The Five Most Revolutionary Scientific Trends to Look Out For In 2017

2016 was a powerful year for science and technology innovation. CRISPR gene editing technology became nearly a household name with its potential to affect humanity. SpaceX rockets landed themselves. And a baby was born with three parents.

But what’s in store for 2017?

While some decry the developed world is falling apart due to changing political environments, science and technology innovation is likely to continue thriving. In fact, innovation is occurring so fast, I believe 2017 will be the year governments begin to consider forming new science, technology, and futurist agencies and organizations to better contend with the rapid change. The old ones are mired in bureaucracy, conservative religious ideology, and the past—unable to contend with issues like nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, and virtual reality. Borrowing from The Wizard of Oz, “We’re not in Kansas anymore.”

Let’s take a look at the top five developments I anticipate for 2017:

1) Neural prosthetics—the idea we can benefit greatly by connecting our thoughts directly to the computing power of machines—will become the holy grail of human progress.

Artificial intelligence and robotics are developing so quickly that in the next decade, I believe they’ll take away approximately 25 million jobs in America from humans. In case you don’t know how many jobs that is, that’s about three times as many jobs as was lost during the recent Great Recession in the US.

America should look at natural disasters and past wartime scenarios to get an idea of how disruptive AI and robotics will be to the economy. Already, the world’s largest hedge fund is creating tech to replace its workers with machine intelligence in less than five years time. Don’t expect Wall Street to have human workers in 10 years time, unless they can somehow upgrade themselves.

That’s where neural prosthetics comes in. It’s a technology that can and might keep humans competitive indefinitely. These so-called brain readers and communicators will allow humans to utilize AI—in real time cognition—for its own intelligence. After all, what’s better than a super smart human mind? A super smart human mind directly connected to a super smart artificial intelligence.

Personally, I love this idea. And I have volunteered to be a test subject of implants and headsets that read brain waves. My senior thesis in college was on brains in a vat, and the idea of being a part of the Matrix fascinates me.

The use of neural prosthetics will change human nature, but without it, I doubt humans can be competitive in the future to machine labor. Besides without human labor, there’s no guarantee capitalism, as we know it, can survive. After all, capitalism is based on human labor, and if machines do everything, then it’s likely to end up a very different economic system.

Almost by default, to keep humans competitive in the labor force, we’ll have to become transhuman—and utilize radical technology as intrinsic parts of our bodies. Otherwise, only the very rich will own robotics and AI companies, leaving the rest of us in a jobless dystopia.

One company called Kernel, which launched this year with a 100 million dollars of the founders own money, tech visionary Bryan Johnson, is leading the way. I expect many more startups to join the fray in 2017.

2) President-elect Trump will hire an anti-red tape FDA chief that streamlines the Food and Drug Administration, making more drugs available to save lives and improve health.

No matter how you look at it, the FDA has become a bureaucracy monster. Early in 2016, I wrote about this FDA problem in Motherboard:

“On average, a new drug takes at least 10 years from creation to arrival in your cabinet in America. Additionally, Matthew Herper at Forbes reports that about $5 billion is spent on average developing a new drug. New medical devices—especially those life saving ones—take upwards of seven years to hit the market. For patients, some who are dying to get the drugs and devices, this may as well be an eternity. Nearly all of this has to do with the FDA and the bureaucratic labyrinth that exists to make sure medicine is safe in America.

Now don’t get me wrong, I also want safe medicine. And for the most part, the FDA does that. But sometimes there are more important things than safe medicine, especially if you’re suffering from a debilitating and terminal disease. For example, many people believe access to medicine before they die is more important than whether that medicine is safe or not. And with such a long, laborious, and costly medical approval process in the US, many inventors and companies that would like to create new medicine don’t do it because of the prohibitive procedure of bearing a product from conception to sale.”

One such choice for FDA Chief being floated around by media outlets is free market-minded Jim O’Neill, managing director for Mithril Capital, which was cofounded by Peter Thiel. Mr. O’Neill, who formerly worked in the George W. Bush administration, would be just the kind of person to cut the fat off the FDA and get America better drugs for better health.

