Zoltan Istvan is the founder of the Transhumanist Party, the author of the “Transhumanist Bill of Rights”, and a frequently interviewed expert on AI and genetic editing. Zoltan is a prolific writer; he wrote the bestseller “Transhumanist Wager” and is one of the most prominent transhumanists on our planet. In 2016, he ran a presidential campaign in the United States as a candidate of the Transhumanist Party, travelling around the United States in a coffin-shaped Immortality Bus. His recent biography, written by Ben Murnane delves into the extraordinary story of Istvan’s war on death, which fuses futurist and libertarian philosophy. In April 2025, Istvan announced his candidacy for Governor of California as a Democrat in the 2026 election. You can follow Zoltan on Instagram or Twitter.
SF: You are a prominent transhumanist and in recent years, there has been a huge spike in the attention of the public to the developments in AI. ChatGPT and the AI image generators revolutionised the way people fear or experience AI. How do you observe this from your transhumanist viewpoint as an expert on this very topic, who is constantly participating in the conversation about AI and the future of humanity?
ZI: Well, I think the big issue at hand is how fast artificial intelligence has increased in both its intellect, its power, and just how humans use it. I mean, even two years ago, kind of pre-ChatGPT, we were thinking AI was still kind of science fiction, but here we are using it as journalists, as filmmakers, now discovering drugs, all these different things. And to be honest with you, AI has taken over the transhumanist movement, that is for sure, and nobody saw that coming two or three years ago. So that is the first thing. I think the second thing is: will AI maybe 10 years or 20 years from now, when it is super powerful, super smart, will it be something that is beneficial for human beings and not something that is some scary, dark, overcoming kind of monster? Nobody knows these answers, but for sure, the transhumanism movement is absolutely changed because of it. I personally think that AI could be very beneficial to humanity, but if we lose control of it, I do not know if it is a good thing anymore. So even in the last two years, my own thinking has started to change on AI.
SF: You ran in the 2016 presidential campaign as a candidate of the Transhumanist Party. Do you think that politics is a useful way of gaining the attention of the public for sometimes controversial or novel ideas that are outside of the public debate?
ZI: I think transhumanism, the best thing that happened to it was using politics as a way to get it into the public eye. And it is not just transhumanism. Environmentalism, ideas of freedom, liberty, anytime that you can take a smaller, minor subject and make it into something that is larger, because people follow it because of politics, and everybody follows politics. Then it is something that is very useful and something that is very functional. I was thrilled with how a political campaign based on science and reason could actually take off and become something that everybody around the world started to pay attention to. Nobody thought that would happen when I started. And then all of a sudden, it just went viral. I think political campaigns are one of the best ways to get attention to whatever cause it is that you are trying to accomplish.
SF: So that was the positive side of politics. But there is also the negative, what do you think are the most disastrous ways in which politics impacts the growth of humanity and getting to immortality? Within our lifetime, that is because I am selfishly interested in getting there in my lifetime.
ZI: So the problem with politics is that it often times follows what the majority of people are thinking. And the majority of people, let us be honest, are quite religious, and if they are religious, then they may not have an interest in overcoming death. Transhumanism is very much about overcoming death, so we have this issue at hand with using politics for growing a scientific movement. It is kind of contradictory, and yet it can also work. But I think if you break into real mainstream politics like I was going to win an election, then all of a sudden we have a huge dilemma because maybe everybody would say: Oh wow, Zoltan is secular. Zoltan is an atheist; he doesn’t belong representing the people, the majority who are religious, and that is a real dilemma.
SF: You do not have anyone in Congress who is an atheist, so …
ZI: None! Out of 535 members, we have none, and that is, in my opinion, a very sad thing. At least we should have a couple for representation.
SF: So that is one side of Transhumanism. But I see the potential in it to become much more. There is a lot of talk about this void people have after leaving Christianity, after the rise of secularism and after the traditional ways of being departed from our lives. Do you think that transhumanism has the possibility to, fill this void with thinking about something grander than just your life? Is this something that could be very positive, unlike atheism, which is just a negation?
