Breaking Banks
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this week on the futurists i think the very first policy and the one i really ran on was the majority of you know i think why my campaign actually did very well is i had suggested that we reduce the budget for the military and the defense and defense american defense by 50 and allocate all that money to health care and technology and science so instead of an industrial military-industrial complex let’s create a science industrial complex and that would filter out in so many ways that would filter out culturally everybody would say okay we’re no longer this you know war mongering nation now we’re a science mongering nation which is so much better

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welcome back to the futurists i’m rob tercek and i’m with my co-host brett king and what we’re interested in is finding out from the people who are thinking about conceiving visualizing and inventing the future we want to understand exactly what makes them tick what motivates them to do what they do and how do they do it and this week we’ve got a superb guest to join us uh he is an entrepreneur a business person who started and owns many businesses he’s also a transhumanist a journalist and a two-time candidate for the president of the united states i’m so thrilled to have you here zoltan estevan welcome to the futurists thank you so much for having me thrilled to have you now you’ve been all over the place you just got back to california right so tell me about your your recent travels well sure um i was in germany at the 2b ahead of futurist congress speaking on transhumanism at bmw world which was amazing because bmw world was an amazing place to speak and then i actually took my mother back to hungary who hadn’t been there for 20 years and she escaped with my father who passed away um in in 1968 and literally they were kind of like freedom fighters had to leave the communist regime so here it is the russians again causing problems but uh it was very interesting to take my mother back to hungary and budapest and let her see that so i had a great uh great time traveling around europe the last few weeks excellent and you just finished a degree at oxford right well i’m actually in the middle of the degree at oxford still okay so yes uh thankfully because i love being there it’s like once you’re there you just want to be a full-time student forever yeah i’m doing a master’s degree in philosophy uh with a specialty of ethics very cool technology to talk about those things yeah yeah we’ll certainly have an opportunity to talk about ethics in tech and ethics in a.i and in transhumanism but before we jump into that i want to ask you a really straight-up question which is what is transhumanism can you give us your definition of it well sure and there are of course many definitions but the latin would say that this is beyond human transhumanism is beyond human but what i like to think about is in terms of technology in the body um transfumous want to go beyond what is the physical form what is biology so we want to integrate ourselves with technologies into ourselves and so give me anything like exoskeleton suits that might let you climb mount everest or even something as simple as driverless cars where you use it all the time and it really changes your life but i like to think of transhumanism as the most radical 10 of the technology that is out there right now and that way transhumanism can always kind of evolve the most radical 10 of the technologies out there right now and and what you’re driving at is that this is technology that would somehow extend or enhance or augment human capability yes a hundred percent with with um you know the specifics and a lot of you’ll hear this from a lot of transgenders many trans humans would like to overcome biological death as kind of a primary concern but a lot you know the much larger field is just adaptation cyborgism how do we use technology in our lives like you know virtual reality uh to to kind of become almost a different species or at least interpret ourselves differently so you know we talk about technology but you’re also talking about the technology of biology right such things as obviously gene therapy is a way for us to improve humanity but things like transgenics where we might actually incorporate some characteristics of other species in our genes as well as the cybernetics you talk about right yeah no doubt and you know transhumanism can incorporate uh genetic editing versus artificial intelligence everything in between and they’re you know a huge push is for genetic editing to enhance ourselves but i would say like if you really ask the hundred year future it does start eliminating biology entirely as something that’s more fragile more complicated maybe something that’s kind of terminal it always wants to you know cellular nature is is terminal and so most transhumanists would say the the far future out a century or so is going to be ones and zeros or silicon or graphene and things like that and not incorporate biology none probably incorporate carbon things like that anymore so this is what they mean when they say to transport or migrate your consciousness to a non-biological substrate you’re talking about basically transporting my consciousness to a chip like silicon well that would be the end goal something a couple hundred years in the future uh you know i don’t wanna maybe it’s possible here in 30 40 years they’re already doing some experiments in silicon valley with brainwave interfacing and consciousness and telepathy and things like that so maybe we’ll get there a lot faster but yes there’s no question that we want to move away from biology which in the end is just something that kind of evolved and while it’s it’s been magnificent for the human race and we’ve had a great chance to experience the world whatever um it really doesn’t satisfy transfumous in the sense that we all die after it and the only thing that really can carries on is our progeny what we want is something where our consciousness our sense of self our identity doesn’t uh get extinguished and that really has a much better chance of being metal of being ones and zeros something that still can be something that’s based on uh where has a longevity that’s much longer than than what we consider the frail world of biology it’s it’s really interesting actually that if you think about like the fermi paradox one of the elements of the fermi paradox is that maybe all intelligences are now ai’s in you know in the the broader galactic community because that seems like the the best chance you have at permanence of retaining consciousness because of the the risk to biology you know um it’s it’s i think that’s an interesting element aside of you know we’re obviously going to come to some fork in the road at some point in the future whether it’s 100 years or 200 years from now where you will have this decision to make does humanity evolve into machine you know machine basis or is there value in keeping the biological energy and this is certainly clearly still a debate amongst transhumanists as well yeah yeah no doubt and let me just say you know i i think the ai age is coming but it’s going to be far shorter than people realize maybe 15 or 30 years and then there’s something else who knows it might be the quantum age might be some kind of other age where things just really evolve into different types of you know uh quantum matter whatever and tell quantum intelligence but the point is that yeah it’s going to go from biology to machine intelligence and then to something else and probably something else after that but it keeps getting smaller more sophisticated more complicated and more interesting now to some of the folks that are listening this