As the bitter and dirty race for the American presidency draws to a close, it's time to highlight the only candidate who has put bioethics at the front and centre of his campaign. His program is pretty simple: to overcome death and ageing within 15 years. A Tranhshumanist Bill of Rights for "Human beings, sentient artificial intelligences, cyborgs, and other advanced sapient life forms" commits government to working for indefinite life spans, morphological freedom and an end to involuntary suffering and ageing. Some people have questioned the practicality of eliminating death, because of the resulting population explosion. However, Zoltan's response is that "mind-uploading will be here in 50 years, so people might actually remain alive but in machines, making population levels easy to deal with." He has a few other ideas as well, such as surrendering the job of being president to artificial intelligence.

Earlier this year, the American Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) awarded their facetious'annual Luddite award' to a lose coalition of AI sceptics, including Tesla CEO Elon Musk and renown physicist Stephen Hawking. The ITIF labelled the likes of Musk and Hawking'alarmists' engaged in and "feverish hand-wringing about a looming artificial intelligence apocalypse". Yet the sarcastic gesture did not go down well. This week Nature published a scathing critique of the ITIF's'fanciful futurism', defending the'legitimate concerns' of Musk and Hawking. Ironically, the risks of AI are already being felt indirectly as universities lose young talent to the corporate sector.