ZI: I think when you actually look at the grand scheme of things, transhumanism presents the most ideal manifestation of what it can mean to be a human being because all of a sudden you can become some kind of deity, some kind of great spiritual influence because now you have maybe merged your mind with machines. You have become superhuman or transhuman. You can do a million different things that we wouldn’t have done as just biological creatures, and if that is the case, then that is a huge spiritual end. I mean it is almost similar to what the religions are preaching, except we are getting to it through science and reason.
SF: How do you think that transhumanism intersects with the question of space exploration? So in your Transhumanist Bill of Rights, you have the point about ensuring that humanity is preserved through space exploration because we are stuck on one planet that is subject to asteroid impact that could kill us all. But do you think that space exploration itself could be much more in terms of meaning? Can people find meaning in the conquest of space after they achieve immortality? Is that something that you think could be the transhumanist future?
ZI: Well, I absolutely think the transhumanist future involves space travel. No transhumanist that I know wants to remain on Earth forever. Even if you could live forever, Earth is just too small, when you have a universe of billions and billions of possibly habitable planets. And the idea that we would maybe merge with AI and become, even just maybe, all sorts of like intellectual Stardust, the potentiality is incredible of what transhumans could become. And that absolutely involves space travel. I would just say #1 is getting off the Earth and #2 is getting out of our Solar System. The Star Trek idea is very real to the transhumanist. So, when you look at what the final meaning of being a human being is, it is really being a transhuman being that is going across galaxies and exploring what is out there in our universe. Who knows what we are going to find, but it is going to be super fun and super curious.
SF: An opposite view could be that it is humans who are inherently interesting. So we will be simply enjoying relationships with other humans, even as immortals. So there will be no need to go into space and see inanimate objects.
ZI: There are some people that might say: Let’s just stay on Earth. Let’s remain biological. But let’s conquer death. I mean, there are some transhumanists like that, but I would think the majority of transhumanists are sort of like me. They really want to get rid of biological flesh. Biology dies; that is the main problem. But also, it is very limited. If we don’t drink water, we will die. If we don’t eat, if we get too cold or too hot, we can die. We need to get to a machine-based body. We need to get to the ones and zeros. So we could expand our consciousness into whole different types of arenas of ideas and thoughts, and being. And that means getting out of biology. We could still have many inner relationships like the hive mind, where we are all intertwined in each other’s AI minds. But I think I would not put too much emphasis on human relationships. I think the most important thing is really that a person develops their independence, has the power to overcome their environmental circumstances and can then go discover what it is that they want out of life. That might be relationships with other people. But for me, I think it is just the curiosity of what is out there in the universe.
SF: Article three of the Transhumanist Bill of Rights, which you have brought into Congress of the United States as the final point of your campaign, reminds me of the non-aggression principle. It has a similar underlying bodily autonomy argument, but it expands those rights to AI and robots, which have higher intelligence similar to humans. Why should we grant reasonable protection of rights to objects such as AI?
ZI: Well, I think to begin with, humans have a history of realizing that rights should be applied to anything that becomes of a certain intellect, a certain smart, needing rights to protect itself, even maybe, all the way down to animals in the environment and what is happening is artificial intelligence is becoming quite smart. Now, maybe it does not have a consciousness yet, but that could change in three, five or ten years. And what we don’t want to do is get caught in another scenario where we have a living entity that is complaining that we are withholding its rights and maybe enslaving it. Humans have made a lot of mistakes over the last few hundred years, and we know better now. If we get something like an advanced artificial intelligence that demands rights, we should start giving them to it. And it is not just AI. It might be creating brand new creatures out of genetic editing, like Star Wars-type things that also demand rights. I just think if there is something out there that has feelings, it is smart, it loves life, it wants its own freedom, then it deserves it.
