Zoltan Istvan is very worried about the superintelligent machines.
He says the war over artificial intelligence will be worse than the Cold War nuclear arms race — much worse. It will be far more deadly, and whoever wins will control the world, eternally. This artificial intelligence might be being developed right now, he says, for all we know. At a government facility in the middle of the Arizona desert, perhaps.
But this is not what Zoltan Istvan is most afraid of, and neither is it the weirdest thing he will tell me in our week together driving 400 miles across the Southwest in his 40-year-old “Immortality Bus,” crudely fashioned into the shape of a coffin. As the presidential candidate of the Transhumanist Party, Zoltan Istvan is dedicated to spreading transhumanism’s gospel, like some modern day Ken Kesey who doesn’t even need acid for his trip.
Zoltan Istvan very much wants to be the next president of the United States.
But not anywhere near as badly as he wants to never die.