3) Driverless cars will appear in all major American cities, challenging state and local laws.

This month Uber was in my hometown of San Francisco, testing out its new driverless vehicles. After several reports of driverless cars running red lights, the California DMW quickly shut it down, sending it packing to Arizona where laws are more favorable.

I found this sad, as did many techno-optimists. Being in driverless cars is one of the more visceral experiences people can have that make them understand the transhumanist age has indeed arrived. Driverless cars will be a philosophical turning point for many Americans, many who are not sure they really believe the future will be automation-ubiquitous.

But like California, some governments—often led by luddite lobbyists and general fear—will resist, setting up the stage for US Congress to consider the matter. At some point, the Supreme Court may even have to get involved to okay such change. The facts are the transportation industry will be completely different animal within 10 years time. And 2017 will be the year local governments rise up to grapple with the coming driverless world.

4) Life Extension science will go mainstream with multiple science breakthroughs and new companies joining the quest for the “Fountain of Youth”

2016 was a banner year or the life extension industry. Even Mark Zuckerberg came out and established his own multi-billion dollar commitment with the goal of curing, preventing, or managing all human disease by the end of the century. The rise of CRISPR genetic editing further gave the movement new firepower as the possibility to rewrite our very own genetic code—including our hereditary shortcoming and the aging process—became not just possible, but plausible. Finally, events like the thousand-person life extension-oriented RAAD Festival, the Longevity Cookbook, and my own Immortality Bus made headlines as America wondered aloud what indefinite lifespans meant—and how it might affect humanity.

Despite that, we still live in a country with strong deathist attitudes. Ironically, I suspect that life extension will become much more well known in a Republican controlled-government, as the conflict between religious values and science allowing us to live indefinitely ultimately reach a climax, one that will end up in civil strife and Congressional discussion.

I’ve said this on my presidential campaign trail before: The more people that label transhumanism as something dangerous, the more popular it’ll become. That’s human nature for you.

5) Because many leaders in the incoming Trump Administration don’t believe in climate change, scientists will change their focus from carbon footprint prevention to radical geoengineering tech to save the planet.

As a journalist who’s traveled extensively to write more than a dozen environmental stories—many for National Geographic—I’ve seen some of the Earth’s destruction firsthand. I’ve witnessed the decimation of millions of hectares of Paraguay’s forests. I’ve seen major oil spills in the ocean. And as a Communications Director at nonprofit WildAid I’ve searched for extremely endangered species in Southeast Asia—some that are simply no longer there.

It’s sad what we as a people have done to Planet Earth. But we will rebuild. And I believe we will make Earth more plentiful and beautiful than ever before. How? With radical technology that is right now being created in laboratories around the world.

In just 10 years time, I believe we may have the ability through genetic editing to regrow rainforests at 5-10 times their normal speed of growth—giving us the power to replenish the damaged Amazon basin. We already have some of the Jurassic Park tech to bring back endangered species like the Siamese Crocodile in Cambodia, where just about 400 remain in the wild. And we already have ways to do basic engineering on our climate. Rain is not something sent from the “gods,” but the precise mixture of certain weather and atmospheric conditions, as China is already experimenting with. We are learning how to make it. We can be the new generation of rain makers—or of endless sunny days (though presumably we’d want a mixture of both).

Perhaps, the leading green tech will be nanotechnology—where we can literally remake the planet to our taste. This type of tech involves affecting and building matter and objects on a molecular level. In line with this tech are ways of consuming pollution or even garbage—the hope is we can create nanobots that eat the waste and pollution humans have made. Already, researchers are experimenting with fungi that eat plastic.

Transhumanism is the key to making the Earth pristine again, not forcing people to make less of a carbon footprint. While I believe in respecting the Earth and not polluting it, the future of beautifying nature belongs more to technology and science than human restraint. That said, my techno-optimism knows that geoengineering presents risks too, as we would be in uncharted territory. We must be careful not to create unintended long term consequences of our environment we can’t reverse.

Despite challenges, I’m betting 2017 is the year scientists, technologists, engineers, and the public begin to openly accept geoengineering as a leading way to fulfill goals of the environmental movement. In the face of an American government and leadership that largely is not interested in climate change, the best way forward is likely through radical science and technology innovation.

