Transhumanism  

Zoltan Istvan is the first unashamedly and unabashedly openly transhumanist presidential candidate in the history of the United States. His political campaign, his Immortality Bus Tour and his book the Transhumanist Wager, have managed to get a huge amount of global media coverage and stir a debate. 

Zoltan Istvan is the first Transhumanist Party member to run for president of the United States.  He, began a life-changing solo, multi-year sailing journey around the world at the age of 21 with 500 handpicked books, mostly classics. He’s explored over 100 countries—many as a journalist for the National Geographic Channel—writing, filming, and appearing in dozens of television stories, articles, and webcasts.

His journalistic work has also been featured by The New York Times, Outside, Wired UK, Slate, Vice, San Francisco Chronicle, BBC Radio, CNN, CBS, RT, Fox News, the Travel Channel, and in much other media.

"Should we use science and technology to overcome death and become a stronger species?"

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In addition to his award-winning coverage of the war in Kashmir, he gained worldwide attention for pioneering and popularizing the extreme sport of volcano boarding. Istvan later became a director for the international conservation group WildAid, leading armed patrol units to stop the billion-dollar illegal wildlife trade in Southeast Asia.

Back in America, he started various successful businesses, from real estate development to film-making to viticulture, joining them under ZI Ventures. He is a philosophy and religious studies graduate of Columbia University and resides in San Francisco with his daughters and physician wife. Istvan recently published The Transhumanist Wager, an award-winning fictional thriller describing philosopher Jethro Knights and his unwavering quest for immortality via science and technology.

Istvan writes futurist and transhumanist-themed blogs for The Huffington Post, Psychology Today, and Vice’s Motherboard. Zoltan is also founder of the Transhumanist Party and is early in the process of beginning a 2016 US presidential campaign.

"Should we use science and technology to overcome death and become a stronger species?" asks Istvan on the Immortality Bus tour.

For good or for bad, much of that debate around Istvan's campaign has been revolving not only around Istvan’s ideas but also around his personality and leadership style. With much of the criticism coming from within the wider transhumanist community itself. Whatever the case may be, when I heard that Istvan is visiting Toronto for WEST conference I thought that I can’t pass the opportunity to get him for a Singularity 1on1 interview.

SOURCE  Singularity Weblog

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 Transhumanism  

The exponential technologies that will continue to shape the future,  are clearly part of transhumanist appeal, but the cultural forces behind the movement may be as, or even more important over the long term.

There are undoubtedly a number of technical advancements that point to a transhuman future—from the advent and development of the internet, to the new spring of artificial intelligence to the life-extending progress in medicine and genetics—the Singularity seems assured.  There is another development that is not technological in nature, but may be more important in getting to the promise of the future though—the cultural transition underway.

In the last few weeks, a number of major, long-standing cultural barriers have fallen away.  The Confederate flag, which has stood for the backwardness, intolerance and down-right racism in the Southern United States has finally come down and been recognized for the outdated viewpoint it represents.  Sadly, a viscous and murderous attack instigated this move by states like South Carolina and corporate entities like Walmart. Nevertheless, the action represents a momentous shift in the cultural attitude of the most powerful nation in the world.

At the same time this occurred, another major event - the legalization of same-sex marriage across the United States, was enacted by the Supreme Court of the country. Amazingly, rainbows lit up the night from the White House, to the Empire State building to the walls of Facebook.

In long-held conservative political jurisdictions like Alberta in Canada, where a conservative government that was in power for more than 40 years, was ousted in favor of a much more progressive party, liberal ideas are taking hold.  And these ideas are sure to be more accepting of even more radical transhuman ideas in the future.

Combined with the growing acceptance of marijuana use, and other factors, the new liberalization taking hold in North America point to a major shift in the cultural environment.  For transhuman ideas like greatly enhancing human intellectual, physical, and psychological capacities, this is a very promising development.

As the Transhumanist Party candidate Zoltan Istvan points out, "Nearly all transhumanists support the LGBT cause. After all, a desire to be free to alter, express, and control one's sexual preference and identity sounds like a transhumanist concept. Advocates of transhumanism aim to alter, express, and control their bodies and preferences too, except they emphasize doing it with science and technology."

Related articles The Transhumanist Reader  A Brilliant Introduction To Transhumanism  Kim Stanley Robinson Discusses Utopia, The Singularity and Transhumanism

Istvan calls the LGBT movement and transhumanism "practically different sides of the same coin," and each is poised to gain strength from one another in the future as radical technologies transform the species.

