The following opinions (more than allegations) are based on the author’s interpretation of the public communications of the people, and his personal experience with the people involved. They may well be wrong, however, the author is confident in stating these opinions. At this stage, we do not seek any legal action, or allegations, however, it seems that at least one of them (Istvan Gyurko) violated an important piece of legislation. These opinions are based on the author’s personal experience, and the aim is to call attention to questionable promises like immortality and others. The readers are welcome to dismiss such opinions or to follow them based on their own decisions. The alleged frauds could always be just pure incompetence, but there are suspicious behaviors and statements that the author believes more people should consider.
GF2045 was an affinity fraud in which a media monkey called Dmitry claimed he would solve the technological immortality problem. He claimed to be a bilionaire who wants to make this happen, as I suspected, however, this is not the case. He made a fancy website, and gathered a lot of naive people. He even conned important transhumanists like my friend Randal Koene to give speeches at an extra expensive event in NYC with $900 tickets. I understood that was a scam when it turned out he also invited religious charlatans and pseudo-scientists to promote a kind of new age religion at the same event. He also gave $300 to the fools among transhumanists who sold tickets for him. Of course, he disappeared and we never saw him again. There seems to be no progress in his plan, which includes very expensive research like replacing the human body with a robotic avatar. We repeatedly asked him if he would fund any actual brain scanning, brain simulation and/or robotics research, since he was supposedly a billionaire, but we never received a reply from him.
HumAI is a scam that imitates the GF2045 scam. A dating app / pornsite developer with no technical background claims he will solve the immortality problem with a “startup” in 30 years. He published a silly, incoherent, technically unsound “press release” he probably ripped off from the opinions of uneducated transhumanists he talked to, and Kurzweil’s books (which he probably didn’t understand), and somehow published this scam on all the clueless tech websites. Again a fancy website and no other substance. He is again making an affinity fraud, he collects donations and uses “ambassadors” to spread this scam. He is claiming he will make a mobile app called Soul which will collect information about a user and this will somehow eventually make him immortal. That alone should raise a red flag for anyone who is not completely scientifically illiterate. There are some other transhumanist startups led by people with no technical expertise or background claiming to solve extremely difficult scientific grand challenges, please be skeptical of claims with no substance behind them.
Lifeboat Foundation is a fraudulent non-profit and likely a money laundering operation that doesn’t really exist. They recruit their advisors pretending to be legitimate, and then do, basically, nothing. They often claim a donator will match every penny donated. What kind of a donator is that? That could only be money laundering. It is one of the trust funds for transhumanist charlatans that is a common thing nowadays. Here is an excellent takedown of these teabagger scammers.
Zoltan Istvan is a fraudster who collected people’s money for a fake presidential campaign, he did not use his real last name, either. He later formed an actual PAC, but we have no idea what he is doing with it. He excluded everyone else he associated with from the process, and now has gathered some tea party proponents to help his “case”. He promoted his fascist, militarist, totalitarian, egotistical, dehumanist ideology, masquerading as transhumanism, and thus misrepresented transhumanism. His actions amount to an affinity fraud, and the likes of him should not be welcome in the transhumanist community. Zoltan made friends with a lot of gullible transhumanists including some scientists like my former retarded friend Giovanni Santostasi, and used them to fortify his affinity fraud, giving himself an air of legitimacy. One of the most successful scams so far. See these questions he avoids answering to see how far his scam goes. I understood him to be a fraudster when it turned out he was an ally of Mike Lorrey, a notorious cyber criminal (who scammed people in Second Life), and tea party fanatic. He kept citing Mike Lorrey, and his fraudulent group technolibertarians in his anti-intellectual, brain damaging articles about transhumanism. He denied he was a global warming denialist, but kept pushing the denialist rhetoric of Mike Lorrey that we do not have to constrain fossil fuels in any way, because magical future technology will save us. This was a certain red flag. The other red flag was that the “novel” he wrote was a praise of fascism and dictatorship, while he claimed to be a democrat, and “endorsed” Clinton, who had never heard of this relatively unknown charlatan. He is a pathetic liar, and the articles he publishes demote transhumanists as inhuman idiots who will turn the world into a 1984 like dystopia. It’s also worth noting that Zoltan means Sultan in Ottoman language, a kind of imperial ruler. This egotistical twit might be the single most annoying person in the transhumanist community, he has been called the Donald Trump of transhumanism by many.
MIRI is an organization that pretends it’s solving the very serious problem of “friendly AI”, because otherwise AI will destroy the world. They think that if we don’t send them money, the world will end. This is a kind of fraud that imitates TV evangelists: if you don’t send us money, you will go to hell. Alternately, they’ve claimed that MIRI yields the best utility for charity donations, because, after all, they are saving the world, somehow, by publishing comical pseudo-intellectual nonsense and sophistry. MIRI’s claims about AI likely destroying the world are pseudo-science, and they’ve offered ridiculous “solutions” like an AI managed world dictatorship to combat this “problem”. However, they have been able to deceive a lot of gullible, socially incompetent, possibly autistic people. In particular, they have given rise to the foundation of FHI, FLI, and other half-scammy organizations who do nothing but parrot about how dangerous AI is. As a consequence of these extreme levels of stupidity, recently, Hawking and Musk, who unwittingly supported this nonsense, received a Luddite Award, rightly so. The real function of these organizations, however, is to be a trust fund for idiots like Yudkowsky, Bostrom, Tegmark, and their minions. Most of these people have superstitious views bordering on insanity, which I explained in my other post. For instance, Yudkowsky and Bostrom both have techno-creationist views fantasizing that future AI gods are somehow connected to their actions, or that we live in a simulation (creation) of AI gods. Tegmark is also a creationist of sorts. These AI Doomsaying Cults, are probably the most successful scam in the community, and remind me of Scientology, another new age religious cult based on second-grade science fiction (imitating the scripts of The Matrix and Terminator movies in particular, which had much better ideas).
I urge transhumanists to be mindful about such scams. If people want your money because they are transhumanists and they have no other reasonable explanation for why, that is most likely a scam. Please do support actual businesses and organizations that promote transhumanism in a good way, like Humanity+, but beware of the imitators and frauds.