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

from The Five Most Revolutionary Scientific Trends to Look Out For In 2017

Genetic Editing Could Cause the Next Cold War

While Time magazine recently chose President-Elect Donald Trump as its Person of the Year, CRISPR gene editing pioneers were a runner-up choice. Few innovations in the last millennium carry such transformative prospects as the ability to edit our own genome and make ourselves into fundamentally something else. Some experts think genetic editing might be the key to curing all disease and achieving perfect health.

Unlike other epic scientific advances—like the 1945 explosion of the first atomic bomb in New Mexico—the immediate effect of genetic editing technology is not dangerous. Yet, it stands to be just as divisive to humans as the 70-year proliferation of nuclear weaponry. On one hand, you have secular-minded China and its scientists leading the gene editing revolution, openly modifying the human genome in hopes of improving the human being. On the other hand, you have a soon-to-be broadly Republican US administration and Congress that appear to be strongly Christian—conservatives who often insist humans should remain just as God created them.

The immediate effect of genetic editing technology is not dangerous. Yet, it stands to be just as divisive to humans as the 70-year proliferation of nuclear weaponry.

Therein lies a great coming conflict, one that I’m sure will lead to street protests, riots, and civil strife—the kind described explicitly in my novel The Transhumanist Wager, where a religious-fundamentalist government shuts down extreme science in the name of conservatism. The playing field of geopolitics is pretty simple: If China or another country vows to increase its children’s intelligence via genetic editing (which I estimate they will be able to do in 5-10 years time), and America chooses to remain “au naturel” because they insist that’s how God made them, a conflict species-deep will quickly arise. If this scenario seems too bizarre to happen, just consider the Russian Olympic track and field team that was banned in the recent 2016 Games for supposed doping.

It’s quite possible the same accusatory flavor of “banning” could happen between China and America in the game of life—between its workers, its politicians, is people, its artists, and its media. I wonder if America—approximately 70 percent who identify as Christians—will put up with beings who modified themselves by science to be smarter and more functional entities.

This type of idea takes racism and immigration to a whole new level. Will America close off its borders, its jobs, its schools, and its general openness to the world to stay pure, old-fashioned human? Will we stop trading, befriending, and even starting families with those who are modified?

In short, will genetic editing start a new cold war? One that bears much finger pointing and verbal reprimands, including the use of derogatory terms like mutants, cyborgs, and transhumanists. Think the videogame Dues Ex, but with modified people taking all the best jobs.

So, now that we know what can happen if America won’t embrace the most important science to emerge this century, how can we avoid it?

First—and this is wishful thinking, since 100 percent of the US Congress and the Supreme Court appear to be religious at the moment—is we could just embrace genetic editing and be better at it than the Chinese. This is the exact scenario I suggest. Yes, it will lead to a place where beings are similar to those in Star Wars and Star Trek, but after all, we love those movies because we want to reach that super-science age. And in the long run, such evolution of the species is inevitable anyway, so long as we don’t kill ourselves first in a nuclear war or an environmental catastrophe.

In a second scenario, America could focus more on technology and less on biology and genetics. On my recent 4-month long Immortality Bus tour across America, I found conservative people seem more inclined to use tech accessories or wear a special headset that would make them smarter (for example, by connecting their thoughts Matrix-style into the cloud and AI)—as opposed to structurally changing their brains, as the Chinese likely will do. America could innovate that accessory tech that would keep us ahead of the biological modifications of other nations. I’ll accept that—reluctantly—if the first scenario I presented is a no-go.

A third way—and this is the blatant transhumanist nightmare—is we could establish a non-modification policy across all countries, similar to how we have created the Paris Treaty for climate change or rules of war that ban chemical weapons. The major nations of the world, sensing a significant global legal issue in genetic editing, could come together as a species and criminalize the science.