Another factor behind the rise of liberalism in the West, may be the downright descent from reason and logic in the pseudo-nation of ISIS. The radical gangsterism parading behind a facade of religious zealotry demonstrated by the imported thugs and Baathist-recycled leadership in the former areas of Iraq and Syria give the rest of the world a clear picture of what a return to (percieved) Medieval ideas and apocalypse-seeking backward thinking leads to.  Clearly the appropriate action to this action is to increase freedom in the lands that claim to value it.

“We will conquer your Rome, break your crosses, and enslave your women,” an ISIS spokesman, claims. “If we do not reach that time, then our children and grandchildren will reach it, and they will sell your sons as slaves at the slave market.” What kind of logical response, can anyone present to such statements?

Transhumanism is not a religion, nor is it attempting to replace religion. It is a way of being that embraces evolving the human being with science, reason, and technology.

"A desire to be free to alter, express, and control one's sexual preference and identity sounds like a transhumanist concept."

As the racist gunman led to the incredible turn-around on the Confederate flag issue is potentially mirrored in the heinous acts of ISIS, like murdering gays, non-believers and even the use of slavery,  on the greater liberal democratic nations.  In turn, these breakthroughs could definitely lead to a greater acceptance of transhumanist views.

Perceived more broadly this may even go on to include ideas like guaranteed basic income and other futuristic ideology.

As Istvan writes, "Personhood, sexual freedom (virtual or not), and gender identity (or non-identity) will soon take on unprecedented roles in society, spurred by radical innovation and changing stereotypes of what it means to be a human being."

Racing ahead of ISIS and other radicalized areas technologically may too be a solution to their threats in the longer term.  Developing robotics, artificial intelligence and biological power may prove to be important, and are in-line with much of transhumanist thought, but at its base, we do face as much a cultural war as anything in this case.

Istvan and others think that transformative technology that will have the most important impact on the future, but clearly the cultural forces behind this change may be as, or even more important over the long term.


SOURCE  Top Image via Michael Broussard

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 Transhumanism  

Shortly before announcing the formation of the Transhumanist Party and his run for the US presidency, transhumanist philosopher and writer Zoltan Istvan gave a TEDs talk explaining his path and his vision for the future.

After the success of his book The Transhumanist Wager, Zoltan Istvan started actively promoting transhumanism and other futurist issues, giving talks, media interviews, writing and he is now running for the US presidency under his newly-formed Transhumanist Party banner.

Related articles A Brilliant Introduction To Transhumanism  The Transhumanist Reader  Do You Want to Live Forever?

Like the character in his book, Jethro Knights, Istvan, an American-Hungarian, began a solo, multi-year sailing journey around the world at the age of 21. His main cargo was 500 handpicked books, mostly classics. He's explored over 100 countries—many as a journalist for the National Geographic Channel—writing, filming, and appearing in dozens of television stories, articles, and webcasts.

In this talk, recorded last month at the 2014 TEDxTransmedia Exponential Beauty event in Geneva, Switzerland, Istvan relates how is near-death experience with an unexploded landmine in Vietnam focused his attention on his desire to go on living, and centralized his focus on transhumanism.

"What I wanted to realize about the process was that I was ready to give up my journalism, ready to give up the danger in order to join a field that is interested in preserving life."

"While laying there on the ground, I had the discovery of a lifetime, or perhaps the revelation I like to call the philosophical nuclear bomb because at that moment I realized that for a couple years I've been doing some incredibly dangerous things," Istvan relates. "What I wanted to realize about the process was that I was ready to give up my journalism, ready to give up the danger in order to join a field that is interested in preserving life."

"I realized at that moment that I wanted to overcome death and not die." For this reason, Istvan calls this moment the most beautiful in his life.

He goes on to relate a few advances in life extension, or as he labels it—transhumanism. According to Istvan, if research into life extension continues at its current pace, many people will not have to face death.

One of the potential technologies Istvan talks about is mind uploading. "The foot is already in the door for us finding the technology to download our entire set of memories," he claims.

Istvan asks what beauty will be like in the future virtual world of and an enhanced view of reality.  "The human eye only sees about one percent of the light spectrum.  The human ear only hears about 0.1 percent of what's out there in the sound waves," he says. "Imagine for a second if we're tied into devices that allow us to experience that other 99 percent...it makes you think about how everything, not just beauty is going to change."