probably sounds a little strange um they’re probably saying that sounds a lot like science fiction which you know science fiction is no stranger to the futurist program we are happy to indulge in it um but that’s not what we’re talking about we’re actually talking about something that you can see happening around us today and you could argue that humanity has strived throughout its existence to transcend the limitations of the human lifespan of our biological clocks inside of us uh that’s that’s what civilization is all about finding ways to organize people together to transcend the basic limitations of life and finding durable ways to transmit knowledge to the next generation all we’re doing now is using advanced technology to accelerate that process i mean maybe that’s too simplistic but how do you respond to that to say that transhumanism something happened right now and not in the future well i mean considering you know where we were a hundred years ago certainly we’re in the transhumanist age i just think um you know like i said at the start that if if you take my definition of transtumors being the most radical 10 of the technologies most of us don’t actually have access to that 10 yet for example the robotic eye is something that’s big on the horizon for everyone because it can kind of take in facebook we can do this kind of podcast through it there’s a million different things that ties directly to your your neural system you know right to your brain and you know there’s so many things that could come from a robotic eye and you can’t see in ultraviolet ways yes yes and you can see snakes in the dark you you can see you know if there’s a fire in the house it might wake you up in the middle of night say oh there’s carbon monoxide in there or whatever million reasons that we would want to do it but even though they’re experimenting with it and some people actually have robotic eyes that the fda has approved it’s really not available in a sense that we can go out and voluntarily exchange our eye and get a better eye even though some of those robotic eyes can already see more uh closer when it concerns like telescopically and what not already but the point is a lot of this technology is still out there and only available maybe to the medically disabled or things like that they’re actually the disabled often get the transfumous technologies first which is which is wonderful of course because we can we can help that out um but it’s not always in our hands however if you really look at us driving around cars flying in jet airplanes doing podcasts online you know i mean we really are in a transfumous age compared to 100 years ago they’d probably think this is all witchcraft 100 years ago that’s exactly right yeah no it’s not look at two of us are wearing eyeglasses right that’s a mechanical way to correct for biological vision uh you know people have cochlear implants uh they’re now experimenting with all kinds of contact lenses some people have pacemakers other people have artificial joints you know so bit by bit we are where we can where it’s medically possible we’re starting to replace parts of our biological body but maybe with machines before we look at augmentation of existing humanity which is obviously you know part of this you know one of the side effects of transhumanism is going to be the elimination of disabilities right i think that’s um that sort of flows into your your conversation there zoltan you know um you know like even um the robotic prosthesis um you know i’m a big fan of the work of dr hugh herr and some of the you know some of the developments going on there but um you know how do we deal with the fact that in a few years something like this bionic eye or a robotic prosthesis like a you know robotic arm or limb will be more advanced than our human limbs and people may make a decision ethically you know where does this sit where if someone says all right i’m going to cut off my my arm it’s a perfectly good arm but i’m going to get a better arm out of a robotic prosthetic well i i think you know i think this this question is already on the minds of many biohackers i’m actually a little surprised because i had forecasted about two years ago that sometime in the next 48 months somebody would cut off their arm and put on a robotic arm and at this point they’re doing it for show it’s kind of a media thing but there is a very solid possibility within seven to ten years these robotic limbs might be better than what we have now and people will electively start doing them and i think um when you come to that point it’s going to be sort of like social media there’s a bunch of people out there that say oh i don’t want to go on facebook i don’t want to go on twitter i don’t want to do this but if you’re in a job that requires that and so many jobs do these days then you sort of have to and i feel the same thing is going to happen with robotic limbs at some point if you’re both in construction you and your neighbor and the neighbor can now lift three times the weight you can lift it’s got a robotic arms he’s going to be making more money he’s going to be taking care of his family better he’s going to be getting the bigger house there are social concerns that will probably force us into the cyborg age capitalistic concerns i’m not saying they’re good i’m just saying that this is the way technology has been that those who use it often have an advantage and therefore they acquire it faster and first you know this this is interesting as a policy conversation but you know obviously you ran for president a couple of times um but as you look at governments like you know china and the united states uh european governments and so forth which governments are starting to think about this sort of stuff at a policy level or are we still still absent that in the in the public conversation well i think for sure the biden administration has done better in you know pushing forth technologies including climate change technologies and things like that than the the previous administration but i gotta say you know when you really look at a place like china uh even though there’s a huge amount of social control there’s you know maybe it’s a dictatorship and these kinds of things they seem to be very open-minded to transhumanism and i and i i wonder if a lot of it is cultural you know we live in a very judo christian nation where people are scared of cyborgism people are scared of these things robotic eyes nobody our privacy is such a sacred you know kind of thing um whereas in china there’s like look this is very functional for the nation as a whole and embrace this stuff and so i feel like they may be truly the first transhuman nation and they’re spending a huge amount of money on ai i got to say though just having been in germany there were some wonderful things that i saw in munich’s wonderful new technology and of course japan is always there so it’s a worldwide effort effort i just think to to begin with though america has to really keep on the ball can’t just be silicon valley always carrying the ball it has to be a a a government that embraces us we want to lead the world into the transfumous age because as you know as this great democracy we don’t want to fall behind and we certainly don’t want somebody like russia and china to lead these technologies because that becomes something very dangerous one of the challenges we face as a country in the united states is that uh is this belief that somehow america is exceptional right we’ve been telling ourselves that for 200 years and this faith in american exceptionalism means that it’s very hard for us to accept lessons from other countries because we’re supposed to be the first the best the biggest whatever whatever mythology we’re telling ourselves as a national narrative