The front desk of BGI-Tianjin. BGI is one of the leading genetic research companies in China and the world, and is actively pursuing the genetic basis of human intelligence. Image: Wei ta - Imaginechina/Associated Press

To some extent, this has already happened, because as soon as the world realized the Chinese had experimented on the human genome, calls were made to put a stop on some of this science. Such a reaction is not dissimilar from what George W. Bush did with stem cells when his religious values made him shut down federal funding on all but a tiny portion of the research in America. Stem cells have since been shown to be one of the most important medical applications in the world, and those lost years of science have potentially negatively affected millions of lives.

Sadly, the third option of a general or even partial moratorium on genetic editing will surely harm innovation. The great thing with gene editing is we can likely do many wondrous things with it, such as potentially cure cancer, halt aging, grow better organs, and overcome disability by better repairing ourselves. Beyond making ourselves superhuman, we can simply make ourselves better fit for Earth, including dealing with a changing environment.

I also don’t think the third option will work in the long run. More than ever, science is the hands of individuals, who can buy amazing bio-testing kits on eBay for just a $1000—as well as incredibly powerful computers to analyze the data. Citizen scientists would just create the new gene editing tech and begin doing it themselves—perhaps more dangerously had the government not been overseeing the research from the start.

I argue for the first path. Let’s allow good, old-fashioned scientific competition with China to proceed. Let’s see which country can create the best enhancements for their citizenry, and let’s share the best of our work with one another in the end to make it so all peoples are as equal as possible. If we’re too closed-minded about such radical science, we might find ourselves embroiled in a state of hostile speciation, where another new cold war swallows a generation.

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

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from Genetic Editing Could Cause the Next Cold War

Revolutionary Politics Are Necessary for Transhumanism to Succeed

Image courtesy Zoltan Istvan

Now that my hectic presidential campaign is nearly over, I will be attempting to further integrate the US Transhumanist Party into the futurist community. One way I will do this is by leaving my post as chairman and treasurer of the party, and handing operations over to others in the transhumanist community. But before I do so, I want to explain some of my thoughts and controversial decisions of the past two years as its leading officer.

I formed the Transhumanist Party in October 2014 to be a missing link in the transhumanist social movement—a movement which aims to radically improve human beings with technology and also to wage a war of science against biological death. Up until then, transhumanism had been desperately short on organisations with political emphasis and legal bite. The party, as well as my presidential candidacy, went on to receive much media attention, both nationally and internationally. This helped to grow transhumanism, as did the dozen or so international transhumanist parties that soon formed after the US one.

Despite the overwhelming success and recognition of the Transhumanist Party, over the last 25 months, there has been much contention directed by some in the transhumanist community against the US party and my efforts to promote transhumanism—especially via my presidential candidacy. Some have insisted politics and science shouldn’t mix. Others have said I was just out to make a name for myself. Some religious transhumanists accused me of doing the Antichrist’s work because I adamantly promoted transhumanism with strong secular undertones.

Read more: What I Learned By Running for President

The culmination of this opposition to my work resulted in a community-wide petition in 2015 to disavow my presidential candidacy. For weeks, the document was shared and spammed in social media, especially into the dozens of major transhumanist Facebook groups. While the petition was signed by some notable transhumanist elders, the sheer lack of signatures—first the petition authors wanted to get 1000 signatures, then they lowered it to 100 when they realized so few people were signing it—showed that the great majority in the community were not against my campaign.

After the petition’s lack of success, many of my critics in the community took aim at the US Transhumanist Party itself, questioning through social media posts and articles the party’s legitimacy and its legality—and whether we were a Federal Election Committee (FEC) approved political party. (We aren’t.) Generally, this antagonism came from elder and academic futurists, and not the quickly growing millennial base of transhumanists that now make up the greater part of the movement.

The author at the FEC.

Let me start by saying, under my leadership, the Transhumanist Party has not striven much to be a so-called “legal” political party. I did try to register the party at the FEC headquarters in Washington DC, but an FEC director quickly turned me down. She explained it takes lots of formal paperwork, lots of incorporated state parties, lots of declared federal party candidates, and lots of bank accounts with money in them to become considered to be a FEC-approved political entity.