"Ultimately, we're just an infant in what the universe is," concludes Istvan. "When we start applying technology like life extension and robotics and microchips into our head and start tying ourselves to a digital world, we're going to find ourselves uncovering entire new concepts of beauty."

A lot of what Istvan discusses is only five, ten or fifteen years away according to experts and trends.

Like Ted Chu, Istvan says we will no longer be the human species once we adopt these technologies.

"Whatever happens, no matter how far we go, how far we evolve, one thing is going to remain constant—beauty requires us to be alive."


SOURCE  TEDx Talks

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 Singularity  

What will the morality of a superintelligent AI be like? Will it be friendly to humanity?  By the Singularity, will the need to consider humanity even be relevant?

Essential to the core of many transhumanist thinkers is the techno-optimistic perspective.  If and when a Singularity comes, with ultra intelligent artificial intelligence, can we really feel secure that it will feel benevolent and even loving towards humankind?According to the author of The Transhumanist Wager, Zoltan Istvan:

Within a few months of the launch of artificial intelligence, expect nearly every science and technology book to be completely rewritten with new ideas--better and far more complex ideas. Expect a new era of learning and advanced life for our species. The key, of course, is not to let artificial intelligence run wild and out of sight, but to already be cyborgs and part machines ourselves, so that we can plug right into it wherever it leads. Then no matter what happens, we are along for the ride. After all, we don't want to miss the Singularity.

Surviving the Singularity means that humans must become part machine.  Ray Kurzweil has also presented this idea.  "Computers started out as large remote machines in air-conditioned rooms tended by white coated technicians," he writes. "Subsequently they moved onto our desks, then under our arms, and now in our pockets. Soon, we’ll routinely put them inside our bodies and brains. Ultimately we will become more nonbiological than biological."

Will the rise of superintelligence mean we will entirely supplant the human race? No one knows for sure. The fact that many people that are alive today will be around to find out the answer is unsettling and exciting for those aware of the direction the exponential growth of information technologies, and their encroachment into nearly every other field will have.  As Elon Musk famously Tweeted recently, AI "is potentially more dangerous than nukes." He followed up the next day with:

Hope we're not just the biological boot loader for digital superintelligence. Unfortunately, that is increasingly probable
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 3, 2014

Related articles Our Final Invention  Nick Bostrom on Existential Risk and The Singularity  The Transhumanist Wager

From medicine to robotics, and if nanotechnology meets it's promise, potentially all physical matter in the universe will be affected.  Controlling all of the facets of these developments will not be done by mere human intelligence, nor by an AI alone.  Working together, a new species, what Ted Chu has named the CoBe (Cosmic Being), will be in charge. It, or they will have wills of their own, making programming in so-called "friendly AI," or Asimov's Three Laws, probably irrelevant.

MIRI's Michael Anissimov has clear ideas about programming superintelligent AIs. Image Source - Facebook

Istvan hopes that his novel will be the first one read by a superintelligence. "A sophisticated artificial intelligence will be able to upgrade its "will." Its plasticity will know no bounds, as our brains do. In my philosophical novel The Transhumanist Wager, I put forth the idea that all humans desire to reach a state of perfect personal power--to be omnipotent in the universe. I call this a Will to Evolution."

"Programming AI with mammalian ideas, modern-day philosophies, and the fallibilities of the human spirit is dangerous and will possibly lead to total chaos. We're just not that noble or wise, yet," Istevan writes.

He also goes on to say, "I expect AI to eventually embrace my laws, and all the challenging, coldly rational ideas in TEF. Those ideas do not reflect politically correct modern-day thinking and the society our species has built."  TEF refers to Istevan's Three Laws of Teleological Egocentric Functionalism, namely:

1) A transhumanist must safeguard one's own existence above all else. 

2) A transhumanist must strive to achieve omnipotence as expediently as possible--so long as one's actions do not conflict with the First Law. 

3) A transhumanist must safeguard value in the universe--so long as one's actions do not conflict with the First and Second Laws.

Joshua Fox and Carl Shulman wrote a paper on the morality of superintelligence for MIRI (The Machine Intelligence Research Institute), where they suggest the idea from Earth’s history tends to suggest that increasing intelligence, knowledge, and rationality results in more cooperative and benevolent behavior misses how essentially different superintelligent AI will be.  They conclude, "we have reason for pessimism regarding the values of intelligent machines not carefully engineered to be altruistic."

