 Greetings, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Janati Stolyerov II. I am the chairman of the United States Transhumanist Party and the chief executive of the Nevada Transhumanist Party. Today I will offer you a preview of my remarks that I plan to deliver during a panel discussion at FreedomFest 2017 in Las Vegas on Friday, July 21. It will take place within the Paris Hotel in Las Vegas between 2.30pm and 3.20pm. I will be on the same panel with such distinguished individuals as Michael Shermer, the moderator, Edward Hudgens, Zoltan Istvan, who founded the Transhumanist Party and ran as its presidential candidate in 2016, as well as Peter Voss and Ed Schuss. The topic of the panel is artificial intelligence and robots, economy of the future, or end of free markets. I will be presenting a nuanced case suggesting that artificial intelligence and automation will indeed transform free markets and the capitalist economy, but will not do away with the capitalist economy for a very important set of considerations. First, it is important to distinguish, and I am certain other panelists will distinguish between narrow artificial intelligence, narrow AI, and artificial general intelligence, or AGI. Narrow AI is dependent on the context within which it operates, so narrow AI will do what it is programmed to do somewhat autonomously within a particular context. Think of a self-driving car, for instance, being programmed to operate on roadways subject to certain rules of the road within a given country. Or think of an AI program that can play the game of chess or the game of go and beat human opponents in it. Narrow AI can process a lot of data, do a lot of calculations quickly, perhaps come up with solutions within the field of endeavor for which it was programmed. Narrow AI is fast advancing. It is the area that will have the most approximate impact on jobs, but I argue only on certain kinds of jobs. Jobs that do require a lot of computational capacity, a lot of high throughput processing, but would apply to essentially similar types of information or decisions within that delimited kind of context to which the narrow AI would apply. So narrow AI might displace a lot of data entry or data processing types of jobs. Narrow AI might displace what I would call a lot of quant types of jobs. People who construct mathematical or numerical models according to certain well-defined predetermined rules or parameters. What narrow AI would not displace, however, is work that requires creative judgment, particularly judgment that brings in multiple disciplines or insights, including insights from extensive personal experience, and even more particularly judgment intended to overcome a multifaceted challenge or to avoid a suboptimal outcome. In order to avoid a suboptimal outcome in a real-world multi-dimensional problem, one not only has to bring in skills from multiple disciplines or knowledge gained from personal experience, one also has to have certain personality traits and virtues designed to essentially carry that decision to fruition, because it's not always easy to implement a decision that would solve a multifaceted challenge or avoid a suboptimal outcome. People with those kinds of skill sets will only continue to be in higher demand, and indeed as automation enables more bountiful production, as narrow AI enables the, let us say, simpler high throughput types of tasks to be addressed more efficiently, the level at which the challenges in our world will accumulate will be the problems that may not require all that much processing power that could be handled by the human mind, but that do require abundant judgment. I myself am a property and casualty actuary by specialty, and as an actuary, I do employ a lot of mathematical techniques, and I review techniques and predictive models developed by others, but I would say a distinguishing feature of the actuarial profession that separates it from the kind of quant that I described is the ability to go beyond specific mathematical or modeling techniques on their rote application and to question the underlying assumptions that go into a particular technique or model, that in essence would suggest whether or not the application of a given technique or the way a given model is designed would be appropriate for addressing the real-world problem in question. Indeed, employing judgment focusing on the underlying assumptions of methods and models and the realism or lack thereof of those assumptions would be, in my view, the most important fundamental skill sets that an actuary would need to have, as compared to a quant who would too often focus on quantitative techniques in isolation from real-world significance, and that type of work where one simply implements a scheme, which may be a sophisticated scheme, could be rendered obsolete by narrow AI. So for the foreseeable future, the market economy, the world of jobs and employment, would be sustainable for those who are well educated, for those who have good judgment. Such people would be able to earn steady and rising incomes and would be able to continue to fuel the capitalist economy with their purchasing and investment decisions. I recognize, however, that not everybody is equipped to utilize that kind of creative judgment at the level necessary to solve the multifaceted challenges confronting large organizations or even small organizations or even individuals. We all know people who have terrible judgment, and yet a lot of those people have been able to make a living up to now doing more roped routine tasks, which have progressively been rendered obsolete through automation and maybe rendered more so obsolete through the advent of improved narrow AI. As a result, even from a libertarian perspective, it may be necessary to provide a universal, unconditional basic income that would hopefully replace the labyrinth-themed complexity of today's welfare programs, but provide a certain floor, fairly spartan, but sustainable standard of living, below which individuals who are unable to find employment would not be able to descend. And of course, they would get a certain fixed amount of