Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: geopolitics – Page 24

Eliminating Money, Taxes, and Ownership Will Bring Forth Technoutopia

My new story for Vice Motherboard on The Venus Project, Jacque Fresco, and a Resource Based Economy. I had the honor of visiting 100 year old Jacque Fresco last week. This story is also on the cover of Vice right now: http://motherboard.vice.com/read/eliminating-money-taxes-and…chnoutopia #transhumanism #Election2016 #ScienceCandidate #ResourceBasedEconomy #JacqueFresco #VenusProject

Futurist and architect Jacque Fresco speaks in parables. If he goes on too long with a story, his 40-year partner Roxanne Meadows interjects facts to keep him on track. Fresco recently turned 100 years old, and is the oldest celebrity futurist in the world. His magnum opus is The Venus Project, a 21-acre Central Florida Eden with white dome-shaped buildings that Meadows and he hand built over three and a half decades. The sanctuary and research center is where Fresco still leads weekly seminars, which includes a tour of 10 buildings—some filled with hundreds of future city models inside them—that highlight the promise of a future world where equality and technology abound.

How I met Fresco at The Venus Project this month starts with income taxes —something I hate and aim to one day eliminate altogether for humanity. Fresco doesn’t like taxes either. While searching online about taxes, I stumbled upon Fresco’s voluminous work: over 80 years of essays, filmed lectures, books, documentaries, models, and architectural drawings. Much of Fresco’s work is anchored by his main philosophical idea: a resource-based economy, where there’s not only zero taxes, but no ownership or money either.

It sounds fanciful, but the more I read about Fresco’s work and ideas, the more intrigued I became. Here was a man with a vision, one not dissimilar from my own. The timing of my meeting with Fresco and Meadows was serendipitous. As I neared the end of my US presidential campaign, I was looking to build out the Transhumanist Party’s 20-point platform with a more aggressive futurist platform—one that looked not only 10–20 years into the future, as I generally focus on, but one that also examines what could and should happen in 50 years or even the next century.

22 Minutes: The Independents

Canada’s favorite comedy show 22 Minutes of CBC (similar to The Daily Show) is out tonight with a new broadcast. My campaign and transhumanism is in it for a few minutes. Here’s a 4 minute YouTube clip from the TV broadcast that’s quite funny. Shows sometimes get a million views across Canada:

Is America ready for the first redneck, gun toting, mullet sporting, tiger tackling, gay polygamist president? Shaun Majumder investigates.

This Hour Has 22 Minutes airs Tuesdays at 8:30pm (9:00 NT) on CBC.

Watch full episodes online: http://bit.ly/watch22mins

Check out http://www.cbc.ca/comedy for more original comedy.

Continue reading “22 Minutes: The Independents” | >

Meet the 2016 presidential candidate who believes humans will eventually live forever

Circa News, a millennial site, did a story on transhumanism and my campaign. There are 3 videos embedded into this article (a general one on transhumanism, one on using tech to help the environment, and one on a Universal Basic Income):

WATCH | Zoltan Istvan thinks all sentient beings — including, but not limited to humans, artificial intelligence and cyborgs — have the right to be immortal. And that right should be protected under law.

Which is why, naturally, he decided to run for president of the United States.

Zoltan Istvan on Transhumanism and Artificial Intelligence (Part 1)

Here’s my 20-min interview on transhumanism and AI for The Rubin Report:

Zoltan Istvan (Transhumanist and Presidential Candidate) joins Dave Rubin to discuss his candidacy for president under the transhumanist Party, and his views on artificial intelligence. ***Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/subscription_center?add_user=RubinReport

***The Rubin Report is fan-funded: http://www.rubinreport.com/donate

Stay tuned for parts 2 and 3 of Dave’s interview with Zoltan Istvan coming tomorrow, and the full interview airing Friday 10/7.

SUPPORT MONTHLY (Patreon): https://www.patreon.com/rubinreport

Continue reading “Zoltan Istvan on Transhumanism and Artificial Intelligence (Part 1)” | >

The future of robots: singing lullabies, testing motorcycles

Cool new story in the San Francisco Chronicle about the robotics conference. I gave a speech at it yesterday.

At the two-day RoboBusiness Conference, about 2,000 people were serenaded with lullabies and Disney tunes, including “Let It Go” from the hit film “Frozen,” by a human-like robot designed to comfort senior citizens and autistic children.

And next to a man-size robot that can drive a motorcycle 190 mph around a race track, a half-dozen ant-size robots quickly scurried about a miniature factory floor.

“In five years, could you imagine what this conference is going to look like?” Transhumanist Party presidential candidate Zoltan Istvan asked the crowd. “There are going to be 8-foot robots walking all around us, talking to us, some of them maybe being smarter than us.”

The 12th annual conference, which wrapped up Thursday, illustrated how the focus of robotics is shifting from industrial uses to consumer products. That’s especially true at a time when drones, self-driving cars and police robots that carry bombs are making news.

Swift response to refugee crisis rests on Obama summit after UN talks fail — By Julian Borger and Patrick Kingsley | The Guardian

“Hopes of a fast and effective response to the global refugee crisis now rest on a summit convened by Barack Obama on Tuesday in New York, after negotiations before a meeting of world leaders at the UN on Monday failed to produce any concrete measures.”

Read more

​The Language of Aliens Will Always Be Indecipherable

My new Vice Motherboard story on the Fermi Paradox, Jethro’s Window, and why we’ll never discover intelligent aliens:

Here’s the sad solution to Fermi’s Paradox: We’ve never discovered other life forms because language and communication methods in the Singularity evolve so rapidly that even in one minute, an entire civilization can become transformed and totally unintelligible. In an expanding universe that is at least 13.6 billion years old, this transformation might never end. What this means is we will never have more than a few seconds to understand or even notice our millions of neighbors. The nature of the universe—the nature of communication in a universe where intelligence exponentially grows—is to keep us forever unaware and alone.

The only time we may discover other intelligent life forms is that 100 or so years during Jethro’s Window, and then it requires the miracle of another species in a similar evolutionary time table, right then, looking for us too. Given the universe is so gargantuan and many billions of years old, even with millions of alien species out there, we’ll never find them. We’ll never know them. It’s an unfortunate mathematical certainty.

Zoltan Istvan is a futurist, author of The Transhumanist Wager, and a 2016 US Presidential candidateof the Transhumanist Party. He writes an occasional columnfor Motherboard in which he ruminates on the future beyond human ability.

Topics: opinion, columns, fermi paradox, aliens, Extraterrestrial Life, Futures.

/* */