Zoltan Istvan Wants to Create Superpeople—Oh, and Also Be California’s Governor
by AJAI RAJ
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. It’s 2015, and the ever-humming machinery of American presidential politics is picking up steam. The American political machine runs on steam, okay? It’s very old.
Out of the predictable, claustrophobic sameness of the political duopoly — with naked oligarchy on one side and an ostensibly friendlier, more diverse oligarchy on the other — emerges a candidate with some new ideas. Oh, maybe not completely new ideas, but wild ideas, fresh ideas, ideas long thought to be unpalatable to the American political mainstream.
Ideas like free college for everybody, a universal basic income, or UBI … and abolishing death once and for all.
I’ll drop the conceit. Obviously I’m not talking about Bernie Sanders. Sure, Bernie might be America’s idea of a wild-eyed radical — so debased has our notion of a left politics become — but next to Zoltan Istvan, Bernie Sanders looks like Edmund Burke.
And Bernie’s vision for America’s future looks as quaint as Burke’s 18th century next to Istvan’s, a re-imagining of Mos Eisley Cantina in which all of the denizens are humans who have transcended their own biology. More on that later.
Istvan is less worried about billionaires and banks than he is about ’bots. For him, a universal basic income isn’t some pie-in-the-sky socialist ideal, but a pragmatic necessity in the face of the automation that’s coming for our jobs in the near future.
I first spoke to Istvan two years ago, when he was running for president under the aegis of the Transhumanist Party, which he founded. That run brought Istvan a good bit of publicity. It also taught him a thing or two about politics, the most important of which might have been the value of harnessing an existing political infrastructure.
That’s why, rather than continue campaigning with the Transhumanist Party, Istvan has decided instead to run as a libertarian, with his sights set on the 2018 gubernatorial race in his home state of California.
Istvan describes his politics as being somewhere between Gary Johnson and Bernie Sanders, but with his explicit concerns about mitigating the effects of automation and artificial intelligence on the American worker — not to mention his embrace of life-extension and gene-editing technology to not only prolong but transform life — he’s another type of political animal altogether.
Istvan may not be the anti-Ahnold, but he could certainly be considered the anti-Terminator, a man who wants to make peace with the machines before they have a chance to take over.
I caught up with Istvan — he prefers “Zolt,” a diminutive of his Hungarian name that renders it less dramatic, yet somehow more futuristic-sounding — to find out what he learned from his first political run, why he’s now campaigning as a Libertarian, and what he makes of American politics in 2017 and beyond.
D: So you said you’re going to be running for governor of California as a Libertarian, and I want to get into that, but first I’m curious to hear how your 2016 bid for president went. Did you get the response you’d hoped for?
Z.I.: The presidential campaign got really busy there at the end! I was excited by how popular it got. I think what happened there at the very end was, there was a huge amount of attention put to third-party candidates.
For instance, ISideWith picked me up, and even let me debate with Jill Stein and Gary Johnson. I was really trying to get on the list of candidates, because something like 40 to 50 million people took the [site’s] test. In the end, in the last, like, two months, they let me on, and it gave me a huge amount of extra visibility — not media visibility, but like real, substantial visibility. I would trade that for a New York Times article.
After that, my campaign really started getting a lot of attention. It had something like 150,000 people a day doing it, and it ranks the presidential candidates that you match with. And a huge amount of libertarians ended up matching with me over Gary Johnson, which of course gave my campaign a ton of support.
I also got a lot of Bernie Sanders people, because I’m sort of somewhere between Bernie Sanders and Gary Johnson. It happened about seven weeks before [the election], and you could literally see the uptrend in Google searches from that moment on.
D: So that answers the question of why you’re running as a libertarian — it seems like your ideas resonate with people who share those ideas.
Z.I.: Not only that, but I realized a couple months into my campaign that it’s very difficult, without real money, to change the system. I feel like it really comes down to money. And that’s one of the reasons I’m running as a Libertarian in the California governor’s race — it’s because I walk into a party that has essentially 130,000 paying members in California, and half a million people that voted for Gary Johnson, just in California alone. So anywhere you draw on, you have serious infrastructure that’s already in place for you.
The Transhumanist Party is great, and I’ve handed it off now to other people who continue to run it, but it’ll take 10 or 20 years to really gain a foothold in modern-day politics. It can get media attention, but it doesn’t have the money, the infrastructure, the members, and that’s something that really takes a long time to gather.
Before he declared his presidential candidacy as a libertarian, I debated John McAfee on my bus. That was interesting, because he used to represent his own Cyber Party, similar to what I did with the Transhumanist Party, except much more McAfee-oriented, with no other advisors or board members. He’s a popular guy, so it caught on quickly, but I think he realized within a couple months that he’d have a better chance as a Libertarian, as I did.
With my presidential campaign, it was really hard going, because I would show up places, and except for the people that were with me, it was hard to get anyone motivated. Sometimes we would show up and there was a lot of infrastructure, lots of people, but you show up in Tennessee, and all of a sudden, you can’t find one transhumanist.