As I was leaving the building, the director handed me a 100-page plus manual on how to become a political party in America and properly pay my party taxes. The dense book contained precise regulation on everything from food expenses to lobbying parameters to employee salaries. I laughed. On average, the Transhumanist Party receives about $150 a month in donations, and no one at the party has ever been paid a salary, including me.

Perhaps in the future, the Transhumanist Party will be more formal and recognized by the FEC, but under my care, the US party was not concerned much about laws, membership, rules, etiquette, or what espresso expenses we incurred at Starbucks. For me, the Transhumanist Party was a political vehicle mostly designed for a singular purpose: to create a social environment that facilitates expediently conquering human death using science and technology. Such a purpose is to aim for a near total revolution in the human experience. Therefore, the Transhumanist Party, by nature, is a revolutionary party. I soon threw the FEC manual in a trash bin.

With this in mind, any calls from critics during my tenure to make the Transhumanist Party a more traditional and legal political entity were currently were not of high importance. The other revolutions that have taken place in history—caused by the likes of Robespierre, Gandhi, Mandela, and George Washington, to name a few—also did not follow many rules or worry much about legality. Their strength was in exactly that they were beyond the law and beyond what society considered politically correct.

However, when considering political parties, let’s not confuse legality with legitimacy. The US Transhumanist Party is entirely legitimate, and has been from the day it was founded, which is partly why it’s become so popular around the world. Legitimacy comes from supporters and citizens. It comes from their actions and ideas—and sometimes from the buildings they occupy by force, the hacks they make on adversary’s computers, and even the smoking barrels of their guns.

True legitimacy does not come from a governmental agency such as the Federal Election Committee, the IRS, or a judge with a rubber stamp. And it certainly doesn’t come from that unreliable, troll-haven Wikipedia, where the Transhumanist Party page was deleted, despite hundreds of major media articles featuring the party as notable.

The team and the Immortality Bus.

That said, whether the party and my presidential campaign was consulting with the US Navy, speaking at the World Bank, opening the popular Financial Times Camp Alphaville, doing an AMA on Reddit’s Futurology, interviewing with Anonymous, or being included as a notable new party by the US Archives, it certainly did join the ranks of entities that influenced and broadened American politics. The proof is in Google Trends and internet rankings, where the Transhumanist Party is constantly searched for and gets thousands of daily views.

Beyond the question of legitimacy, though, is a more important aspect of the current Transhumanist Party—its adamant public stance that activism and civil disobedience is necessary and desirable. When I publicly said—at least a few times—that the party and I wanted to rewrite parts of the US Constitution, I meant it.

After all, we didn’t drive our Immortality Bus across America to deliver a Transhumanist Bill of Rights to the US Capitol because we agree with America and its policies. We drove that bus and delivered that document precisely because we disagree. And we did this despite our love of the core of America—because, after all, the USA is an amazing nation. It just can be significantly improved—and should be.

The posting and delivery of the Transhumanist Bill of Rights was partially an act of civil disobedience, and I endorse such actions so long as America continues to betray its citizens with deathist policies and regulations endorsed by the past 43 religious US presidents. Nearly 250 years after America was founded, it’s finally time we get someone in office who makes decisions and passes laws based entirely on reason and the scientific method. It’s impossible for a religious president, a religious Supreme Court, and a 100 percent religious US Congress (all who state they publicly believe in afterlives) to care enough about medical, scientific, and technological progress when they all think they’re going to be immortal angels in heaven someday.

You may not agree with that fact. You may think the Transhumanist Party and my own presidential campaign are too extreme. But I assure you that losing a friend to cancer, or a child to a car accident, or one’s mind to Alzheimer’s justifies our steadfast dedication. In the 21^st century, with the resources our country has and the know-how of our amazing scientists and technologists, we can in 25 year’s time change all this. We can eliminate most suffering, most disease, and even death for everyone—if we simply would just put all our energy into it. That would be the greatest, most positive revolution in the history of America and of the world.

Whatever happens, no one is forcing the critics in the futurist communities to support the Transhumanist Party. People can go off and form their own parties, support their own candidates, and advocate for whatever they want in their own ways. In fact, I think the more science and technology parties we have, the better.

