Future shock: how about a US president who lives forever?

Jamie Barlett meets the man behind a political movement in America that wants to make us all more than human.

It usually takes a lifetime for a radical political movement to graduate from the margins to the mainstream. That's OK, because Zoltan Istvan is planning to live 10000 years. Istvan is a transhumanist.

Transhumanists, broadly speaking, are people who want us to become "beyond human". It's an umbrella term for a broad family of ideas united by the vision that technology now, or at least soon, will allow us to greatly enhance human intellectual, physical, and psychological capacities. That means bionic limbs, 3D printing of organs and uploading our entire brains onto memory sticks and carrying them around with us as backup.

But ideas are not enough for this fledgling movement. Transhumanism remains a smallish but well-funded movement. Humanity+, the largest formal umbrella group, has just under 10000 members from around the world, and they are largely rich Californians, technology geeks and scientists (sometimes all three). And it remains mostly confined to the West. That's why, in October this year, Istvan decided to form the Transhumanist Party, and run for president in the 2016 US presidential election.

As you might have guessed, Istvan will be running on a pretty interesting policy platform.

First up - and a particular interest of Istvan's, who I've come to believe is genuinely determined to live forever - is life extension. This is the study of keeping people alive for as long as possible, either by slowing the ageing process or extending lifespan. "Few fields of study offer so much for civilisation," Istvan tells me. "And we're not far off the science being available so that people can start living a lot longer - maybe even 50 years or 100 years in the very near future."

I'm not sure how accurate his timelines are - others in the transhumanist movement are a little more cautious. But as it stands, he reckons there's hardly any investment in research of this type - about $1-billion (about R11.6-billion) a year, and most of this is on diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. In terms of what Istvan considers life extension science - stopping ageing and eliminating death entirely - it's far, far less. Because of that, Istvan thinks we're letting people die unnecessarily. In a tidy populist touch, he plans to curtail military spending in favour of research into all this. With enough resources, he thinks we can "conquer" ageing within a decade. The Transhumanist Party advocates spending at least $1-trillion over 10 years on life extension research.

Then there's perhaps the most important policy of all: how to manage the existential risks of rapid scientific advance - engineered viruses, nanotechnology, homemade biohacking, and of course, artificial intelligence.

Ray Kurzweil - probably the world's most famous transhumanist, who works for Google - thinks "the singularity" (the point at which AI becomes so smart that it starts making even smarter versions of itself, leaving us mortals trailing behind) will be with us in 2045. It's a terrifying prospect. The transhumanists themselves seem divided, although most agree that it's at least a possibility this century.

No party, argues Istvan, is thinking properly about any of this, but they could become major threats to civilisation in the near future. "I'm not entirely sure yet how we'd regulate it, but the Transhumanist Party will make this a top priority," he explains. "Of course I support AI, nanotechnology and other radical engineering, and would increase funding for all of it significantly, but strict safeguards need to be in place too."

Istvan also wants to make college mandatory, and free, for everyone. Which sounds rather good. "If we all live to 140, we're going to need a smarter, more capable population," he explains, when I suggest it sounds a bit Scandinavian for a Californian-based party that has tones of libertarianism.

Of course, the Transhumanist Party has not yet thought through policies on the bread and butter of government: immigration, housing, social welfare, and so on. Not that it matters, because at this point Istvan doesn't really intend to win, but rather to raise awareness about the party and the movement. Running for president will give him a platform, he hopes, to demonstrate that science and technology is good for people, for health and for wellbeing. (Istvan thinks that his main adversaries in the future will be religious groups.)

So what are his chances? "I realise I won't win it this time around. But by 2024 we will be a real, legitimate party with likely over half a million members. That's when we'll really make our move."

I think he's right that there will be space in politics for a movement that addresses our relationship with technology explicitly. At Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden, scientists are already connecting robotic limbs to the human nervous system of amputees; the first arm surgeries are scheduled to occur in less than 12 months. Then there's the "Iron Man" armour suit being created for American soldiers. Panasonic will release an exoskeleton suit soon. Injectable oxygen shots are already here. Some video games are already being played via mind-reading helmets. Enhanced contact lenses will soon allow people to have infrared night vision.

It does all throw up important ethical and philosophical challenges.

Is an uploaded mind still human? Should we give "human rights" to an AI with a superior intellect to a human?

Then there's the social problems. Presumably, human enhancement technologies would be disproportionately available to those with greater financial resources, creating a genetic divide.

And if you lived forever, are you taking up the place of another generation? What about the more mundane things - what would be a fair prison sentence for murder if we could all live for 200 years?

Either way, campaigning should be fun. At present Istvan has a tiny team helping him, but he'll launch a Kickstarter campaign next month to raise more funds. Later in the year, he'll tour California - his home state - on a campaign bus with what he hopes will be a handful of 1.8m robots.

Not everyone is happy, though. There are those in the transhumanist movement who don't like politics mixing with their pure research pursuits.

Istvan is a high-profile but controversial character in the movement - especially after his book, The Transhumanist Wager, which is a philosophical near-future dystopian thriller in which transhumanists launch the third world war from their "seastead".

"The transhumanist movement has a lot of older white males with egos," he says. "But I'm representing a new part of the movement. Young, revolutionary and political."