has the idea that “in 25 or 30 years, making a family will be very much something where you sit in front of a computer, and you decide how you want to do this, and then probably they’ll have something–an aquarium or something in your living room or at the hospital” where the baby is made and incubated.

What I love most about him is that he is so serious about this mind uploading concept; and he also has a weird way of looking at Internet of Things. He imagines that in the future man will not only live in machines, or that machines will become man, but that even before that, IoT will help man in trouble to reach 911 in seconds and within two or less minutes the emergency team shall have arrived on site.

The problem is that Americans won’t take him seriously. Most of them will think that he is talking nuts – coz, as it happens, more than 72% of them still believe that immortality lies in the heavens and other religious texts. If I were an American, that’s the guy I would give my vote.

By the way, he also says that as long as you have a device similar to an iPhone you should be able to vote. What’s the point of re-registration and having to travel in order to do something you could have effected by a tap on a touch screen? Read his interview by PopSci here.

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