While designing and engineering in altruism, friendliness, or imprisoning the AI in a box, or installing fail-safe off switches may seem like good ideas to help safeguard humanity, the transhuman perspective may, in fact, supersede the necessity.  What if superintelligence does not arise from artificial intelligence software, but through genetic manipulation, or via smart drugs that actually work?  What is the off switch for a superintelligent person? In Singularity Rising, James D. Miller makes substantive arguments that the Singularity might be biological before it is algorithmically-based.

With continued accelerated development in all areas of genetics, nanotechnology and AI/robotics, and medical life extension, the coming decades will increasingly look very different, as will we.

By 2045, AI may be our Final Invention.  Our transition to a new level of evolution through transhumanism will leave behind the human being so that we may race with the machines, to the stars and beyond.

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 Life Extension  

Reporting for CNN, "Supersize Me" film maker Morgan Spurlock recently looked at the futurist possibilities of immortality including the medical advancements and virtual reality developments that might make it possible.

Afew months ago, Morgan Spurlock entered the brave new world of extreme life extension, embarking on a life-prolonging regimen and trying everything from genome hacking, to creating an avatar and uploading his consciousness in preparation for the technological Singularity.

Spurlock’s quest to live forever includes visits with radical futurist Ray Kurzweil, Stanford University’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab, and Cambrian Genomics in San Francisco.

"I'd like to live until tomorrow, and I feel that tomorrow I will feel the same way."

He also attends a party where he speaks with Max More, Natasha Vita-More, Zoltan Istvan, and other thought leaders in the immortality game.  Spurlock also visits Dr. Terry Grossman's clinic for a battery of tests on his health, including measuring his telomeres, which were judged to be short.

Related articles Ray Kurzweil at Global Directions 2013  The Transhumanist Wager  Our Post-Human Future

Spurlock gets some of his stem cells collected, and talks with organ engineering pioneer, Anthony Atala at Wake Forest University about 3D printing replacement organs.

Talking with Kurzweil, Spulock covers the topics of circumventing death and the technology of health and medicine growth into information technology.  This means, according to Kurzweil, that the area will experience the same radical exponential growth as the rest of the computer industry.  Kurzweil suggests that the next 15 years will be the health and medical bridge to the nanotech revolution that will really prolong lives.

When asked about his longevity plans, Kurzweil responds, "Well, I'd like to live until tomorrow, and I feel that tomorrow I will feel the same way."

Image Source: CNN

Spurlock talks with Jaron Lanier for balance to the techno-optimism of Kurzweil and company.  He enquires if virtual reality offers the possibility for digital immortality.  The footage from Stanford University’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab is very interesting to say the least.  He then creates a virtual hologram, or avatar, of himself at the University of Southern California's Institute for Creative Technologies.  After a few months, Spurlock interviews his hologram.  The system combines the holographic image with a conversational artificial intelligence and voice recognition. It is unclear if the conversation was planned and scripted or not.  (More details of this project are upcoming.)

CNN’s popular original series "Morgan Spurlock Inside Man," produced and hosted by Oscar®-nominated documentary filmmaker Spurlock, immerses the host in topical subjects while offering an intimate look at diverse aspects of the human condition. Topics have included “Celebrity,” (the job of satisfying the public's constant appetite for the famous), “Income Disparity” (the 1% vs. the 99%), “The Future” (where Morgan went on an epic quest to live forever), and more.




SOURCE  CNN

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 Ideas  

In Zoltan Istvan's The Transhumanist Wager, the book's protagonist Jethro Knights employs very extreme methods to make his philosophy come to pass.  Is this a model for today's transhumanists, or does Knights go too far?

Certainly among the most popular and provocative recent explorations of transhumanism in the last few years has been Zoltan Istvan's The Transhumanist Wager.  The books protagonist, Jethro Knights is a philosopher-king for the future, in a plot that closely mirrors Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged.  Istvan wrote the book, "hoping to change people's ideas of what a human being is and what it can become."

In the book, Knights develops his philosophical manifesto for transhumanism which he calls, Teleological Egocentric Functionalism, or TEF.  The goal of the transhumanist is to lead to the "omnipotender," an omniscient being capable of controlling all aspects of the world.  The Transhumanist Wager is a play on Pascal's Wager, where all humans bet their lives whether God lives or not.