money per year. They would have the freedom to spend it as they wish, but if they spend it unwisely, there would be no further support from that system for them. They would need to rely on voluntary charity or their friends. And even though some libertarians may object to that, the majority of people I think would understand the importance of that kind of system. If nothing else from a pragmatic perspective, to prevent resentment or revolt by those whose jobs are displaced by automation, because ideally we should convince as many people as possible to support any sort of automation that can solve problems and improve productivity, bring about abundance and increase in standards of living, the individuals who are particularly displaced by those advances may not feel that way. So a universal basic income may in effect allay their grievances, and of course prevent any destructive lashing out that would undermine the progress of our civilization. Furthermore, I advocate that the majority of people should be guided gradually by voluntary free market cultural signals toward activities that do contribute value in terms of human flourishing, but are not necessarily monetarily remunerative. Those activities could solve certain problems of everyday life, say do work around the home, take care of an ailing relative or an ailing member of one's community, clean up litter in one's area, even if one doesn't get paid for it, but one perceives the importance of doing that. Advocate to one's local neighborhood governing body, whatever that may be, to create some sort of improvement in the infrastructure of the neighborhood, or activities that express creativity and imagination. Activities like art or music or writing, a lot more people would be able to engage in those for now distinctly human types of endeavors, at least in terms of the meaning that they can convey. Or dabbling in potential new scientific discoveries, if somebody has that floor of a universal basic income, they may engage in attempting to push outward the boundaries of knowledge in a field they're interested in, even though it may not be particularly monetarily remunerative or in demand within the market at the time. Some people may utilize this opportunity of a universal basic income to pursue entrepreneurial ventures, which are high risk but may be high reward, and they would be cushioned from absolute destitution by this Spartan floor that a universal basic income would provide. Now, an entirely different proposition from the narrow AI characterized economy that I described would be the arrival of AGI, or Artificial General Intelligence, because AGI is not as attached to a particular context as narrow AI. The point of AGI is to be universal and flexible, and to be able to learn new domains and new skill sets. So an AGI entity, if it is developed, could become genuinely creative and capable of judgments that we would consider both of a prudential nature and of a moral nature. And that type of entity, which in my view would emerge decades later than the more advanced narrow AIs that are on the horizon, would indeed be able to replace the more judgment oriented human professions that could survive narrow AI. However, once AGI emerges if it is developed, that type of concern I would say would pale in comparison to another important question, which is once AGI entities become capable enough to replace the judgment oriented professions, they would most likely themselves need to have become sentient to achieve this. And being sentient would render them worthy of respect as autonomous rights bearing entities. This is an area where the U.S. Transhumanist Party has been at the forefront of the discussion at a time when it is still possible to develop the discussion in a manner that is not fueled by animosity or the pressure of an impending advance revolutionizing everything. We have developed documents such as the Transhumanist Bill of Rights, version 2.0 of which was voted on democratically by our members in late December 2016. And for the Freedom Fest audience, I confess this is not a fully libertarian document. Our members come from a wide variety of conventional and unconventional political persuasions. But this document does have a strong emphasis on the freedom, the personal freedom, of sentient entities. And it classifies sentient entities in a taxonomy that seeks to determine what the prerequisites are to be considered sufficiently sentient to have these rights. The activities of the Transhumanist Party at this stage are aimed at raising awareness that in the future perhaps humans will not be the only sentient entities, will not be the only rights bearing entities. And that of course will inaugurate a whole series of questions about how do we recognize these entities politically and how do we prevent unnecessary and possibly catastrophic frictions between us humans and those types of sentient AGI's. How do we integrate these beings into our future society? How do we prevent them from being assailed either by Luddites who fear technological advancement or even certain self-identified transhumanists who posit that artificial intelligence would necessarily be an existential threat? Consider how a sentient and perhaps fundamentally decent AGI in the future would interpret that rhetoric reflecting back on the prejudice and antipathy with which some humans, even very intelligent humans, treated the potential arrival of this kind of being. What I would like to avoid and what the Transhumanist Party seeks to avoid would be a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy of doomsaying regarding AI. I think we need to step back from the doomsaying mode and instead look at particular AI systems and their capabilities as well as the distinction between narrow AI and AGI and how each is likely to affect our future economy and the free market. I, as a libertarian leading transhumanist, have confidence that the free market is a fundamentally workable system, though it has never been perfectly implemented anywhere in the world, and strong vestiges of it will continue to be with us in the years and decades to come. Thank you very much.