but the problem with that is it blinds us to advances that are happening so if there’s a country that we view as an antagonist or a competitor these days it’s china then it’s hard for us to take in any information about that country that doesn’t reinforce that perception of china as the you know as the adversary so it’s hard for us to accept that there might be lessons for us there um certainly there’s plenty as you pointed out to criticize about china but what we’re missing there is that the chinese leadership consists in a large part of engineers people who are scientifically true and in fact people understand how to build systems and maintain systems now i contrast that with the point you’ve made you’ve made the observation that most american politicians are lawyers and most of congress is dominated by lawyers and if you wonder why we have such convoluted laws and such a complex regulatory process and such a crazy scheme for immigration in such a crazy convoluted tax system and it goes on and on and on you go through any aspect of where the government touches you it’s super complicated why because it’s written by and for lawyers it’s like the full employment act for attorneys every time they pass a new set of laws in the united states one of the observations or criticisms of the u.s is that because we’re dominated by lawyers and legalistic minds in policy we don’t focus on end goals or outcomes instead we focus on process because that’s what attorneys are focused on did you go through the process and you end up in a situation where a bureaucratic part of the government can say like well we did the 10 steps in the process but no one’s accountable for the outcomes now you ran for president you did it twice there’s no small undertaking tell me about your motivation why did you feel like we needed to change the national level and the leadership what gap were you trying to fill by running for president sure and let me just say in in the first presidential uh campaign i had a policy that really was trying to restrict the amount of lawyers in office and it’s not that lawyers don’t have a great you know something in society they do their jobs but if you have 40 50 percent in congress running the show lawyers are designed to stop things they’re designed to look at all the fine details and when you’re trying to run a nation you can’t always just stop things with fine details sometimes you just got to get out in front and and run with the ball in the open space and i i feel like we had more doctors we had more nurses we had more teachers we had more contractors you know plumbers in office i bet we’d get a lot more done and i almost wonder if there should be some kind of law pass or at least some kind of financial mandate where we support those kinds of careers getting into public office as a way to diversify our government but you know when you run for office first off it’s pretty takes a huge toll both in your family and your personal life and it’s a little hard to be on the camera all the time and doing these things but i i think the main reason i ran is because there are no politicians out there talking about the big questions none of them are addressing genetic editing none of them are addressing ai at least they’re not addressing it in a very specific way when you for example had the presidential debates you didn’t hear big giant questions about ai and you know i can tell you we barely had a conversation on ubi and things like that yes yes and i can tell you you know at oxford in the philosophy department the biggest question right now is artificial intelligence wow what are we going to do 10 15 20 years when these things are maybe as smart as us who knows what’s going to happen what are the ethics should we go forward and yet this would be something you would think leaders of our country would be you know forming committees doing this doing that and instead um it’s just too dangerous of a question because as soon as you talk about it you lose voters they kind of look at them the voters look at it right at it as they would look at me which was oh zoltan has some interesting ideas but he shouldn’t be elected those are weird questions let’s talk about taxes or immigration and yet ai is the most important question and so is genetic editing these kinds of questions that we can start embodying it just it’s sadly they don’t want anything about it well you know you’ve got there’s so many implications just to ai the techno unemployment angle that rob and i often debate that on this show um but the the the ethics of gene therapy you know in vitro and then you know um you know like you know mass mass inoculation you know like just just think of the reaction to the covert vaccine and now you’re suddenly going to be talking about doing gene therapy to eliminate parkinson’s or alzheimer’s from the genome right you know how how’s that gonna you know play at it from a policy perspective but we are going to have to deal with this at some point in the next few years we’re going to have to have this debate so the longer you’re talking about it the broader um you know you can you can get in terms of consensus building on this the easier path to policy so i i don’t get the whole avoidance of this i get it from a politics perspective but it is it’s like cutting off your nose despite your face and and this is one of the reasons that i think china is is going to have significant advantages in the 21st century because this sort of stuff they see as an um elements to enable china to outperform the united states economically and intellectually you know and and yeah so that’s a real concern particularly when it comes to ai right when it comes to ai the nation that gets to a real nationwide scale ai that embodies their cultural values and their way of thinking in a way that’s a new arms race they’ll achieve a kind of supremacy and everyone else is going to have to catch up i know you’ve written a bit about that share with us your views all the time no it is an arms race and i mean when you talk about it and this is why it’s so baffling that america doesn’t want to confront these things we have an arms race with genetic editing too super soldiers eliminating disease eliminating aging and whoever gets their first is going to not only get the patents but they’re also going to have the economic fallout from it which is going to be massive they’re going to become these are trillion dollar industries maybe multi-multi-trillion dollar industries so it’s imperative that an american america gets their first that a democratic kind of nation achieves these things because i worry especially with ai the idea that you could send viruses out to other ais as they’re already doing in cyber security warfare and whatnot so if you have the upper hand you can hold the upper hand and definitely in fact this is almost different than the arms race because the armature race was kind of like 60 40 you can still destroy each other but in the ai arms race it’s whoever gets to the top ends up controlling the geopolitical uh kind of environment entirely and because it’s not you can’t one can’t destroy the other one only only the top one can kind of sprout out viruses and everything else has to remain subdued and therefore you have this uh you know this this thing where it’s not mutual destruction it’s just simple victory and of course if china or russia gets there and putin has said this before he said whoever gets to the great ai first is gonna you know be that as the victor with all the spoils so we really need to watch this now this is why i wish politicians would take it more seriously i i do understand that military leaders are and i know they’re probably pushing the politicians but at the same time i wish politicians would come out openly and say listen this is america’s