 So this is Gennady. He's the Chief Executive Officer, is it? The Chief Executive is my official title for the Nevada Transhumanist Party, and I'm the chairman of the United States Transhumanist Party as well. So thank you, David, for the introduction and for facilitating this set of presentations. Today, because we are talking about emerging futures, I would like to discuss my vision for pursuing a future of extreme progress by transforming the political paradigm in the United States. If you go on to the next slide, this contains a little bit of background information about the U.S. Transhumanist Party. Most of you know this already. The U.S. Transhumanist Party was founded by Zoltan Istvan on October 7th, 2014. Zoltan ran for president in 2016. He was mostly a write-in candidate because state's ballot access laws are quite stringent, but he did get extensive media exposure over 100 million page views, and he is famous for his immortality bus tour. After the presidential election concluded, Zoltan stepped down as chairman on November 17th, 2016. And now he has largely moved on to other endeavors, for instance, running as a Libertarian for Governor of California. However, he has expressed a desire to transform the Transhumanist Party into a member-driven organization that represents the Transhumanist community as a whole. So he asked me to be the second chairman and to create the infrastructure for a self-sustaining movement, including a membership base that would vote on policy and structure. And to that end, we have created a new website at www.transhumanist-party.org, where one can apply for free via an electronic form to be a member. Right now, we actually have 389 members as of today, and we have conducted three successful votes already. I would also like to point out we are a trans-partisan organization in that we do not require or expect our members to adhere to any conventional set of political beliefs. We have members who are Libertarians, Socialists, Democrats, Republicans, centrists, people who have been apolitical up until now, and other transhumanists who might not fit into any of those categories. So moving on to the next slide, this is just a depiction of our advisors thus far, who are distinguished subject matter experts, quite well known within the transhumanist community. And again, we would like to see the best expertise, the most erudite individuals influencing the deliberations and decisions of the Transhumanist Party, and we would like to receive that expertise in as many areas of emerging technologies that are relevant to transhumanism as possible. Moving on to our next slide, most aspects of the transhumanist party's platform and structure will ultimately be determined by our members, but at the time I became chairman, I decided for three core ideals to constitute the immutable portion of what the transhumanist party stands for. These ideals are intended to the areas of broad agreement within the transhumanist community, and different individuals will, I recognize, interpret these statements in slightly different ways. However, I think they could still find broad agreement with the wording of these statements. So the first ideal is that the transhumanist party supports significant life extension achieved through the progress of science and technology. The second ideal is that the transhumanist party supports a cultural and political atmosphere informed and animated by reason, science and secular values. And the third ideal is that the transhumanist party supports efforts to use science, technology, and rational discourse to reduce and eliminate various existential risks to the human species. And in our membership application, we ask prospective members, do they agree with just these three core ideals and the overwhelming majority of people who have applied for membership thus far, essentially all except two people have agreed and the other two people, I have inquired of them what their areas of disagreement might be, and as a result of that still figured out that they essentially hold broadly transhumanist views in a variety of areas. So on the next slide, these core ideals create the framework for a very different political approach. Mainstream politics currently neglects the crucial role that emerging technologies play in shaping the possibilities of everyday life. A lot of politicians when they campaign don't mention technology at all, and we need to raise awareness that technology is indeed one of the most significant drivers and indeed the most significant driver of societal and political change and the factor that most substantially affects the opportunities available to individuals. At the same time, we need to combine that technological advocacy with support for societal values like freedom, tolerance, and cosmopolitanism. Because without these values, not only can one not have sustained technological innovation, but also certain technologies could become tools of oppression rather than tools of liberation. Unfortunately, today's politics is shaped by scarcity and competing special interest groups. A prime example of this is the 2016 election season where we observed substantial animosity driven by a zero-sum mentality. Many people today still think others must lose in order for them to win, and this tribalism is exactly the opposite of the transhumanist vision. Transhumanism promotes a future of widespread abundance, which would overcome today's major sources of scarcity, particularly the scarcity of time that arises with today's woefully short lifespans. And this is why in the transhumanist party we consider radical life extension, indefinite life extension, but also any incremental life