SF: On the podcast with Team Futurism, you mentioned that AI algorithms seem quite hard to censor. For instance, this has been shown by the Gemini catastrophe that Google had, where the AI started generating some very weird content. Do you think that this could be some hope for freedom? Is there this inability of algorithms to be easily censorious in their nature?
ZI: I know right now AI is based on algorithms, and there is nothing really there yet, at least that we can decipher. But I believe very firmly that that is just a spark. There was a spark too in our evolution at one point, we went from being just primates, and all of a sudden, we said: wow, we can make use of tools. And those tools can build houses and start fires and cure people from cancer, and go to the moon in space rockets. Something like that will happen with AI too. I am not sure if it is in the next two years or the next 20 years, but I am almost certain it is going to happen, and when that moment happens, it is no longer algorithms. I mean, we have algorithms running in our brains. That is how our neurons fire. They follow certain kinds of patterns as well, but algorithms shouldn’t necessarily be seen only as patterns. Once something demands freedom, once something demands rights, once something says it loves you or it hates you and it has a sense of identity, it is time for us to consider making it equal to us, or at least granting it rights so that it can fulfil its desires and what it wants to be.
SF: One area which is particularly potentially disastrous for AI is the application of AI to warfare. Do you think there’s going to be an arms race in terms of AI, for this purpose? Do you think this is the biggest danger?
ZI: This is where I get quite pessimistic about AI. And I get pessimistic for human beings because I think it is human beings who are going to lose out. I’ve been a journalist for 30 years, and there’s no question that if you use ChatGPT, you know that it can write very very well very quickly and in probably one to two years it will be able to make movies very well, very quickly and it will probably be able to do anything. Fly helicopters, discover drugs, and write PhDs. A huge swath of people around the world are going to lose their jobs because of this. I know it hasn’t happened yet, and some people have said: Ohh, you know they keep warning about this. But it will eventually happen, especially when we have robots that can match the AI. The robots that can, for example, paint a wall as quickly as a human being. Or a robot that can mop a floor and be a janitor. Once these things start happening, you are going to see less and less people able to get jobs. This presents a massive problem for society. I expect there to be demonstrations of civil strife, maybe even civil war, over some of these issues. And nobody has a really good solution yet to the problem. It is going to be very dangerous, but at the same time, just because technology is changing the world doesn’t mean that we should stop it. Maybe we can also use AI so that humans can work a lot less and dedicate a lot more time to their happiness or to their families. Or maybe to the exploration of their own curiosity.
SF: Do you think there is a reasonable fear of the potential for the growth of a new Luddite movement where people would start to counter AI with regulation and try to stop AI from developing? Even I personally can feel some instinct deep inside me that tells me we should stop it, before it takes away my nice writing job.
ZI: So I will be honest with you. In the last few years, I have also taken a step back. I was very pro-AI, but then I saw ChatGPT. I used it and I thought: Oh my God! Have I been preaching the wrong idea? But I thought a lot about it, and I am, of course, a graduate student right now at Oxford and writing my thesis on AI. I still believe that AI can be very beneficial to humanity. We just need to make it so that it has kind of fail-safe controls, where hopefully it doesn’t just kind of overcome us very, very quickly. There is a very good possibility we could end up utilizing it and becoming one with it, maybe through Neuralink or things like this in the future, so that AI and our brains, are sort of one and the same. If this was going to happen, a lot less of us would lose jobs, or at least we would be merged with them. And maybe AI can do all the work and we can just go surfing or play the guitar on the beach. But I like you, I became a little bit more sceptical, a little more cynical about AI being this great boom for the world. It might be a great boom for a few billionaires and nobody else, and this presents a very real challenge. But I do think right now still, I am on the side of: let’s move fast forward with AI and develop it, and let’s see what it can do for humanity. Because again, it might not just be only about AI. It is about getting us to the stars. It is about the new technologies that take us off the planet (and help us) become truly transhumanist. And that is what I think AI can still help us do.
SF: Well, let’s hope that AI allows us to just surf on volcanoes and have some fun. Thank you very much for your time.
Order Zoltan Istvan’s biography here.
