Zoltan Gyurko Istvan

SAN FRANCISCO (PRWEB) November 19, 2019

Born in California, Istvan is a former journalist for National Geographic and has recently penned articles for The New York Times opinion section. In 2013, Istvan published his novel The Transhumanist Wager, which became a #1 Philosophy and Science Fiction bestseller on Amazon. The book has been compared more than 1,000 times to Ayn Rands Atlas Shrugged. Istvans most recent book of political essays titled Upgrading America was a #1 bestseller in Politics on Amazon.

Istvan has become known around the world for spearheading the multi-million person transhumanism movement, which aims to upgrade the human body with science and technology. The #1 goal of transhumanism is to overcome biological death. While still outside the political mainstream, the worlds largest companies such as Apple, Google, and Microsoft are key innovators in the transhumanist movement.

Istvan has consulted for the U.S. Navy and given speeches at conferences around the world, including for institutions such as the World Bank and the World Economic Forum. Istvan has traveled to over 100 countries and is a former director of a major wildlife organization, WildAid. He has a degree from Columbia University in Philosophy and Religion. A successful entrepreneur with multiple businesses, Istvan lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his physician wife and two young daughters.

Istvans 20-point political platform, available on his campaign website http://www.zoltan2020.com, advances ideas that so far have been absent in the Republican primaries. Although his years as a businessman have made him fiscally conservative, Istvan supports a Universal Basic Income that is based off monetizing government resources, called a Federal Land Dividend. He proposes ending the war on drugs, making public preschool and college both free and mandatory, and licensing parents to make sure they are ready to raise children. He supports artificial wombs as a third option in the pro-life vs pro-choice debate, and would like to cut the military budget in order to create a science industrial complex in America. He aims to fight climate change with geo-engineering and end the IRS with a straightforward national sales tax. He favors nearly-open borders, tort reform, deregulation, banning private prisons, and using AI-operated drones and robots to stop mass shootings in public places and schools.

Istvan is also worried that China is beating America on the technological front in areas such as artificial intelligence, genetic editing, and neural prosthetic development. As president, he promises to get America innovating again, because once the Chinese take a lead in innovation, the United States may never get it back.

Pratik Chougule, Istvans campaign manager, says that Istvan is running as a new type of Republican politician. He expects Istvans bold ideas about the countrys future will resonate with a wide cross-section of Americans.

Istvans campaign slogan is: Upgrading America.

For more information, contact campaign manager Pratik Chougule at: pc@zoltan2020.com

To schedule an interview or talk to Mr. Istvan, email: info@zoltanistvan.com or call: 415-802-4891http://www.zoltan2020.comTwitter: @zoltan_istvan

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Zoltan Istvan, a Leader in Science and Technology, Will Run for US President and Challenge Trump in the 2020 Republican Primaries - PR Web

The first email was forwarded back and forth internally for a while due to a general sense of skepticism and a lack of clear interest:

From: S E

Date: Fri, Sep 13, 2019 at 1:12 PM

Subject: Bichip Mark of the beast

Hail Satan

Hope you are all fine

I am writing to you since our Human Microchip company is having a big international event here in Copenhagen, November 26th. We are unveiling the cutting edge technology of human microchip implant with long distance read and internet data, for the first time in the history that is also known as the mark of the beast in the bible of Jesus and we have been facing opposition from churches and even been in the news for that:

‘Transhumans’ reveal why they want everyone to implant chips under their skin

Anyway, here is the link to the event is bichip.com/event

I wonder if you guys would like to help us promote the event which is actually free to attend? there are about 400 seats left yet and we can provide free VIP tickets to the temple members (Including free Flight and Accommodation)

Best

Simon

Bichip, Denmark

+4531751127

Professional emails lacking in basic details are, unfortunately, the norm. I receive emails from career journalists at major media outlets sometimes saying nothing more than that they would like to interview me. I get invitations to conferences that merely state that they seek my participation, leaving it to me to ask if they are asking me to speak, seeking sponsorship, or what, exactly? The fact that this email merely asked if we would help promote the event did not make it particularly suspect. The fact that there was apparently no cap set on flights and accommodations, however, was suspect, but could easily be seen as another common failure to specify. If one were to reply, one might then learn that a plus one is acceptable, but no more. It also is not unheard of for a start-up with delusions of grandeur to overspend on something like a conference. Still, they seemed to be offering too much while asking for too little.