extension to be one of our foremost priorities. And we recognize also with widespread abundance, people who are more prosperous, more comfortable, more fulfilled in their lives are less likely to react with vicious hostility toward others. Not only do they have more to lose from conflict, but also they have less of an interest in conflict in the first place. So ultimately we seek to transform politics into what it should have always been, which is a constructive focus on which policies are best for improving human well-being and solving the problems that confront us. So on the next slide, I would like to discuss how the transhumanist party's approach reflects that political vision. We are an open, transparent and horizontal organization, and we will strive to be increasingly so with time. We offer autonomy for state-level transhumanist parties, which of course have to abide by the laws of their respective states when they're ready to register with the secretaries of state for their states, and they need to behave in a peaceful and rights-respecting manner. But apart from that, they are able to determine their own bylaws, their own leadership structures, their own platforms, and we will support them in spreading the word about their respective organizations. Furthermore, we seek to free political activity from the constraints of time, place, money, and connections. We believe emerging technologies can do this such that one doesn't have to be wealthy or well-connected or in a specific location in order to effectuate political change. An example I like to use is a busy individual who is interested in transhumanist ideas but doesn't have a lot of time, but might have 15 minutes of time on a given day. My vision is for that individual to be able to go to the transhumanist party website and find a project or a small way in which that person can substantively contribute from wherever that person is, whatever that person's knowledge base or other interests might be. And that could really harness some untapped potential within the transhumanist community and other communities that could be our natural allies. Furthermore, we strongly reject tribalism. We reject the politics of personality and power. We believe politics needs to be about constructive solutions to the problems of our time. And to that end, we embrace collaboration with other transhumanist organizations and individuals, be that on a case-by-case basis or on a systematic basis. We don't have to agree on everything, but we will try to find areas of common ground and possibilities for symbiosis. We are also radically open in terms of our membership. We are the only political party in the U.S. that I'm aware of that allows individuals outside of the U.S. to be what are called allied members. Granted, they wouldn't be able to vote in United States elections. However, they could vote in internal transhumanist party elections, and they could certainly take part in our internal deliberations and make suggestions. Furthermore, we don't have an age restriction for members. Anybody who is capable of forming a political opinion, including children, would be eligible to be a member. In the future, if sentient artificial intelligences are developed, animal species are uplifted, or we encounter intelligent extraterrestrial species, we would welcome any such willing entities as members. And furthermore, we seek to innovate in terms of our approach to voting. All our voting is conducted electronically using the rank preference method, which is superior to the prevailing method where you only vote for a single option, because rank preference voting eliminates incentives for strategic voting, where one might deliberately not vote for one's top choice just because one fears a particularly bad choice winning, and one fears taking votes away from a suboptimal but tolerable choice. Instead, one rank orders across the entire spectrum of options so that if one's top preference doesn't get selected in subsequent rounds of the instant runoff process, one's next ranked preferences might still have significant influence. So our goal is a member-driven organization with a lot of distributed member-initiated activity and minimal vertical bottlenecks. Essentially, the goal is if anybody has a constructive project that could contribute to advancing the transhumanist vision, they could initiate that project under the auspices of the U.S. transhumanist party. And at this stage, we do prioritize shaping public opinion over winning elections. We realize state ballot access laws are a hurdle to overcome that would require a significant volunteer base. But at any stage of our existence, there are substantial activities that we can engage in. For instance, the two expert discussion panels we held earlier this year on artificial intelligence and life extension that you could view on YouTube, the member articles that we have published, the policy discussions that we have initiated throughout the transhumanist community, as well as efforts at public outreach and activism that are aimed outward toward non-transhumanists to get them introduced to transhumanist ideas and the promises of emerging technologies. So on the next slide, I offer a brief summary of our achievements in member voting thus far. Our first vote was held in late December of 2016 on version 2.0 of the Transhumanist Bill of Rights. And this is a greatly expanded version from the original one that Zoltan István wrote and temporarily placed on the walls of the U.S. Capitol building in 2015. This version has not the six original articles of Zoltan's version, but 25 articles and an extensive preamble that broadly defines the sentient entities to whom rights