game we better be in it before it’s an irony isn’t it we’re the most technologically advanced society in the world and we have leaders who are technologically illiterate and you see that when for instance they interview people like mark zuckerberg you know when when congress calls those people forward and interviews them it’s embarrassing to watch our 70 and 80 year old senators try to formulate an intelligent question i mean it’s almost laughable right but these are our leaders these are the people formulating policy so zoltan what policies would you recommend that the united states enact that we’re not currently enacting well i think the very first policy and the one i really ran on was the majority of you know i think why my campaign actually did very well is i had suggested that we reduce the budget for the military and the defense and defense american defense by 50 and allocate all that money to health care and technology and science so instead of an industrial military-industrial complex let’s create a science industrial complex and that would filter out in so many ways that would filter out culturally everybody would say okay we’re no longer this you know war-mongering nation now we’re a science mongering nation which is so much better and i think it’s really a matter of budget you know 20 percent of the gdp still remains for defense and i think you know the point of the story is if you spend that for science you spend that for health care we could take care of real wars we have a war against cancer we have a war against alzheimer’s we have a war against disease out there that we should be fighting and we could win if we put the resources there so that’s that would be my very first policy is reduce the budget of the military take the spare money and put it directly into science which would definitely help america more than i can think of anything else right now well you know i imagine that’s going to get a lot of votes yeah um the military-industrial complex right but um zoltan it’s interesting you know that you were studying at oxford you know you’re studying ethics but you’re also studying philosophy because um you know i i want to get into that after the after the break in terms of where this takes us philosophically as well but um in in the in in the time that you’ve been in the transhumanist community what progress have we made here that you can sort of identify you know either societally or in terms of policy that is starting to see real benefit well i i think for one thing since i’ve been around maybe 10 years in the in sort of the public life my novel the transfumous wager came out and that sort of pushed me to this publicity uh i guess level of publicity um we sort of have been tackling disabilities they are actually being um uh eliminated to some extent people are getting better for example you had an arm shut off into 2010 the neural systems weren’t very functional back then now people can get an arm shot off and still start playing the piano with the robotic arm so you are seeing things like that take place i think a lot of the technologies are still in their infancy genetic editing we’ve had a few you know like they had the thing in china where they did something with the two daughters and tried to get rid of hiv but then the whole world came down with the moratorium and it was kind of like swash i wish we would move forward with some of these ideas even if there are risks to some individuals because the broader implications for the public could be massive in terms of saving lives and saving uh you know saving people from death and so i think in the real world transhumanism as a community has grown a lot it’s grown as a movement you hear it all the time but a lot of the best technologies are still out there probably in the next five to 15 years with brain interface with some of the actual advancements that the fda is going to pass with genetic editing those things are going to start really changing our lives i wish i had more positivity to say here but a lot of it is still you know in research and trying to get through the governmental system so that it can be implemented in our lives before we go to break i want to ask you one last question so we’ve had a couple different speakers talking about the future on the show who were concerned about the emotional response to the future in particular john hagel who’s the legend you know in terms of his ability to forecast digital change and network change and he’s now focused his entire consulting practice this is a guy who ran a big chunk of deloitte and a big big chunk of mckinsey he’s changed his entire consulting practice now to focus on emotional responses fear of the future talk about fear of the future because many of the concepts you’re sharing right now they’re going to instill a fear response and some of the folks that are hearing about it well to be honest i think a lot of fear comes from your cultural baggage um or if you’re uh let’s say a born-again christian then you really don’t want to chip in anywhere in your body especially not in your brain or anything like that and even if you’re somebody who’s not doesn’t have any kind of cultural baggage you still need still may be afraid of you know cameras all over the place that are taking away your privacy i feel like one of the big problems in society is not looking at the history it’s really clear when you look at the history history shows that the world has gotten better people’s lives are longer there’s more prosperity less people are dying at birth people are happier and it’s always because science and technology has made it that way there are vaccines there are this there’s that and people’s lives get better you can see it on any kind of grass any kind of scale so you just have to think no matter how crazy the technology is that graph and scale is going to continue now believe me when we introduced anesthesia and all these other things and fire whatever it was people freaked out they thought oh this is magic and witchcraft it’s always magic and witchcraft but the historical scale shows that things are getting better our lives are getting better and that’s what we need to base our our content and base our feelings on it that we can trust science and technology after hundreds and hundreds of years of making the human race a better place yeah this is the story of humanity we suffer for millions of years then we finally figure out a way to kind of incrementally make it a little bit better and people can resist that they cling to the past it’s like what we know they clean they clean they resist resist and then finally the science gets a little bit better and now it can be implemented and what do you know long behold it works and then we immediately take it for granted and then we complain about it when it doesn’t work you know i experienced that when i was doing mobile video at first uh in in 1999 people thought putting a video on a phone was ridiculous i got kicked out of people’s offices because they told me i was out of my mind by 2001 it was a thing small but here it is 20 years later and now everybody’s using video on their mobile phone to communicate and we totally take it for granted but in the beginning it was preposterous and that movement from preposterous to possible to probable to now we take it for granted and it’s fully deployed i think it’s quite an interesting time it only takes about 20 years for this stuff to grab hold and to really go to mass scale let’s take a quick break you’re listening to the futurists i’m brett king and my co-host rob tursek and we are interviewing zoltan estevan ran for president twice and he’s a trans humanist we’ll be right back after this break [Music] welcome to breaking banks the number one global fintech radio show and podcast i’m brett king and i’m jason henricks every week since 2013 we explored the personalities startups innovators and industry players driving disruption in financial services from incumbents to unicorns and from cutting edge technology to the people using it to help create a more innovative inclusive and healthy financial future i’m jp nichols and this is breaking banks