Interestingly, the reference to the Mark of the Beast hardly caught my attention at all. Despite the email apparently referring the the biochip as the literal Mark of the Beast, I assumed it a matter of clumsy wording indicating the viewpoint that protestors were taking against the technology, certainly not the viewpoint of the manufacturers themselves. Still, I was not interested. I would not care to get the implant, nor am I horrified by the prospect of others carrying such implants in the future. The technology is not new, it is not terribly interesting, and the alleged controversy seemed a bit outdated in the social media age. In a world wherein nearly everybody willingly submits their most private information to Google and Facebook, and those companies work toward supplying face-recognition technology to public environments for the purposes of instant-tailored marketing, what does it matter if those using e-currency carry it always on their phone, a card in their pocket, or in a chip under their skin?

At some point, I was discussing current issues regarding social media and its regulation with our Ordination Director, Greg Stevens, when I remembered the BiChip email and forwarded it to him. Greg did a cursory investigation and replied to me:

As you know, Im an enthusiastic supporter of transhumanism as an overall direction and love the idea of biotech. Im looking forward to the day we have both the biotech and the AI to provide us with what I call full phenotypic freedom the ability to augment ourselves to be whatever types of creatures we want, and to interface with computer and each other in whatever way we want.

But, based on the material that I saw out there, BiChip is nothing more than a cute initial proof-of-concept in the early stages. Any details of BiChip as a company or its dealings aside, I like that promotion of the BiChip is something that can get the conversation started so that we can confront things like: what does it need to have to be useful? what are the risks and how do we build in protections against those risks from the beginning (instead of stumbling into abuses later and having to fix things after-the-fact).

I would not get the BiChip as its been described. Its simply not useful. I dont make purchases using e-currency in day-to-day life. The only reason something like ApplePay from my iPhone or Apple Watch is useful is that the software can access whatever bank account or credit card I set it up for.

Ive never seen actual whitepapers for BiChip. I saw marketing material, and marketing material is always vague. But based on what I read, BiChip was inherently crippled in that it only operated in ecurrency and was limited in what it could communicate with.

There is no revolution in this tech. The only thing exciting about it is that it was marketed as a product that might get people talking about what biotech may be able to do in the future.

This, of course, led to more in-person discussions and disagreements between Greg and I (I am far more the privacy advocate while he is more for cultivating a cultural adjustment to privacys natural diminishment through technology). Neither of us were against the concept of implants necessarily, though of course they would have to be implanted of ones own free will, without undue coercive influence. For my part, I thought that the very topic of implants might make people begin to look more clearly at the privacy they abdicate daily, finally considering regulation regarding proper usage and retention. We again began to wonder what BiChip was all about, what their event was meant to entail, and how they imagined that we would promote the event.

Over a month had passed from the original email, so I reached out to see if they were still interested in discussing details:

On Wed, 16 Oct 2019 at 07.24,

Dear Simon

We are very interested in the event.

My own position is that Data Privacy is going to necessarily be an ongoing dialogue that will always change as technology advances. I do not think we need to declare privacy dead, but I also do not think that the convenience of a microchip implant poses a deeper threat to privacy than RFID, smartphones, and social media. The question is one of responsible retention and usage of data, not a matter of withholding technologies.

Please let us know if you are still interested in our attendance and how we might help you popularize the event.

Thank you

Lucien Greaves

Spokesperson, Cofounder

The Satanic Temple

The reply came the same day:

Hi Lucien and friends

The offer is still valid and we can provide free vip tickets and free flights and hotel to Denmark for the attendees. However we prefer to have important members/board members as the priority but we can book up to 100 of these tickets.

Regarding the way you help out the event, you can come with any idea. I personally consider myself a member of the temple as i officially joined some years ago and maybe the time and money we are spending on this technology is directly a promotion for the satanist movement I guess it is time that the temple considers Bichip as a partner and help us fight together.

I recommend a direct call to Bichip president (Finn) on 004531751127 or to me 0013232180018 to speed up the process .