Jethro felt he should be a genuine philosophical machine, following the most expedient path to immortality.

"Jethro felt he should be a genuine philosophical machine, following the most expedient path to immortality."

TEF is predicated on logic, a simple wager that every human faces:

If a reasoning human being loves and values life, they will want to live as long as possible—the desire to be immortal. Nevertheless, it's impossible to know if they're going to be immortal once they die. To do nothing doesn't help the odds of attaining immortality—since it seems evident that everyone will die someday and possibly cease to exist. To try to do something scientifically constructive towards ensuring immortality beforehand is the most logical conclusion.

Beyond the imperative of attaining immortality, TEF also follows Knight's Three Laws of Transhumanism to help individuals efficiently navigate the future.

1) A transhumanist must safeguard one's own existence above all else.
2) A transhumanist must strive to achieve omnipotence as expediently as possible—so long as one's actions do not conflict with the First Law.
3) A transhumanist must safeguard value in the universe—so long as one's actions do not conflict with the First and Second Laws.

For Knights, morality is defined through TEF as the amount of time we have left to live.Part of the philosophy also involves the The Humanicide Formula, which is to be used to determine who should live or die.

The optimum transhuman trajectory of civilization is that which creates the most efficient way to produce omnipotenders.  Currently, the best way to accomplish this is to achieve as expediently as possible the highest amount of productive transhuman life house in the maximum amount of human beings; however not all human beings will be a net-positive in producing omnipotenders.  Any individual who ultimately hampers the optimum transhuman trajectory of civilization should be eliminated.  The Humanicide Formula addresses these issues directly.  It determines whether an individual should live or die based on an algorithm measuring transhuman productivity in terms of that individual's remaining life hours, their resource consumption in a finite system, and their past, present and potential future contributions.

Knights creates a new nation of willing scientists on the world’s largest seasteading project, Transhumania. When the world declares war against the floating city, demanding an end to its renegade and godless transhuman experiments and ambitions, Knights strikes back, leaving the planet forever changed.
"This is why I have stated in public that I cannot go as far as Jethro. He may be right in his dark logic, he may be philosophically correct, but it is too blatantly inhuman for me personally," claims Istevan. Jethro Knights is partially based on a autobiographical events, like Istvan's own sailing trip around the world, and the fact that he is married to a doctor, yet he claims the character itself is an artistic creation.  "I don't believe the character of Jethro is necessarily reachable."

"Even people that really like the book end up disliking him," admits Istvan.

In The Transhumanist Wager, extremes are painted in simple strokes for the purposes of the plot, claims Istvan.  "The book is written for the person who has not thought about these things," claims Istvan.

Knights even describes how TEF should make people try to act like computers, to explore and even attain a “cold precisionlike morality” and a “harsh machine-like objectivity.”   Among the controversial ideas Knights and his fellow transhumanists act out would transfer those billions from programs that fund society's most vulnerable — or as Knights says, "lazy welfare recipients," "mentally challenged, "uneducated repeat criminals" and "obese second-rate citizens bankrupting our medical system."

Perhaps the most jarring example of the callous way Knights employs TEF is when the panel on Transhumania is evaluating applications for the Immortality Grant.  A case is presented from a mother of five from three marriages, but, "She's unemployed, lives in a trailer park, is barely able to feed her family, and how has been diagnosed with brain cancer.  She says she wants to live longer so she can teach her kids how to be responsible, upright people."

One of Jethro's colleagues responds, "What a waste of time.  Send her six feet of rope to hang herself." Knights replies, saying the cost of the rope isn't worth it."

Such discussions probably do go on everyday in doctor's offices and similar panels, but for Istvan to give this characteristic to Knights, along with the actual killing he orders later in the book is very extreme.

Once Transhumania has forced the capitulation of the world, Knights employs seemingly draconian dictatorial measures to achieve transhuman ideals.

Transhumania will implement a strict worldwide family planning policy: People who can reasonably and successfully raise children will be allowed to procreate and encouraged to do so; all others will not be allowed to procreate.  Transhumania will support and and advance the best healthcare and medical innovation possible - but insists that all people acquire it themselves at their own expense if they desire it...

If country rulers, politicians, and officials tried to negotiate or hold on to their former power, they were killed by robots patrolling the planet on Transhumanian aircraft.  

Related articles The Transhumanist Reader  Zoltan Istvan: The Transhumanist Wager Is A Choice We'll All Have To Make  Do You Want to Live Forever?