Politics and minor third parties are a great way to push burgeoning movements like transhumanism forward. Unfortunately, along the way, it’s impossible to make everyone happy—and critics and naysayers will be ubiquitous. But if the greater good has been served and progress has been made, then we should acknowledge that entities like the Transhumanist Party—revolutionary or not—have played a helping hand in positively moving the world forward.

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

from Revolutionary Politics Are Necessary for Transhumanism to Succeed

​What I Learned by Running for President

Last week, I was included on ISideWith.com, a site that matches users with presidential candidates after answering a 5-minute political questionnaire. Traffic to my campaign soared, since the site boasts 43 million users. There are nearly 1900 FEC registered 2016 US presidential candidates, but only eight of us still running have matching profiles on ISideWith.

It highlights a truth about US politics—that running for president is broadly a contest of media. And if anyone doubts this, the case in point is Donald Trump. If you can regularly and prominently get into the major media, you can be a contender for president. If you can’t, then no one knows who you are—even if you have the best ideas or experience out there.

In October 2014, when I formed the science and tech-focused Transhumanist Party and began my run as a presidential candidate, I was quite naïve. I imagined I’d waltz into the American political scene, get my name on a bunch of state ballots, and make a legitimate run for the White House. I never expected to win, but I believed I could challenge and possibly change a widely criticized political system.

I was wrong. The system is nearly impenetrable, bound by rules designed decades and even centuries ago. Those rules are specifically made to keep radicals like me out—even if the two major party candidates are markedly disliked, as they are this cycle. For starters, it takes many millions of dollars to get on crucial state ballots, like my home state of California, where I am neither on the ballot or even a write-in. Those millions of dollars must pay for an army of staffers who peddle door to door to gain the approximately 880,000 signatures needed for an independent to gain ballot access to all 50 states. And getting signatures supporting an unorthodox transhumanist candidate like myself is even more difficult. It can range from $3 to $10 a signature.

To make this crystal clear, let’s consider the case of the Libertarian Party, the third largest political party in America. For the first time since 1996, the party’s candidate, former New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson, will be on the ballot in all 50 states. Twenty years is a long time for Libertarians to wait to finally be on all the ballots again. It won’t matter much though in terms of votes, since the Clinton and Trump campaigns have received at least as much as 25 times the amount in campaign contributions as Johnson—and I’ve learned that running for president is largely a matter of resources, not leadership or even charisma.

Campaigning in Times Square.

With such overwhelming odds against my candidacy and tiny political party from the start, I chose to bypass the battle to get on state ballots and instead focus using media to move the transhumanism movement ahead. After all, only very rarely have third parties in America affected the outcome of the elections anyway. Like it or not, you are stuck with an elephant or a donkey-headed leader.

The good news, though, is the internet is making a run for the presidency a good way to get attention for a cause like transhumanism. It may only take five minutes to file a candidacy form with the FEC to run for US president, but the legitimacy in many people’s minds is real. Some candidates out there are using this for real good for the country, like the Nutrition Party and its candidate Rod Silva, which is trying to improve the way America eats. Or the Marijuana Party, which wants to legalize pot and end the asinine War on Drugs.

I’ve been honored to watch transhumanism grow a lot under my candidacy. My main goal all along has been to tell the world that science and technological innovation is coming far more quickly than ever before, and as a nation, we must answer to it with practical and forward-thinking policies. If we don’t, it could lead to increased inequality, a blatantly dystopian future, and a severe planetary environmental crisis.

Take the case of genetic editing. China is leading the charge to create designer babies with the tech—including possibly augmenting intelligence and strength—but Clinton and Trump won’t touch the subject, instead focusing on sexual harassment and Emailgate. How will they feel in two decades when a new generation of Chinese babies are genetically smarter or stronger than Americans?

Nowhere is the travesty of American politics more clear than in the 2016 presidential debates. Not one major question on climate change, despite it being a huge worry on most everyone’s mind. Also, not one question on artificial intelligence, even though my consulting with the US Navy confirms it’s one of the most important national security issues of the 21^st Century.