Best

Simon

Of course, this did not make any sense to me. An offer to fly some hundred members of The Satanic Temple (TST) to Denmark was grossly improbable even for a delusionally enthusiastic start-up. Further, the email again failed to be explicit in what Bichip would expect from me personally or TST as an organization. I lost interest entirely, but Gregs interest was piqued. Attempting a further investigation into what the whole thing was really about, Greg attempted to contact the numbers provided only to find that they were inoperative numbers. Clearly, none of this was on the level, but it was difficult to understand what exactly the scam was.

On November 08 I received a Direct Message through Twitter, which I never replied to:

I simply forgot about the whole matter.

Then, on November 16, I was tagged in a reply to a bizarre tweet by the same account that had reached out to try and confirm my presence at the international gathering.

This dialogue, I came to discover, was in reference to an article that had just been posted by biohackinfo.com claiming that authorities had raided the Bichip offices for unspecified reasons and that the event I had been invited to was therefore cancelled.

Of course, by now it was clear that the event was never intended to happen to begin with, but it was still unclear what this whole scam was meant to achieve. According to the Biohackinfo article:

Two days ago on November 14, Danish police raided the Copenhagen offices of tech company BiChip. This was three days after we broke the story about BiChips bizarre Chief Technical Officer Simon Sallienjavi, who is also the leader of a growing satanic cult that fuses devil worshiping with biohacking and transhumanism.

With all its operations shut down, BiChip has announced that all its offices are closed until December 29, and they have cancelled their much hyped November 26 event that was to be hosted at the Black Diamond building in Copenhagen. At the event, BiChip was set to unveil what it claims is a revolutionary human microchip implant that is both distance-readable and internet-connectable. Christian groups in Denmark and elsewhere in Europe were planning on protesting this event in part due to Sallienjavis notoriety in Denmark for converting Christians to satanism.

All of this was written without a single citation or hyperlink to any credible source that could confirm any of the claims made. No news articles about the police raid, no hyperlinks outside of those to other articles on the Biohackinfo page itself supporting the claims of Christian uproar, nor anything of any credible nature related to the very existence of Sallienjavi himself. The article went on to make even more extreme claims for which there are no reference anywhere outside of the Biohackinfo site:

Despite Sallienjavis eccentricities, despite his satanic cult, despite the bizarre claims he repeatedly makes in public about being the anti-Christ figure prophesied in the Bible, despite his questionable and borderline criminal activities one of which includes the disappearance of a former cult member named Anna Smolar; Sallienjavi has high level security clearance in many bureaus of the Danish government including Denmarks security services. Sallienjavi also oversees a Danish government-funded multinational called BEZH, which is the parent company of most of his numerous startups, including BiChip.

This was not a conspiracy theory. This was a conspiracy fantasy. The characters do not even exist in the real world. Searches for the story of missing cult member Anna Smolar yield nothing, and Sallienjavi is a fictional character. A significant population of people were credulous enough to believe the PizzaGate conspiracy theory which alleged that a small pizzeria in Washington, DC harbored underground tunnels where political elites engaged in human trafficking, but even that gullible audience (probably) needed at least the pizzeria in question to exist in reality before accepting claims of their covert activities.

The abrupt cancellation of the November 26 event, is going to be met with much anguish and grief from some of the people who were unexpectedly invited like American satanists from both the Church of Satan and the Satanic Temple. The latter in particular, could not wait to attend, and according to our source inside BiChip, Lucien Greaves, the founder of the Satanic Temple, which BiChip has been donating to for years, practically begged Sallienjavi to let him attend the event.

Please let us know if you are still interested in our attendance and how we might help you popularize the event, Greaves had pleaded in an email to Sallienjavi.

Although Sallienjavi wants to absorb both the Satanic Temple and the Church of Satan into his growing cult, he has little to no respect for the Temple and merely regards them as useful idiots and thralls. Sallienjavi however has respect for the Church of Satan, and BiChip had even invited Peter H. Gilmore, the current high priest of the church, to speak at the November 26 event as a secret special guest speaker. BiChip paid Gilmore with 10 bitcoin in advance, a book deal, and $15000 for his flight to Denmark. Gilmore also has an invite to the opening of Sallienjavis cults church.