I talked to the national leadership of the Libertarian Party — I actually interviewed to be Gary Johnson’s running mate. I ended up not getting the job, but my campaign as the Transhumanist Party candidate had become so successful that he was looking at me as somebody who might be able to bring in millennials.
Ever since I talked to him in person — I spent 24 hours with him and we really went over all the details — I realized that the Libertarian Party is a really great fit for a lot of the ideas of technology and science that I support.
At the end of the day, all I want is for transhumanist technologies [e.g. artificial intelligence, life-extension and personal genetic modification] to move forward, and that requires an environment where you can move forward, where the government basically stays out of it and says “do whatever you want to do.”
So in that sense the Libertarian Party is not only pragmatic, but a pretty good fit for a lot of my ideas, especially here in California, where wacky ideas can go a lot farther than they would, say, in the Bible Belt.
D: Transhumanism does seem compatible with libertarianism in the ways that you’re describing — radical autonomy, and a hands-off approach to new technology. But you also espouse other ideas that are less compatible with Libertarian orthodoxy, like free college education and a universal basic income. How do you intend to reconcile those conflicts?
Z.I.: It’s interesting, just last weekend I was at the largest annual SoCal Libertarian event, and yes, some of the leadership of the California party and the national party talked to me. I’d say quite seriously about my vision for a universal basic income. And I told the L.A. Times last week that I continue to support a basic income, and for better or worse they ran it as the title of their article. And that was very hard for a lot of libertarians to swallow.
That said, libertarians have long ago argued for the merits of a basic income. There are very strong libertarian reasons for supporting it. For one thing, the libertarian version of UBI will swallow welfare, will swallow social security, will swallow a whole bunch of government programs and streamline.
When you actually look at the numbers of what welfare costs, welfare costs billions of dollars in administrative costs. If you give everyone a basic income — maybe not the very rich, but the poor and the middle class — all of a sudden, you have streamlined the process, while still handing out the resources of government.
I think a lot of libertarians can get behind that, because at the end of the day, what they’re doing is, they’re taking taxes and handing it back out to the people. Most Libertarians will say taxes are theft — and I agree, to some extent taxes are theft — but if we can streamline it, take out the cost of the bureaucracy of welfare, the food stamps of welfare … we’re not talking about not feeding people, but we’re just talking about, “Look, here’s some personal responsibility. Everybody gets $10,000, and what you do with it is up to you.”
And that’s a very libertarian concept, and I think a lot of people would like something like that, similar to what Alaska does with oil money. Even if it’s not broadly supported by the party, there are plenty of libertarians and plenty of libertarian philosophers who have argued its merit. And I continue to support it.
D: Why is a universal basic income such an important idea to you?
Z.I.: I think, in California, with automation, with four million truck-driving jobs about to be taken over the next three or four years because of automated trucks, I cannot see a way to avoid some type of basic income to keep people from literally revolting.
I was just on the campaign trail, driving my bus with these truck drivers. These are gun-carrying men. They can’t be retrained for another job, because by the time they can be retrained, a robot will take that job. What do you do with four million very proud, grown American men who carry guns, which is, broadly speaking, who the truck-driving industry is?
If you don’t give them something that’s going to make them stand proud, there’s going to be a problem.
And there should be a problem, because you’ve taken their livelihoods away. They don’t care about the future, robots — you know, some of these things that a lot of transhumanists care about — they care about their families, about a good life, and I think it’s important that a basic income can kind of give them a bridge to say, “You know what, this is okay, I have a lot of free time and I still have some money.”
And I think that’s where a universal basic income is going to satisfy a lot of people in a way that doesn’t cause civil strife.
And this isn’t just for truck drivers or people serving food — the largest hedge fund in the world is starting to replace thousands, or at least hundreds, of its mid-level workers, with [artificial intelligence]. Those mid-level workers are people with master’s degrees from the very best universities in the world.
This is not people who aren’t smart enough. Everybody is at risk. Even my wife, who’s an ob-gyn, who trained for 19 years to do what she does, is at risk of being replaced in the next 10 to 20 years by robots who work 24 hours around the clock to deliver babies.
I realized this by the 2016 election — I realized that half of Americans are very upset, and that they’re never going to get their jobs back, whether it’s coal mining, or whatever it is. The economy’s changing, and it’s not going to recover unless it recovers through automation, and it’s only going to be a handful of companies that are responsible for that automation.
So we have to ask ourselves whether capitalism as we know it can continue, or whether it’s going to create a huge amount of inequality. When we talk about automation, we never talk about finance guys making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. I can almost guarantee you that in five years, every building on Wall Street will be completely empty, except for computers.
Unless we have a neural prosthetic or something of that sort that’s always connected to the Internet — and we’re not anywhere near that — you can’t compete with machines that do algorithms all day.
I think you should know, I’m running as a left-leaning Libertarian. I think a classical libertarian would say, “Zolt is a socialist,” and that’s not true, but I am younger, and do lean left.
And it’s not just UBI — when I put forth a libertarian version of government, it includes so many different other little caveats. You know, the reality is that automation is going to make the government smaller in itself. So if the libertarians can embrace the technology that’s out there, we can naturally make the government smaller.