hey there welcome back to the futurists i’m rob terczyk with co-host brett king and this week we are interviewing zoltan istvan and zoltan is a is a futurist about as hardcore futures as you can possibly imagine one of the main concepts that he has developed he’s got a lot of interesting ideas if you look at his wikipedia page you can read about all of them one of the ones i want to bring up is about immortality and transcending the limitations of human life and the acronym here is tef and it stands for teleological egocentric functionalism so zoltan tell us a little bit about the tef sure well tess is is the philosophy that’s based in my novel the transhumas wager and basically it’s just kind of broken down through the words teleological means something that’s of design egocentric means it’s based on the individual and functionalism means it’s rational and reasonable and so it’s you know it’s almost like a a fun version of the scientific method basically except for the difference between maybe the scientific method and this is that it inherently tests inherently believes that there is a design in the universe not one that’s done by god not one that’s necessarily done by any kind of spiritual thing but it’s this design that we are improving no matter how you look at the universe um things are organizing in a way to get us to a place that’s more complex than where we came from and that place for many transhumanists the very first stop is to try to overcome death and the reason we want to overcome death is because we love life we think life is great we don’t want to you know we just don’t want to die and then then it’s kind of gone forever we spend our 80 years here so tef’s first and kind of foremost uh thing that advocates for is really that in this design in this evolution of humanity humanity into whatever kind of trans human being we’re going to become we’re trying to overcome death biologically so that we can continue this journey of whatever we’re going to go into it’s sort of been this pursuit of humanity for the ages right um you know immortality you know the elixirs of life the fountain of youth this is this is if you like at the core of human existence it’s like the ultimate um you know like you’ve got the big questions of why are we here but ultimately the ultimate human existence is where we can remove death and so there are you know as as we’ve debated there are sort of two paths to that there’s there’s biological immortality um but there is the the easier path from a technology perspective may be technological immortality um but where do you lie in terms of the issue where that enhancing or augmenting humanity could potentially create two classes of human because either based on the cost of these enhancements or augmentations or based on say religious beliefs and or moral or ethical considerations some people may not want to be enhanced um and you could have like a fork of inhumanity in terms of our evolution well you know let me just say first i almost think we already are in two classes the the rich on average live 25 longer than the poor and then the the things they have access to good clean food clean water housing it’s already completely in my opinion an unfair system which is why i’ve been a big supporter of universal basic income but that’s another story but so i think um in the future though this might become worse and and inequality is growing so there’s really you know it’s one of the things i’ve been telling people as much awesome technology as we create if half the world gets left behind and we create a dystopia we’re going to look back and say oh we blew it you know so it’s something like we all humanity has to go all together and you have to make all these technologies available and don’t be wrong i’m not like trying to defeat uh capitalism or things like that i’m just saying that there has to be a point when all of us actually improve uh the lives of everyone in in order so that we don’t end up the species that has destroyed like all the hollywood movies are just like that you know they always end with some bad guy ruling the world that can’t be the case in transhumanism i don’t want to think that i spent my entire career defending transhumanism only to have a dystopia occur so there has to be some kind of government safeguards or economic policies in place that make it so that all of us go and that even if we are two classes um because i’m not sure that’s unavoidable i would wish we could at least the the second class would have all the basics covered food housing they would be very happy and again that’s why i support a universal basic income but i am worried as well that we’re going to end up in a dystopian there will be two classes and that’s going to be up to people to look deep inside themselves and make the right choices it’s it’s very yeah i think that that question of economics you know you’ve raised it so i’ll throw it in there you know um we again rob and i talk about this frequently on the show but um you know at a certain point in terms of human advancement there’s only so much that capitalism and economics can do for us when it comes to these advances that humanity can make and the advances we’ll need to make just in terms of climate mitigation and resilience and food scarcity and all of those sorts of things they go almost beyond economic considerations that we may need to sort of think about you know what’s the purpose of the economy if it’s not to look after the basic needs of citizens um you know like you could argue that the american economy is the most successful economy the world’s ever seen but if you look at the basic needs of citizens then you could argue it’s a failure right particularly in respect to health care and and so forth so from an economic policy perspective you know in 20 or 30 years how do you see the whole transhumanist movement affecting the way we think about capitalism and economics well you know i i think at the at the very core of it is technology improving the world the more technology we have the better the world is going to be and the reason i think that is because it’s technology and science that cures the diseases it’s a technology and science that might be able to reverse obesity which causes people to die early it’s technology and science i mean you have friends who are working on splicing their their skin with dna plant dna so that they can go out into the sun and photosynthesize maybe there is a cure for the six thousand kids that are starving to death every day that isn’t about growing more food but actually changing who they are so i think that the quicker we get to the transhumanist era the faster we’re going to be able to stop suffering worldwide across the world that comes a lot of it comes from our biology now that’s rather grandiose thinking and radical but in this sense it’s been very conflicting for me because i want to get to the future as quickly as possible at the same time in the meantime i don’t want to see all this suffering and this same thing is happening at oxford when i just took an entire week of studies on the environment it’s it’s clear that we’re screwing up the plan it’s totally clear um with climate change but it’s what’s not so clear is how much we should spend on fixing the environment with new radical technologies geoengineering bioengineering all these other things and that’s what is actually one of the big debates right now at oxford is not do we reduce