As Chris T. Armstrong writes, "The important thing to focus on is the context that drives those actions. The world in which this story takes place is a relatively near-future earth, but one in which many examples of push-back against transhumanism, that are just beginning to emerge today, have grown tremendously in response to future successes of transhumanist technologies and ideas."

Armstrong is currently writing a book that explains and explores the ideas of the Transhumanist Wager, titled, "At Any Cost...A Guide to The Transhumanist Wager."

Istvan has suggested that in the coming years everyone will be faced with the Transhumanist Wager, and that the polarity and tension caused by it in society will escalate, and people will need to choose sides.  Where his novel simplifies world into black and white, and the actions of the world's governments into fundamentalist absolutists, shades of grey will be more apparent as we begin to increasingly face the issues transhumanism presents.

Istvan has stated, that his own views are best reflected as both Knights, and the character of his wife, Zoe Bach.  "Zoe represents the confusion of these ideas in my own mind, and trying to put them forth." Istevan has suggested that a sequel to the book, may involve Zoe coming back and arguing with Jethro over the world he has created.

That said, there have been polarizing forces in the world in the past including megalomaniac dictators, religious differences and others.  Transhumanists working as a coordinated, purposeful force as they do in Istvan's book could conceivably do the same.  Adopting the author's TEF philosophy and implementing it as ruthlessly as Knights does might be the result of potential Redeem Church-like religious fundamentalism and strong attitudes a dystopian future.

Knights may also be interpreted as more of a model of what a self-aware, super-intelligent AI might become, and what type of morality it could employ. Merging with technology is the most expedient way for immortality to be achieved according to may transhumanists, and for Istvan this represents one of the greatest unknown, and potentially dangerous risks for humanity.

"Morality is defined by the amount of time you have left to live. I firmly believe that. Everyone when they're at the end of their life or they only have a couple days left to live makes very different moral choices," Istvan told the Marin News. "The Transhumanist Wager is really about how far do you take technology and science to make yourself the very strongest entity that you can become, and that's the question; if you could become all-powerful, would you do that?"

While most of us can relate to, or at least imagine relating to Knights killing Reverend Belinas out of revenge, and self-preservation, do you think the aims of transhumanism justify acting as the character in The Transhumanist Wager does?

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 Transhumanism  

Adam Ford recently interviewed Zoltan Istvan, author of the science fiction novel, The Transhumanist Wager.  During the interview, Istvan comments that he intentionally wanted the novel to have a similar effect as Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged.

Scorned by over 500 publishers and literary agents around the world, former National Geographic and New York Times correspondent Zoltan Istvan presents his bestselling visionary novel, The Transhumanist Wager, as a seminal statement of our times.

This indie philosophical thriller has been called “revolutionary” and “socially dangerous” by readers, scholars, and religious authorities. The novel debuts a challenging original philosophy, which rebuffs modern civilization by inviting the end of the human species—and declaring the onset of something greater.

Related articles Thoughts on Zoltan Istvan’s “The Transhumanist Wager" David Wood on the Lead Up to the Singularity  The End of Humanity: Nick Bostrom at TEDxOxford

Set in the present day, The Transhumanist Wager tells the story of Jethro Knights and his unwavering quest for immortality via science and technology. Fighting against him are fanatical religious groups, economically depressed governments, and mystic Zoe Bach: a dazzling trauma surgeon and the love of his life, whose belief in spirituality and the afterlife is absolute.

Exiled from America and reeling from personal tragedy, Knights forges a new nation of willing scientists on the world’s largest seasteading project, Transhumania. When the world declares war against the floating city, demanding an end to its renegade and godless transhuman experiments and ambitions, Knights strikes back, leaving the planet forever changed.

There are deliberate parallels with Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, according to Istvan. Jethro Knights is a modern John Galt, and his seastead, Transhumania is a modern Galt's Gulch.

Jethro is obsessed with and focused on attaining personal immortality via biological life extension and especially mind uploading and eternal cybernetic life.
According to Istvan, "My main goal was to inspire readers with a powerful artistic statement that would challenge their ideas of life and death. The rapid advancement of life extension science and technology will drastically change everything in our society far sooner than most people realize."

Singularity Weblog's Nikola Danaylov says, "This novel is a must read for anyone interested in the future of our civilization."



SOURCE  H+ Magazine

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