Presidential longshot at CTIA 2015 promising nothing less than immortality
I hadn’t come to room 3301 of the Sands Expo to see Zoltan Istvan speak. I had come because the official CTIA Super Mobility 2015 conference app had pinged a notification to me that Mike Tyson – a boxer of some repute – was due to participate in a panel discussion and I wanted to startle my editors by landing a quote from Iron Mike.What I found, instead – I have no notion where Tyson was at the appointed time – was Zoltan Istvan, who is running for president. He is polished, polite and friendly. He was also gracious and patient with a reporter who bumbled into his speech by accident and essentially asked, “What the heck is going on here?”For those unfamiliar with his work, Istvan is a columnist for Vice, former reporter for National Geographic and author of a novel called The Transhumanist Wager, which lays out his hyper-futurist philosophy. In essence, he believes that humanity’s goal must be to create technology so advanced that we become immortal – conquering death with the infinitely sharp sword of logic. Through advances in medical science, the gentle melding of humans and machines and various other technological Continue reading