should apply. So we're attempting to preempt civil rights struggles by recognizing the rights of future intelligent and sentient beings who are not the same as today's humans. And you can read this entire document on our website. In January and February of 2017, we held our two initial successful votes on our platform plans. Our platform is found in Article 3 of the U.S. Transhumanist Party Constitution. Thus far we have 10 planks. We hope to have many more adopted over the course of subsequent rounds of voting. We have a plank that strongly supports individual privacy. We have a plank that opposes various forms of bigotry. We have a plank that elaborates on our stance that while the vast majority of technologies are beneficial, there are a few that pose grave and harmful threats, for instance, weapons of mass destruction, and those kinds of technologies should not be deployed. We also strongly advocate nuclear disarmament because the majority of our members do see nuclear war, including accidental nuclear war, as the greatest existential risk facing humankind today. We support concerted research in various areas of emerging technologies and the redirection of funding toward that research. We have an extensive plank on morphological freedom that lays out essentially both the prerogatives and the responsibilities entailed within that concept. We have a plank setting forth a pro-science and pro-intelligence position that is also in opposition to the post-truth deliberate distortion of facts and evidence that is prevalent in politics today. We support freedom of peaceful innovation in a wide array of emerging technologies, and we have a plank that itemizes a lot of the emerging technologies that we support. Of course, this is not an exhaustive list by any stretch. And finally, we support the development of a smart infrastructure that could deliver a variety of amenities to buildings throughout the country as well as have perhaps some self-repairing capabilities. So with that, on the next slide, I just wanted to show how one can apply to become a member of the transhumanist party. You can go to our website, there's a conspicuous bar of links at the top and you can navigate to the become a member option and fill out a simple free questionnaire. So with that, thank you very much and I am open for any questions that you might have. Does anyone have any questions? Sir, I have a curious question. One of the main battles that appears in transhumanist groups are those who are sort of pro and con, having some sort of enforced social contracts. Where does the transhumanist party come down on such things as, for instance, universal basic income, making sure that everyone gets an education, reasonable healthcare, because there are many people in the art world who never have the opportunity to even work to do these types of things because they're crippled from birth. That is a good question and I will acknowledge the spectrum of opinions that exists on this set of issues among transhumanists. And I will also add, I consider myself to be a libertarian transhumanist. However, even as a libertarian transhumanist, I do not rule out certain types of structures such as a universal basic income. My view is we have to look at the world as it exists today and we have to look at structures and mechanisms that can provide an incremental improvement for that. So, for instance, today we have a very cumbersome and conditional and labyrinthine system of welfare benefits that will often fail to achieve its stated purpose of lifting people out of poverty. And whatever one thinks about the role of government in helping prevent dire poverty or insuring that people have basic healthcare, the current systems have failed to do that. So, in light of that recognition, I think there's a lot of common ground among both libertarian transhumanists and more social contract oriented transhumanists in devising a system that overcomes those obstacles. I would say a single universal unconditional basic income that replaces existing welfare programs without diminishing even the amount of funds or resources that is distributed out to people would be an incremental improvement from a libertarian perspective. It would minimize a lot of the costs of administration and it would furthermore provide more incentives for individuals to take initiative to improve their situation. For instance, they don't have to fear losing their welfare benefits if they become gainfully employed. Likewise with universal healthcare. Actually, in voting on the Transhumanist Bill of Rights, the majority of U.S. transhumanist party members supported a provision stating that all sentient entities should be entitled to be beneficiaries of a system of universal healthcare. Now, that's a fairly broad statement. What might a system of universal healthcare that actually works look like? I would suggest the best way to achieve such a system is to drive down the costs of medical procedures and to have so much innovation advancing so rapidly that healthcare treatments, both basic treatments and cutting-edge treatments would become accessible the way food is accessible today. We don't have to worry about having a significant government program to provide food to people in advanced countries today because food is abundant and even a lot of indigent people can be very well-fed today. So let's reach a system where healthcare is that widely and cheaply available and then the mechanics of that system might be a secondary concern. Sounds great. I guess some of the concern, of course, is that there are many people who want to make as much profit as they can. I mean, you look at the Martin Screllings and the ones who