We can get rid of the government without having to pay taxes if robots do most of the work. I’ve advocated for a tax-free society here in 15 or 20 years. If the government can figure out how to use robots for everything that it does, and fund itself off of natural resources — the U.S. government is sitting on trillions and trillions of dollars in natural resources, enough to pay for government operations for centuries, probably.
They are far-fetched, but there are very strong philosophical libertarian ways to make the government smaller and still uphold a safety net for people who don’t have that much. Very poor people, very sick people, the disabled — I’m not going to leave them behind, and I don’t think most libertarians will, either.
I think automation and technology can ultimately be a very beneficial thing. It’s really just a matter of how to go about it, and I think the Libertarian Party is a great way to do it, because the Democrats are too stuck in being Democrats — they might have some very good people looking to help everybody, but they’re very stuck in their ways.
You’re not going to hear Hillary Clinton saying this stuff anytime soon, or any other major candidates. And the Republicans certainly couldn’t care less.
But I think the Libertarians could really reach out here and say that we can achieve something here with technology that is a libertarian ideal, and still provide for the poorest in society, the ones that need the most help, while still emboldening the people who want to create something — some of the very richest. So I think it could work across the board, as long as you take kind of a techno-optimist approach to it.
D: Since you brought up the two major political parties, I should ask — what did you make of the 2016 election, and what do you make of Trump’s presidency so far?
Z.I.: First and foremost, and you and I both know this as journalists, I was shocked by how wrong the media got the entire thing. I was shocked by the outcome, and I was shocked by the polls, and I was shocked by how the media just sort of didn’t get the bigger picture, and we were wrong.
And I guess that represents a very big challenge for how media can operate in the near future. And I’m not trying to be critical of the media here. I’m just trying to say that we must all take a step back and really ask ourselves, where did we go wrong? Everyone thought that Hillary was a shoo-in. And I’m not against Trump like so many other people, but I thought Hillary was going to dramatically get it.
D: There’s been a marked distrust on the political left of anyone who’s willing to work with Trump, like Elon Musk for example. What do you make of that?
Z.I.: I have openly applied to work with Trump. I sent in my resume to his administration, saying, “Look, if you want a tech or science guy, I’m one of the guys.” I would do that as a libertarian. Before I declared my candidacy, I would have done that as an independent.
I wouldn’t have done it as a Republican, because my wife works at Planned Parenthood, so we’re disqualified from the Republican Party for that reason. But that being said, I would absolutely work with Donald Trump as a libertarian, and be happy to do so. I’m not someone who hates politicians one way or another. I’m somebody that wants to do the very best for the country and make science and technology more accessible to the people— increase their lifespans, increase their healthcare.
I don’t know that I would drop out of the governor’s race to take a job in his administration. I think that once you’ve made your stand, you stick with it. But I would work with Donald Trump and I would encourage other libertarians to do so.
The problem is, though, you’re running against the ideas of the ideas of the vice president, Mike Pence, who’s very religious, very Christian, very much against genetic editing, very much like, “Ooh, let’s be careful with this kind of radical technology.”
I mean, there are not just philosophical differences here, but there are now theological differences. And when you start getting into religious differences, that presents a major problem for science and technology, especially as we know that science and technology are becoming so radical in the 21st century. So that makes things very difficult.
But I don’t think the fact that it’s difficult shouldn’t make you want to do it — in fact, I think it should make you want to do it more, so you can have some kind of handle on the way science and technology transpires in this country.
I’m not trying to be pro-Trump. I am totally against Trump’s immigration ban. I think America was made on the basis of strong immigration, and our country should have very open borders. And I know Silicon Valley is hugely made up of immigrants.
D: Since we last spoke, a little over two years ago, what new technological developments have arisen that you find exciting?
Z.I.: Genetic editing. When we last spoke, this was out there, but nobody really realized that it was going to become a transformative science of the 21st century. Now you can distinctively say that genetic editing and CRISPR/Cas-9 technology, where you can go in and modify the DNA and the genes, is easily going to be, I would say, the most important science in the next 25 years moving forward.
Because we have unlocked the ability not just to stop aging, not just augment our intelligence as the Chinese are trying to do, not just eliminate cancer. You could add a third arm, or a fourth or fifth or sixth leg. With genetic editing, you can recreate the human body. I’d say that’s something that has turned the whole science world on its head.
China has already created dogs edited to have more muscle mass, as of course they’re already experimenting with human embryos, which is where the call for a moratorium has come from.
Basically, it’s almost like coding, except that instead of computer coding, it’s coding with DNA. And of course, if you can code with DNA, you can create superpeople. You can create transhumanism in the way that I really want — no disease, no death, none of those things.
And that’s why I think so many scientists have called for a moratorium on it, because all of a sudden, they’re like, “Whoa, we can do anything we want with flesh.” And that’s actually very dangerous, especially for those who are Christians, or those who are very religious. Like, “Wow, we can really make ourselves into gods.”
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