our global footprint but do we actually just put all our money and energy into technological fixes and i have the same thing with humanity and transhumanism do we try to get everyone to the transfumous age as quickly as possible will that mitigate the suffering the least or do we try to slow down and actually make it that everyone’s lives is better i don’t have the right answer yet it’s just a big debate uh you know i think if you want if if you want to define what a futurist is i think you’ve defined it right there which is we’re all in a hurry to get to the future we’re just trying to figure out what’s the safest and most ethical way to get there you know and people are going to take different paths i mean there’s no way to control it in fact i think as i listen to you zoltan i hear you saying that there’s a role for government to play and some of the folks listening to this might sort of react to that because we’ve been primed to react to any definition of government being active or taken a role in industrial policy for instance in a negative way because we’ve been indoctrinated for 50 years with this neoliberal concept uh that you know government should be small enterprise should be free markets should be free and so forth that’s been the dominant if you say you know economic theory but you can actually say it’s kind of the dominant philosophy of governing right we’ve we’ve turned the whole uh perspective of government into an economic exercise it’s all cost and benefit and should we spend here and should we not spend there um where i don’t think prior to the 70s that was how they viewed government government was there to check on the wildness of business you know the more uh the more radical impulses of business and business was out of control i think at this stage right now with global companies that you know so large that their their their on valuations exceed the gdp of most countries on the planet i think it’s safe to say we’re back in the gilded age right we’re now in a technological yielded age and these countries are hard to manage they they’re they’re almost unregulated kim stanley robinson calls them um transnational corporations i think that’s a great way of thinking because they transcend sort of national boundaries and nationals yeah i call them globe spanning information empires right they are empires they’re accountable to nobody the us government is having a very difficult time formulating regulatory policy it’s an open question of whether you know our federal trade commission can even regulate the companies at this scale so uh we’re right in the middle of politics philosophy and economics and i want to turn it back to zoltan to tell me a little bit more about your philosophy of government and your philosophy about free markets how do you respond to a free marketeer who says oh you’re just a guy you’re shill for big government do you want to control business well i think one of the the big and you kind of mention this is one of the the most important laws in the books is our uh view of how we deal with monopolies i also agree with you that technology companies have simply become too large unmanageable they just can’t even be regulated and i think maybe what we need is and this wouldn’t you know the billionaires don’t necessarily have to hate this idea because in the end of the day it’s not whether they have one giant company it’s a question of whether they have maybe three or four big companies but i do think the government should step in with stronger anti-monopolistic practices that would keep companies smaller and keep them more nimble and let a lot of the startups in silicon valley actually have a chance to make it not necessarily be bought out and this kind of environment this kind of playing field would be far better for the average consumer in my opinion than these giant monopolies have become so big they’re bigger than countries and you’re right they can’t be regulated anymore and then they have often people at the very top of the chain of command whether it’s elon musk or mark zuckerberg or whatever that are just to my you know opinion eccentric and and not necessarily you know doing the best for humanity i want people at the they’re uninformed about philosophy they have no knowledge of ethics they demonstrate no ability to implement ethics in their business or manage that process and they seem to be amoral in the sense that they’re just about hey we can do this and we’re not even going to think about the pros and cons or you know maybe the arguments again government’s just going to become ai it’s just going to be a down in the future that’s the best way you know but that that process you say that bret but but how many people want algorithmic justice i mean anyone who’s dealt with the legal system knows that that is a very complicated and nuanced set of arguments right uh there’s no ai that could handle a court case right now yeah no i i tend i tend to think that the way to do this is when companies become too big they just need to be stopped and people need to say look you need to break off into other companies with new leadership and you know as an entrepreneur myself it’s like yes that sucks but i’m still going to be able to make all the money that i want to make it’s just not going to be as easy and yet for the consumer that might make all the difference because instead of one google you might have four different kinds of search engines who are then competing and making the process better and who knows maybe with that kind of competition people the companies might become even bigger and better than they had it’s really just a question of because i’ve got to be honest like given how i i’m a believer at this point that social media might be akin to something like smoking i bet in 10 15 years we’re gonna wake up and say wow uh this is actually sort of a disease and we need to regulate it on a real way because it’s hurting people’s lives like i see my mother who’s 75 years old and she’s on facebook and she believes what she reads it wasn’t designed and they know that and maybe you and i and brett don’t think that way but there are so many millions of americans that are being true and i feel like somebody needs to step in and say just like they stepped in with smoking hey this is bad for you it’s bad for the country it’s causing division we’re gonna we’re on the brink of sometimes it seems like a civil war this can’t be good so therefore it needs to be stopped and i think in that way this is where a lot of my sort of libertarian inclinations fall apart because i say wow you know we need someone to step in and make it so that we don’t destroy ourselves just so someone else can make a dollar the broader context of sort of the transhumanist movement and these things you’re talking about setting policy you know reaching consensus working out what is good for humanity what is bad for humanity um you know the humanity plus uh movement and so forth there’s been some contention around this so you know one of the greatest challenges we’ve got is just formulating ethics when you have such like just look at the abortion issue in the united states right now trying to get an agreement on what the ethics of you know early life is and you know and birth and women’s uh bodily autonomy and those sort of things just the ethics of that is a massive minefield how do we create an ethical you know how do we get consensus on ethics when it comes to things like human augmentation neural chips you know all of those sort of things well i think to begin with you really need to take it more seriously and that’s a a tough call because how do you get someone to take more seriously but if you had somebody a president really cared about this they might say you know go on national television say you know what country’s