"Appearing as a 40-foot coffin, the Immortality Bus will roll down American highways stopping at rallies and events, instigating the kind of clashes and debates that this country (and the world) needs to challenge archaic cultural ideals that are holding science, technology, and medicine back."
"To do all we hope to do, we need to buy the bus and make it look like a coffin. But we need more too: We want a life-sized, interactive robot on board, drones following us, a biohacking lab for experimenting on ourselves, Virtual Reality equipment, lots of public event materials, and, of course, fuel."
"We'll continue in the Bible Belt and visit megachurches, hoping to covert the religious to reason and transhumanism (and showing that formal religion and greatly extended lifespans can happily co-exist). In Detroit, we'll visit factories where robots have taken jobs (and ask our own trainable robot Jethro Knights, what he thinks). In Massachusetts, we'll stop at MIT and get chip implants"
... ... this is a bad reality show for personal promotion, nothing more and nothing less. It's not even a good one. I just showed the indiegogo page to a friend who literally called it 'facepunch worthy'.
"Zoltan Istvan is a man on a mission to end death. ... For whatever it's worth, Zoltan has been involved in extreme adventures his entire life, and is the inventor of volcano boarding (which is just like it sounds)."
I sense an inconsistency.
I have non-zero probability to die next year. In my age of 42 it is not less than 1 per cent, and probably more. I could do many investment which will slightly lower my chance of dying – from healthy life style to cryo contract. And I did many of them.
From economical point of view the death is at least loosing all you capital.
If my net worth is something like one million (mostly real estate and art), and I have 1 per cent chance to die, it is equal to loosing 10 k a year. But in fact more, because death it self is so unpleasant that it has large negative monetary value. And also I should include the cost of lost opportunities.
Once I had a discussion with Vladimir Nesov about what is better: to fight to immortality, or to create Friendly AI which will explain what is really good. My position was that immortality is better because it is measurable, knowable, and has instrumental value for most other goals, and also includes prevention of worst thing on earth which is the Death. Nesov said (as I remember) that personal immortality does not matter as much total value of humanity existence, and more over, his personal existence has no much value at all. All what we need to do is to create Friendly AI. I find his words contradictory because if his existence does not matter, than any human existence also doesn’t matter, because there is nothing special about him.
But later I concluded that the best is to make bets that will raise the probability of my personal immortality, existential risks prevention and creation of friendly AI simultaneously. Because it is easy to imagine situation where research in personal immortality like creation technology for longevity genes delivery will contradict our goal of existential risks reduction because the same technology could be used for creating dangerous viruses.
The best way here is invest in creating regulating authority which will be able to balance these needs, and it can’t be friendly AI because such regulation needed before it will be created.
That is why I think that US needs Transhumanist president. A real person whose value system I can understand and support. And that is why I support Zoltan Istvan for 2016 campaign.
Me and Exponential Technologies Institute donated 10 000 USD for Immortality bus project. This bus will be the start of Presidential campaign for the writer of “Transhumanist wager”. 7 film crews agreed to cover the event. It will create high publicity and cover all topics of immortality, aging research, Friendly AI and x-risks prevention. It will help to raise more funds for such type of research.