The most nonsensical part about this, from my perspective, was that the Biohackinfo Twitter account reached out to me directly to taunt me with this article, thus bringing this whole farce to my attention. The claim that BiChip had heavily donated to The Satanic Temple was accompanied by a hyperlink to an image of a document with the TST letterhead at top. The text of the document stated, in embarrassingly poor English, that thanks were in order for the large donations to our church, imploring the donors, Finn and Flemming, to reach out into your network of trans humanists and pull others into the donation circle. The signature read, Kind regards, On behalf of Jacob McKelvy, T.H.

The letter, of course, is a fake, and that is why Biohackinfos enthusiasm in pointing this all out to me was perplexing. Why on earth would anybody create a story so absurd and then immediately send it to somebody who can immediately debunk it? Turns out, Jacob McKelvy is the name of some slob who pretended to be a Satanist for a while only to make a display of converting to Christianity in hopes of marketing himself to Evangelicals. He never had anything to do with TST. It is as though some fool merely Googled Satanist name and went with whatever sounded good at the time. Was Biohackinfo the gullible victim of somebody elses bizarre misinformation campaign? This seems unlikely, as in another article on the Biohackinfo site about the same fictitious Sallienjavi cult, the author writes again of my pleading to attend the international conference stating, This desperate plea by Greaves the self-professed progressive, is despite the fact that in his communication with Sallienjavi, Sallienjavi had made crazy statements to the tune of privacy is dead or privacy should be done away with. In fact, my only communication with the hoax conference (above) expressed my opposition to that perspective, a fact that Biohackinfo revealed to be fully aware of when confronted. When I replied to Biohackinfo, via public tweet, that I was confused by the extreme incompetence in their conspiracy-creation, the Twitter account responded saying, Dont lie followed by an image of my email reply to the hoax conference. And this was not an image of forwarded text from the email. It was clearly an image from the email account itself, indicating that Biohackinfo was in fact the same person behind the conference outreach email to begin with. I am hard-pressed to think of any other time I have seen something so elaborate also be so poorly-thought. This seemed to be the work of somebody who was not terribly bright, who was also quite convinced of their superior intelligence, acting in ways being mistaken for clever toward people who were being mistaken for severely mentally impaired.

Anyway, the fact that Biohackinfo was openly lying about the content of my email reply indicated that they were hardly gullible innocents being misled by another source. However, in a fit of tweets that again indicated the source to be at least partially fooled by the lies they were propagating, Biohackinfo soon began to post screenshots illustrating that they were uploading their files to Wikileaks, apparently believing that this would be of genuine concern to me

The Twitter account also began taunting the Church of Satan (which is actually little more than a Twitter account itself) with screenshots alleging to be a text correspondence with their Magus, Peter Gilmore. Gilmore, according to Biohackinfo, had accepted a speakers fee to deliver a keynote at the conference.

For their part, the Church of Satan denied that the correspondence was legitimate, and it certainly does not approach any reasonable vision of authenticity. For one thing, the correspondence suggests that monies were actually paid, which certainly never happened. Yet, here was Biohackinfo insistently sending these screenshots to the CoS Twitter, revelling in their whistleblower victory. The whole thing grew more confusing by the moment. If somebody is going to make up false accusations, why accuse somebody of something that is not even illegal, nor is it even clearly, in any way, immoral? When I asked Biohackinfo how Gilmore could have been faulted for accepting a speaking gig at the conference, if in reality he had (which he clearly did not), they replied that the effort to produce the literal so called mark of the beast was wrong.

I know that both Peter Gilmore and myself have imposter accounts manifest on a regular basis from Nigerian scammers looking to collect membership fees in our names. Is it possible that Biohackinfo was both trying to constuct an idiotic conspiracy theory about the Mark of the Beast while simultaneously being duped by an imposter Gilmore account? But what about the $15,000? Well, we dont know where the conversation went before or after that, but it looks as though the money was said to be in the mail, and the would-be scammer talking to the hoaxter may well have been skeptical, but what did they have to lose?

Interestingly, the Biohackinfo site is ostensibly a site advocating for Transhumanist agendas the technological augmentation and improvement of human biology but chip implants are a fairly mundane Transhumanist technology, and certainly not one any Transhumanist would be expected to refer to in superstitious fear-mongering language. Is it possible that Biohackinfo is a paranoid, ridiculously inept, religiously superstitious attempt to infiltrate and discredit the Transhumanist movement?