coming to a challenging time we’re seeing china do these crazy things that are ourselves as well let’s form a committee or let’s form some kind of exploration of this stuff maybe an organization like nasa except specifically that targets ethics simply i mean this is you know i’m part of the uh center of uh practical ethics at oxford and that’s what you know julian savalesko did when he founded that institute he’s like wow the world needs more ethics and so hopefully we will come to a time when we have a lot more people dealing and asking these questions but right now everything’s being so politicized that i’m i kind of feel like a lot of the ethics is getting drowned out and the field of ethics is just not keeping up with moore’s law which is kind of the fundamental problem is technology and science grow far quicker than we can even think about we can’t do enough podcasts to to talk about these issues because in silicon valley the next generation of chip is already being born and it changes the dynamics of the conversation we’re having today and that i don’t have any answer for i just know we need more ethicists let’s talk about the singularity because where all this leads to this arms racist competition this ever increasing pace of innovation uh this all points to some form of super intelligence tell me a little bit about your view on the singularity well sure you know the transsuma’s view is that the singularity is this time when artificial intelligence becomes so sophisticated that first off our understanding of it can know is no longer possible it’s just way beyond our human understanding and you know someone i think david kelly have wired and said uh you know the next five minutes will be more complicated of history the next five minutes than the entire historical uh time before that so we’re talking about massive change in the singularity that is way beyond our three pounds of meat that we carry on our shoulders and for this reason it’s kind of a quasi uh spiritual concept in the transfumous community we’d speak about it like who knows what’s going to happen well there’ll be things like technological resurrection where you’re able to re you know maybe either go back in time or refig configure reverse engineer atomic matter and print out dead people that once were alive just as they once were i mean crazy weird concepts in our transhumanist community but the point is it’s really a fun thing to think about and if ray kurzweil is right um you know it probably is at some point in the next 50 years we will come to a point when these machines become so sophisticated artificial intelligence that they keep growing and they simply leave us behind and if we’re not merged with them and this is the key about the singularity if you want to take place in singularity you’re going to have to upload or at least have a cyborg mind that can keep up with it because if you can’t then you’re going to miss it completely and it could be happening in the blink of an eye i like ian banks banks’s approach to this in the culture novels i think that melding of you know technology and biology and you know the the the culture series is is what i would like to envisage is the sort of perfect balance between those two worlds and also you know you you had those technologically advanced humans the augmented humans that you know saw that saw their um responsibility of taking care of you know these other human cultures that were sort of more natural humans as well but let’s let’s get a bit more sci-fi here zoltan we’ve got about you know we’ve got a few minutes left in the podcast because that wasn’t sci-fi enough [Laughter] it’s all been sci-fi this one’s great this is a great episode um uh you know looking out 30 to 50 years um obviously the ability to download consciousness into a you know a digital construct to to use a digital avatar of ourselves whether in the in the metaverse or the meat versus as uh others call it and so forth all of that but what technologies or what advancements that humanity is set to make most excites you about the future what do you think um you know in terms of what individual things or collectively could really change the way we view the human species and sort of our purpose as a species sure well let me just say um you know for your listeners that uh there’s a documentary that came out in one of my presidential campaigns called immortality or bust and uh it juxtaposed this when i was driving a coffin across the country with my father dying at the same time here i was trying to spread life extension my father was dying and my father died from his fifth heart attack and so what really i i think attracts me is even though i speak a lot of ai and technology is really when we get the 3d bio printing and stem cell technologies the ability to re recreate ourselves you know had my father been able to kind of had his own heart printed out or even an artificial heart he might still be here alive today and since a quarter of us are going to die from heart disease this is massive but it’s not just heart disease it’s most people die from organ failure so definitely i’m believing in the next 15 to 25 years there will routinely be bioprinted organs that we put in our bodies that allow us to live a lot longer and that’s going to be wonderful but the in the in the greater scheme of things we’re going to have to get away from biology and into something that incorporates um 1 0 silicone probably graphene graphene is a lot better than silicone and so that will be that probably the new material the future less we come up with another one and i think we’re gonna either be upload ourselves and continue to have biological selves here or maybe the upload itself will help us and maybe it’s not a perfect upload maybe it’s some kind of compilation of ourselves but the point is i’d say within 50 years i would be very surprised if we don’t have little angels on our shoulders that are almost our identical personalities maybe making really good decisions for us they might be in our head they may be just through a chip implant they may be watching us all over because we have cameras or scanners and things like this but don’t be surprised if there’s a lot of roberts and a lot of brett’s and a lot of zoltans walking around helping us do the kind of things that we’re doing including maybe attending meetings and putting on podcasts so i see one people think people don’t talk about is they think oh i don’t want to have more than one me out there but i actually think it’s going to be very useful from a work perspective is from a philosophical perspective to have many of us out there even if they’re just digital copies that are imperfect and so i see in a 50-year future given ai given brain implants given um uploading possibilities that there will be a lot more humans it just won’t be physical form it’ll be much more digital and those digitals will have lives of their own sort of like family members that bring back maybe goods commerce ideas art things like that and so in the future i see a lot more population just not necessarily of ourselves our own you know mini knees i guess but um it’s it’s going to be radical in that sense and i think it’s something that a lot of people don’t think about they don’t realize that if they had a chance to upload themselves they wouldn’t just upload one version themselves for survival reasons they might upload 100 and that’s really going to change the dynamics almost like traffic in los angeles something like that think of it in terms of wow the crowds let’s let’s build on that and expand it because of course we’re what we’re leaving out of this equation right now you’re talking about people replicating themselves perhaps in silicon perhaps in graphene or some other substrate cool concept but let’s not forget we’re