On October 19, along with Gary Johnson, Jill Stein, and Evan McMullin, I participated in an online ISideWith debate, where we all addressed the same questions Trump and Clinton were thrown by Chris Wallace in the third debate in real time. It astounded me that no science and technology questions were addressed. Nothing has or will affect the American people more than science and technology. The global average life expectancy has doubled since the start of the last century, and I think it might double again in the next 25 years—dramatically affecting social security, welfare, and healthcare. The internet gave us instant communication in all the corners of the world with all people—making new voting methods possible. And robots are poised to take all jobs by middle of this century—unemploying everyone (probably even the president).

These are not side issues. These are the most pressing concerns in politics—not whether Trump is misogynistic or Clinton lost emails.

For damn sake America, get it together! Those words are the result of my two years of campaigning: disbelief that sane people put up with this presidential game show bullshit. As I told Anonymous a few weeks ago when I interviewed on their podcast: The entire election shitshow is controlled by corporate people in boardrooms and the uber-wealthy. Everything from your media to your voting machines to the shoes you wear to walk outside to vote is part of their creation. You are being led by leaders you dislike and becoming people you don’t want to be. That’s what American politics has come to. And we all let it happen.

Outside of crowdfunding my Immortality Bus, I have not taken a penny in donations for my presidential campaign. I’ve made it this way because you can’t have honest elections and big money together. On the top of my list for how to make America truly great, is to totally reform campaign finance laws, so that no candidate has an advantage. The second thing to do is reform media coverage. There must be a way to bring minor candidates into the limelight—and not just to sell commercials for media conglomerates, but because candidates have good and new ideas.

Third—and this is a critical—we must include polling of all candidates. I’ve only been in one semi-poll, an iQuanti report based on Google Trends. It put me 4^th in third party candidates. My campaign has been going on for over two full years, with debates, street protests, major media press interviews, etc. And I’ve only been in just one poll to base my success (or lack of success) on? No wonder the system doesn’t change—no one’s heard about me, even though I’m a regular journalist in the science and tech community. The government should get in the polling business to make sure third party candidates get regularly polled, so they don’t spend all their time and resources trying to establish name recognition.

Finally, if there was one all-important systematic change I’d make to the election process, I’d implement a ranked voting system. This system would allow you to vote third party, but if the vote ended up being meaningless because it wouldn’t affect the electoral outcome, it would then go to the next ranked candidate. Tens of millions of Americans dislike Clinton and Trump, but they feel they must vote for one candidate or the other because otherwise they believe their vote will be wasted. A ranked voting system eliminates that.

The 2016 election is not an anomaly. The hate, vitriol, and nausea many of us feel is real. America is a painfully divided nation, and without wide systematic changes in the election process, nothing will change. That change begins with a vote for parties and candidates outside of the two party monopoly America has become. The change also begins by realizing that America is a greedy blind corporate machine, and that like all corporations, the workers can fight back by striking, by protesting, and by making sure their might is felt.

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

from ​What I Learned by Running for President

The Next Step for Veganism Is Ditching Our Bodies and Digitizing Our Minds

144,000,000. That’s roughly the number of land animals killed every day to produce meat, dairy, and eggs for human consumption. It’s a staggering, horrific number. It’s also a number that means billions of more animals are constantly enslaved—many in terrible conditions, suffering throughout their lives, waiting to meet a bloody, often painful death.

No wonder veganism is a quickly-growing worldwide movement. A top priority for vegans is not harming animals. Some of the largest organizations and groups that support or endorse veganism are PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals), ALF (Animal Liberation Front), and the Humane Society.

The problem is, despite veganism catching on worldwide, the slaughter of more and more animals is inevitable because of an expanding world population. Another problem is that even going totally vegan can carry a cost—sometimes one with a higher animal body count and more environmental damage due to the way the farming industrial complex works. (For example, fertilizer for grains—a worldwide staple—can be made partially from meat products.) So what are vegans to do to stop animal suffering and be better stewards of the planet?

We want to strip you of your stomach, your guts, and even your anus, and replace it all with machine parts and bionics. In the future, there will be no eating, drinking, or defecation.