On October 22nd, 2019, the official website of the US Transhumanist Party published an article naming Biohackinfo in the creation of slanderous allegations against them:

The United States Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party (USTP) unequivocally condemns the false, invented, and malicious allegations contained in two recent articles one by the pseudonymous authors Glyph and CyphR on the yellow-journalism Biohackinfo website, and another by the pseudonymous Nick Sobriquet, published in the Trigger Warning magazine edited by Rachel Haywire. These articles are part of a deliberate, coordinated attack on the transhumanist movement and the many decent, distinguished, accomplished, and benevolent people working within it. These articles also contain numerous outright lies and other half-truths and cherry-picked facts distorted beyond recognition.

The article reveals that the people behind Biohackinfo ran in the recent USTP Electronic Primary, speculating that it was their loss in that election that prompted them to sow chaos and exact vengeance. The Biohackinfo candidate, Rachel Haywire, apparently did not accept her second-place defeat gracefully, prompting the site to fabricate a story in which the USTP was connected to Jeffrey Epstein and intertwined in a massive web of nefarious special interests. Given that the simpletons of Biohackinfo could even make a credible run for the Transhumanist Party candidacy, my guess is that they are not very well connected with any established political players, nefarious or otherwise.

The next day, I received a Direct Message on Twitter from the legendary Sallienjavi himself:

I looked through the feed of the account. No mention of BiChip. Poor English. Various posts about President Trump that can not seem to decide whether the character of Sallienjavi is for him or against him. A few Tweets to indicate Satanism, not to mention he follows 666 accounts and has 666 embedded in his user name. Obviously, Metro.co.uk were duped by a press release when they interviewed Simon, who they then stated only uses his first name and doesnt appear on camera. The account was created in 2012. What kind of deranged fool would maintain this account for this long? Whose bitter antagonism could sustain such prolonged motivation for so long? There were no interactions on any of the posts of this alleged CEO. His followers appear to be nothing but bots and instant follow-backs. Why were these Biohackinfo clowns now messaging me from this account asking me to ignore them? My guess is that they were upset by the way I easily poked holes in their ludicrous story. At one point, the night before, they seemed to be trying to offer an olive branch so as to entice me to desist in my mockery of their infantile scheme:

Shortly thereafter, I received, also via Twitter DM, an unrelated piece of lunacy

And with that, I felt, normalcy had returned. This was a return to pure paranoia the likes of which I regularly receive without flagrant willful and grossly inept attempts at deception.

This Biohackinfo episode is easily the most elaborate and complicated display of absolute ineptitude that I have ever witnessed. I can only assume that they actually think their ploy is clever and that it will somehow prove convincing to a wider audience. They just may even be delusional enough to truly believe that their manufactured revelations will cause as they put it a geopolitical shitstorm, though to what end I can only still just speculate. One would pity them for their troubled idiocy if it were not so visibly stained with antagonistic malice. They created marketing materials for a fictitious product. They created a company and a villainous CEO. They managed to get media to pick up a press release. They manufactured a hoax conference. They put a massive amount of work into a complicated plot that was simultaneously so absurdly poorly-thought.

There is clearly more to this story for anybody who cares to look. That somebody is not presently me, but please let me know what you come up with

Please subscribe to my Patreon page:https://www.patreon.com/LucienGreaves

Follow me on Twitter: @LucienGreaves

Link:
The Most Elaborate Display of Ineptitude I Have Ever Witnessed: The BiChip Hoax - Patheos

I have a four-foot-tall robot in my house that plays with my kids. Its name is Jethro.

Both my daughters, aged 5 and 9, are so enamored with Jethro that they have each asked to marry it. For fun, my wife and I put on mock weddings. Despite the robot being mainly for entertainment, its very basic artificial intelligence can perform thousands of functions, including dance and teach karate, which my kids love.

The most important thing Jethro has taught my kids is that its totally normal to have a walking, talking machine around the house that you can hang out with whenever you want to.

Given my daughters semi-regular use of smartphones and tablets, I have to wonder how this will affect them in the future. Will they have any fear of technologies like driverless cars? Will they take it for granted that machine intelligences and avatars on computers can be their best friends, or even their bosses?