already hyper networked we’ve been hyper network now for 20 years that’s a baked in expectation that people have and those digital selves will be living on the network and they’ll be hyper networked and so we arrive at the possibility of a networked mind and if you want to look for one event that would really rapidly set apart the people who are hyper networked and have backed up their brains to the computer to the cloud separate them from the people who don’t want that kind of technological enhancements um the network mind is going to do it because suddenly you have insect access to an ever growing and ever increasing number of minds and you’d have thereby kind of a force multiplier on what a human mind’s capable of and no doubt there would also be an artificial intelligence uh augmentation as well and so you’ll have like superhumans uh superhumans who are hyper might have multiple cells uh that’s a scary idea i think for some people but for other people it’s exhilarating right like you want to get there and you’d be faced with that choice you can imagine you know you would go to like the brain backup clinic and they’d say okay would you like to network your mind or not check the box and you’re like why not right like you could choose not to if you want to keep your stuff personal but why not get superpowers why not connect with all the minds it’s like longevity treatments it’s the same thing as like you know like you know the longevity treatments like you know that question should i get it you know my next visit to the doctor or not it’s like why wouldn’t you get a longevity treatment if it improves your long-term health the bioprinting stuff all of that i think you know that’s eventually where you run to yeah i mean you have a scenario the rich methuselahs though these like ancient geriatrics walking around who’ve been backed up and have all the power and money and you know and i don’t know that’s a kind of weird idea the world populated with these hundred year olds or 200 year old people but it’s possible yeah no and i i mean i would personally do it i just don’t know if i would want to stay there indefinitely i’m much more like about connecting with one other person i would love to like the the future of love could be so amazing because you might actually be in someone’s mind and maybe you can then exit when you want but uh i’m thinking in terms of soul mate kind of connections that could be incredible what technology could actually do and i think for religious people could be great you might actually be able to commune in real time with you know with your god or something like that there’s so many different things and the same thing with you know if you’re uh you know doing a phd in archaeology you might be able to immerse your brain in all the archaeological inventions or ideas that have ever been done and be an expert on it in a very short time and then really be the best in your field i mean so the future of these things is amazing um but the privacy issues are so wild and scary that i think that’s really what’s going to keep a lot of people from saying you know a lot of the ethics is up at night trying to figure out what do we do about that yeah so i know i know we’re running out of time but i just got a couple of questions i want to wrap up with obviously what we can do to help the trans humanist movement and raise awareness but um where does this fit into um the whole multi-planetary um species thing you know obviously you know we could you know our digital cells or our like technologically enhanced cells may be better adapted adapted at living outside of the planet well i think most trans humans want to get off planet i certainly do i think that’s one of the great things about it but i think uh you know in in in real time what i would like to do is you know i i don’t know if you know my history but i sailed for seven years mostly around the world i was alone on the boat a lot and it was just amazing going country to country reading books i dream of a day when i can go from planet to planet in my own little spaceship so that that that could be a possibility through transhumanist technology and all of us then have this new world of exploration the human race is expanding off planet that’s perfect um but i i i i think you know whether it’s a digital self or not i don’t know if i feel very happy that my digital self is out there enjoying all this stuff and not me right right that creates the conundrum as well because you’re like then the digital self really isn’t me it’s almost like my brother but uh you know i mean it’s better than nothing i suppose but that’s really realistic i mean if we’re talking about if we can put a a realistic quotient on this discussion uh you know look all space exploration that’s happening right now is being done by robotic systems we have a space station but they’re not really in outer space they’re in low orbit you know so they’re not really doing space exploration you know the united states and other countries have given up on that um and that’s because of the life support systems for biological bodies that’s what most of the payload is when you launch a rocket into space so it seems quite quite feasible or plausible i guess to say that well if you can back yourself up onto silicon and you can send that personality out that’s the way humans are going to get to other uh other galaxies

mars is solely inhabited by artificial robots and you know tele-operated machines now yeah so yeah that’s right no human consciousness and and we i totally support that i just would be sad that it’s my digital version or robotic version and not me but then maybe maybe they’ll be able to figure it out or maybe by then you could commune directly with that entity out there and you’re thinking the same thoughts as one of the same so uh you know who knows how it’ll end up but i think um either way it’s gonna be very interesting and it’s good times it kind of brings us back to the point brett was making at the beginning of the show which is if there is uh alien life it’s probably an ai it’s probably an ai and it’s a machine rather than a biological system wow okay hey great fun talking to you zoltan thanks for joining us so what you know how do people find out more about you and the you know the transhumanist movement in general well with the transfumous movement i think it’s just best to google it there’s news that comes out every day but there’s a ton of facebook groups uh maybe a hundred on uh on facebook so they’re all transhumanism with some big groups and with my work you can just google’s old tennis phone or my website sultanichon.com or i’m on all social media and i try to post every day something about transhumanism so i’m there you can find it of course uh if your listeners want just try to amazon prime picked up this documentary immortality or bust about one of my presidential campaigns driving a giant coffin across the country it’s a lot of fun it’s very sad because my father dies but it really gives a good introduction because we travel across the country meeting all the transhumanists and that’s really what the movie uh was about so that was a lot of fun if you want to ever watch on amazon prime super zoltan ishvan thank you for joining the futurists this week we’ve really enjoyed the conversation thank you so much for having me [Music] well that’s it for the futurists this week if you like the show we sure hope you did please subscribe and share it with people in your community and don’t forget to leave us a five star review that really helps other people find the show and you can ping us anytime on instagram and twitter at futurist podcast for the folks that you’d like to see on the show or the questions you’d like us to ask thanks for joining and as always we’ll see you in the future