The answer is bewildering—and it probably won’t be satisfying to plant-loving people. Nonetheless, it will inevitably eliminate most human-caused animal deaths. The answer is transhumanism—the movement that aims to replace human biology with synthetic and machine parts.

You see, the most important goal of transhumanism is to try to overcome death with science and technology. Most cellular degeneration—otherwise known as aging and sickness—comes from the failing of cells. That failure is at least partially caused by the daily act of eating and drinking—of putting foreign objects into our bodies which cells have to consume or discard to try to create energy. Paraxdocially, it’s stressful and hard work for cells to endlessly do this just to live. A simple way to eliminate this Sisyphean task—all the steaks, chocolate donuts, bacon breakfasts, and even my favorite, scotch—is to get rid of human reliance on food and drink entirely.

Transhumanists, like myself, want to get rid of it all. We want to strip you of your stomach, your guts, and even your anus—and replace it all with machine parts and bionics. In the future, there will be no eating, drinking, or defecation.

The obvious question: Where will we get energy from if we don’t eat?

To begin with, we’d need a lot less energy to live since eating, food gathering, and meal preparation take a lot of energy too—even if it’s just driving to Taco Bell, Denny’s, or visiting the salad bar at Whole Foods.

How we get energy really depends on what humans evolve into over the next 25-50 years—and a lot of that depends on how artificial intelligence unfolds. I already have friends planning in the next 12 months to implant chips onto their brains so they can commune telepathically with machines. And with experts like scientist Ben Goertzel predicting a machine consciousness being here in as little as 15-20 years, there’s a possibility we’ll be going Matrix-mode shortly after. An uploaded mind will only need electricity—which can easily be made from wind, the Sun, or a hydropower—not plants, animal meat, or even Red Bull.

But wild transhumanist ambitions aside, my guess is most people won’t be ready to upload their minds into machines at least for another next few decades. However, with CRISPR gene editing tech, there are already DIY biohackers trying to splice plant DNA into their bodies so they can photosynthesize energy from the Sun. Of course, whoever figures this out will surely win the Nobel Prize, since they will also be potentially solving world hunger—and possibly saving the over 8000 kids that die globally from starvation or malnutrition every day.

No more food, no more farms. Image: Alfonso Benayas/Flickr

My guess is that scientists will figure out some form of combining photosynthesis with human biology within a decade. And within two decades, it will become something pragmatic that can supplement our food intake—a so-called free lunch by just hanging out in the Sun.

Despite these two decent options, my money is on a third option—the brain implant that tells us we’re satiated, even when our bodies are calorie restricted and yearning for food. Some studies suggest that maximum human longevity is best accomplished by minorly starving ourselves. If this is correct, it might be the best of both worlds, where humans eat dramatically less, but always feel like they’re tummies are full because an implant stimulating our brain makes us feel it. If we take this one step further, maybe we can have our implants make us feel like we’ve just had a huge steak dinner, all the while knowing that cows haven’t been eaten or cruelly slaughtered.

As a US presidential candidate, the reason I’m writing about veganism is I think it’s a great movement (and there's a #VeganChalkChallenge catching on right now that is fun and I saw in my hometown Mill Valley, California). My love of animals runs deep, and whenever possible, I try not to eat meat myself—mainly because I don’t want to hurt animals or be responsible for their deaths.

In the past, I’ve been on the front lines of the animal rights and preservation movement. For nearly two years, I was a director at a major wildlife organization called WildAid. I worked mostly in Southeast Asia, and our main goal was to stop illegal wildlife poaching. Before that, I was at National Geographic Channel, and in the field I wrote and filmed stories trying to raise awareness for a number of endangered animals.

I want veganism is to win its crusade. And in my opinion, the best way to tackle the crisis of harming animals is precisely how the driverless car manufacturers are treating one of world’s greatest problems: drunk driving. Electric car manufacturers are not asking people to drink less—they are asking them not to drive at all. I think vegans should take a close look at transhumanism and ask if maybe—in 25 years or so—billions of animals around the world will have far better and longer lives because human appetite and eating have literally disappeared.

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

from The Next Step for Veganism Is Ditching Our Bodies and Digitizing Our Minds