Zoltan Istvan is ready to encourage his supporters to vote for either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump in November -- if one of the major-party candidates agrees to put him to work in the White House.
And they'd better take his offer seriously, because he figures he just might be able to tip the election whichever way he wants.
"If we're getting down to the end, and it's close, as expected, this could be appealing to a candidate," Istvan told The Oregonian this week. He believes he could bring a candidate somewhere between 250,000 and a million votes.
If neither Clinton nor Trump takes him up on his proposed deal, he'll keep those votes for himself. Istvan, a former journalist, is the presidential candidate for the Transhumanist Party, which he created in 2014.
Transhumanism is all about using science and technology to solve the world's problems. For Istvan, it's also about actually combining humanity and technology -- that is, creating "the singularity" -- and ending death as we know it.
The 42-year-old futurist and former Oregonian (he used to live in Brookings and now resides in California) admits he'd prefer to work on transhumanist policy for a Democratic president. But he's not picky. "Because I feel so strongly about life-extension science, I would work for a Trump administration," he said. "I serve a cause; I wouldn't be serving Clinton or Trump."
Istvan's presidential run is symbolic; the Columbia University grad and former globe-trotting National Geographic Channel correspondent probably isn't going to be on your state's ballot in November. But he's confident that a lot of voters, especially younger ones, are excited about his campaign. The digital-marketing firm iQuanti determined this week that Istvan was the fourth most "searched for" minor-party presidential candidate over the past six months, coming in behind only the Green Party's Jill Stein and two front-runners for the Libertarian Party nomination, former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson and high-profile software developer John McAfee.
Istvan, who is traveling around the country in a coffin-shaped "Immortality Bus," says his support will continue to grow and that his backers will prove to be stingily loyal. "Their vote is based on one concept," he said. "They don't want to die."
That certainly is a powerful concept. And Istvan is convinced we're quite close to achieving the goal, citing, for starters, advances in gene editing. He says science could "stop aging within the next 25 years." (Medical researchers are not in agreement on whether this is doable in 25 years or at all.) Istvan also believes that the mother of all sci-fi tropes, uploading our consciousness into the cloud, is just around the corner.
Living forever has all sorts of possible downsides, for the planet and for the individual, but Istvan isn't worried. How will Earth handle the massive load of an immortal species? Istvan says our blue orb could be just fine with 50 billion people, "if done properly." Won't we become monumentally bored and depressed by the time we reach our 400th birthdays? No way, because "we're going to be vastly different beings" once we merge with the machines.
Virtual reality, for example, is only in its most simplistic early development. He talked about a recent foray he took into VR in which he found himself "touching and fondling" a young woman.
"I actually felt like I was cheating on my wife," he said. "This was not a cartoonish [avatar]. I wasn't prepared for how immersive it was. I had to take the headset off. I thought, 'If my wife knew I was doing this ...'" He let out a small, nervous laugh.
And that's one small reason why he believes the next president needs a transhuman-policy adviser. These are the "most challenging and exciting questions of our time," he said. "How do these changes in our lives and culture change our institutions" -- marriage, child-rearing, the health-care industry, politics. The list goes on and on.
John McAfee, one of those few minor-party candidates who is out-performing Istvan in internet searches, says the Transhumanist Party candidate is on the wrong track. "I can't think of a more horrific concept than immortality," the controversial tech entrepreneur said during a meeting with Istvan last December. "It is anti-evolutionary. We need to die and die young preferably; dying is the most beautiful of all things. I'd get behind a platform where you kill everyone at 30. I would fight you tooth and nail to stop you making people live forever."
Istvan is undeterred by such "Logan's Run"-like fears. Technologies have succeeded best when created "to wipe out suffering and make our lives happier and more perfect," he said.
Besides, the genie is already out of the bottle, he points out. Which, again, is why he believes the next president needs a transhumanist adviser -- and why America will need a transhumanist president four or eight years from now.
"One country's kids are soon going to have 20 percent higher intelligence because they were the first to implement these new technologies," he said. "This is something we should be talking about."
-- Douglas Perry