Will marrying a super-intelligent robot in 20 years be a natural decision? Even though I love technology, Im not sure how I would feel about having a robot-in-law. But my kids might think nothing of it.

This is my story of transhumanism.

Courtesy of Zoltan Istvan

My transhumanism journey began in 2003 when I was reporting a story for National Geographic in Vietnams demilitarized zone and I almost stepped on a landmine.

I remember my guide roughly shoving me aside and pointing to the metal object half sticking out of the ground in front of me.

I stared at the device that would have completely blown my legs off had my boot tripped the mine. I had just turned 30. The experience left me shaken. And it kept haunting me.

That night as I lay tense and awake in my hotel room, I had the epiphany that has helped define the rest of my life: I decided that the most important thing in my existence was to fight for survival. To put it another way: My goal was to never die.

Because I was not religious, I immediately turned to the thing that gave meaning to my world: science and technology. I took a leap of faith and made a wager that day. I later called this (and even later, dedicated a book to it) the transhumanist wager.

The life extension business of transhumanism will be a $600 billion industry by 2025.

My idea for an immortality wager came from Pascals Wager, the famous bet that caught on in the 17th century that loosely argued it was better to believe in God than not to, because you would be granted an afterlife if there was indeed a God. My transhumanist wager was based in my belief that its better to dedicate our resources to science and technology to overcome death while were still aliveso we dont ever have to find out whether there is an afterlife or not. It turns out I wasnt alone in my passion to live indefinitely through science. A small social movement, mostly of academics and researchers, were tackling similar issues, starting organizations, and funding research.

Some of them called themselves transhumanists.

Fast-forward 16 years from my landmine incident, and transhumanism has grown way beyond its main mission of just overcoming death with science.

Now the movement is the de facto philosophy (maybe even the religion) of Silicon Valley. It encapsulates numerous futurist fields: singularitarianism, cyborgism, cryonics, genetic editing, robotics, AI, biohacking, and others.

Biohacking in particular has taken offthe practice of physically hacking ones body with science, changing and augmenting our physiology the same way computer hackers would infiltrate a mainframe.

Its pretty obvious why it has emerged as such a big trend: It attracts the youth.

Not surprisingly, worrying about death is something that older people usually do (and, apparently, those younger people who almost step on landmines). Most young people feel invincible. But tell young people they can take brain drugs called nootropics that make them super smart, or give them special eye drops that let them see in the dark, or give them a chip implant that enhances human ability (like the one I have), and a lot of young people will go for it.

In 2016, I ran for the US presidency as the Transhumanist Party nominee. To get support from younger biohackers, my team and I journeyed on the Immortality Busmy 38-foot coffin-shaped campaign busto Grindfest, the major annual biohacking meet-up in Tehachapi, California. In an old dentists chair in a garage, biohackers injected me with a horse syringe containing a small radio-frequency-identification implant that uses near-field communication technologythe same wireless frequency used in most smartphones. The tiny deviceits about the size of a grain of ricewas placed just under the skin in my hand. With my chip, I could start a car, pay with bitcoin, and open my front door with a lock reader.

Four years later, I still have the implant and use it almost every day. For surfers or joggers like myself, for example, its great because I dont have to carry keys around.

One thing I do have to navigate is how some religious people view me once they understand I have one. Evangelical Christians have told me that an implant is the mark of the beast, as in from the Bibles Book of Revelations.

Even though Im tagged by conspiracy theorists as a potential contender for the Antichrist, I cant think of any negatives in my own experiences to having a chip implant. But as my work in transhumanism has reached from the US Military to the World Bank to many of the worlds most well-known universities, my chip implant only exasperates this conspiracy.

While people often want to know what other things Ive done to my body, in reality becoming a cyborg is a lot less futuristic and drastic than people think.

For me and for the thousands of people around the world who have implants, its all about functionality. An implant simply makes our lives easier and more efficient. Mine also sends out pre-written text messages when peoples phones come within a few feet of me, which is a fun party trick.

But frankly, a lot of the most transformative technology is still being developed, and if youre healthy like me, theres really not much benefit in doing a lot of biohacking today.

I take nootropics for better brain memory, but theres no conclusive research I know of that it actually works yet. Ive done some brainwave therapy, sometimes called direct neurofeedback, or biofeedback, but I didnt see any lasting changes. I fly drones for fun, and of course I also have Jethro, our family robot.

For the most part, members of the disabled community are the ones who are truly benefiting from transhumanist technologies today. If you have an arm shot off in a war, its cyborg science that gives you a robot arm controlled by your neural system that allows you to grab a beer, play the piano, or shake someones hand again.

But much more dramatic technology is soon to come. And the hope is that it will be availableand accessibleto everyone.

I asked to be added to a volunteer list for an experiment that will place implants in peoples brains that would allow us to communicate telepathically, using AI. (Biohacking trials like this are secretive because they are coming under more intense legal scrutiny.)Im also looking into getting a facial recognition security system for my home. I might even get a pet dog robot; these have become incredibly sophisticated, have fur softer than the real thing (that doesnt shed all over your couch or trigger allergies) and can even act as security systems.

Beyond that, people are using stem cells to grow new teeth, genetic editing to create designer babies, and exoskeleton technology that will likely allow a human to run on water in the near future.

Most people generally focus on one aspect of transhumanism, like just biohacking, or just AI, or just brainwave-tech devices. But I like to try it all, embrace it all, and support it all. Whatever new transhumanist direction technology takes, I try to take it all in and embrace the innovation.

This multi-faceted approach has worked well in helping me build a bridge connecting the various industries and factions of the transhumanist movement. Its what inspired me to launch presidential and California gubernatorial campaigns on a transhumanist platform. Now Im embarking on a new campaign in 2020 for US president as a Republican, hoping to get conservatives to become more open-minded about the future.

The amount of money flowing into transhumanist projects is growing into many billions of dollars. The life extension business of transhumanism will be a $600 billion industry by 2025, according to Bank of America. This is no time for transhumanism to break apart into many different divisions, and its no time to butt heads. We need to unite in our aim to truly change the human being forever.

Transhumanistsit doesnt matter what kind you arebelieve they can be more than just human. The word natural is not in our vocabulary. Theres only what transhumanists can do with the tools of science and technology they create. That is our great calling: to evolve the human being into something better than it is.

Because transhumanism has grown so broadly by now, not all transhumanists agree with me on substantially changing the human being. Some believe we should only use technology to eliminate suffering in our lives. Religious transhumanists believe we should use brain implants and virtual reality to improves our morality and religious behavior. Others tell me politics and transhumanism should never mix, and we must always keep science out of the hands of the government.

We need unity of some significant sort because as we grow at such a fast rate there are a lot of challenges ahead. For example, the conservative Christian Right wants to enact moratoriums against transhumanism. The anarcho-primativists, led by people like the primitivist philosopher and author John Zerzan (who I debated once at Stanford University), want to eliminate much technology and go back to a hunting-gathering lifestyle which they believe is more in tune with Earths original ecology. And finally, we must be careful that the so-called one percent doesnt take transhumanist technology and leave us all in the dust, by becoming gods themselves with radical tech and not sharing the benefits with humanity.

I personally believe the largest danger of the transhumanist era is the fact that within a few decades, we will have created super-intelligent AI. What if this new entity simply decides it doesnt like humans? If something is more sophisticated, powerful, intelligent, and resilient than humans, we will have a hard time stopping it if it wants to harm or eliminate us.

Whatever happens in the future, we must take greater care than we ever have before as our species enters the transhumanist age. For the first time, we are on the verge of transforming the physical structure of our bodies and our brains. And we are inventing machines that could end up being more intelligent and powerful than we are. This type of change requires that not only governments act together, but also cultures, religions, and humanity as a whole.

In the end, I believe that a lot more people will be on board with transhumanism than admit it. Nearly all of us want to eliminate disease, protect our families from death, and create a better path and purpose for science and technology.

But I also realize that this must be done ever so delicately, so as not to prematurely push our species into crisis with our unbridled arrogance. One day, we humans may look back and revel in how far our species has evolvedinto undying mammals, cyborgs, robots, and even pure living data. And the most important part will be to be able to look back and know we didnt destroy ourselves to get there.

See more here:
What it means to be a cyborg in 2019 - Quartz