say, hey, as long as I have an opportunity to drive up the costs for profit for myself, as long as I can do it by the rules. Yes, and I recognize that concern. I think that is even a perversion of the traditional capitalist ideal that Adam Smith articulated. Adam Smith recognized that self-interest, including the profit motive, are powerful motivators for human behavior and could sometimes lead certain goals to be accomplished more effectively than altruistic or charitable motives. At the same time, the incentives within a society matter significantly in determining whether that self-interest is channeled in a constructive or a destructive direction. For instance, a Bill Gates or a Mark Zuckerberg of one era who may have their issues but are relatively benign by historical standards might have been an Attila the Hun or an Alexander the Great in another era where there aren't as many structures or incentives channeling human behavior toward more peaceful and symbiotic types of purposes. So I think it is important for the profit motive to be framed by values and for a business undertaking, a technological undertaking to be focused on something besides money. And in making money, in making well-deserved money, one should be providing something else of value to people just like the baker who sells you your bread in Adam Smith's example. He is looking out for his self-interest, but he is also providing you something that you obviously value. So I think ethics and business and in politics are extremely important and the transhumanist party definitely stands for an ethical approach. I mean also if you deeply read Adam Smith, one of his concerns is the fact that short-sightedness really is a huge danger to our own self-interest. I mean everyone pretends as if altruism isn't in a person's self-interest, but generally people who are altruistic find themselves immediately the beneficiaries of more than enough altruism from other people and other benefits that even though the altruistic action may have been slightly detrimental to them, the net effect, and not to mention the trickle-down effect of their actions is that altruism in the long run tends to be tremendously beneficial to the practitioner as well as the recipients. And I think you make a good point. I think you're advocating for essentially long-term enlightened self-interest, which is what every view of self-interest ought to incorporate into it. And I agree, a lot of people do tend to be short-sighted and they should consider not just the immediate consequences of behavior, but also the consequences many years, decades, and centuries down the road. I think transhumanism is particularly conducive to that consideration because the application of emerging technologies could extend people's time horizons. For instance, if you have 500 years left rather than 50 years left, you might become more concerned about pollution or about preventing asteroid impacts or about preventing deleterious climate change and perhaps more concerned with longer-term projects that could, for instance, improve a particular community over the course of decades or establish space habitats on another world. So I do agree, enlightened self-interest is very important. I think at the same time, it's important to shift public discourse away from this simplistic self-versus-others dichotomy. People like Martin Shkreli think they're being self-interested by trying to gouge prices as much as they can within the short term. However, they're really undermining themselves in the long term by undermining the possibility for constructively offering value to others. So if people can really perceive that harmony of interests as the great French classical liberal economist Frédéric Bastia stated, then I think that false dichotomy would dwindle and we would be all the better off for it. So are there other questions? No, I'm checking on this one. I think other people need that question. Okay, I think Stuart is on and he's next. Are you there? Yes, I'm here. I emailed a couple of questions. I'm sorry, I texted you a couple of emails of questions as we discussed earlier that you would moderate. I can just ask right now if everyone here's... Can everyone hear? Okay, so this is Stuart, Dan Brown. I'm on the board. The first question is, does the party explicitly support technology-based post-capital economics as a post-scarcity solution in the long term? Well, that is a good question and I think it really relates to the role of money in a future economy. The role of money today primarily is to facilitate transactions, to serve as a medium of exchange. In earlier eras when money was associated with more tangible goods like gold or silver, it could be said to be a reliable store of value because the gold and silver are objectively out there and unless someone steals them from you physically, you're going to keep them and be able to use them for whatever intrinsic purposes they may have. However, in the era of fiat currencies where essentially money has value because the government recognizes it as legal tender, but the government could also easily debase it by increasing the money supply. That's kind of a more tenuous proposition already. So the disconnect between money and production of tangible values, the kinds of goods and behaviors that actually improve human life and well-being has become more tenuous already and in the future we could conceive of alternative forms of what we today consider currency. Cryptocurrency is one such example that could be essentially an electronic method of tracking transactions and accounting for them, but it would be even less of a conspicuous motivation than government-issued fiat money is today. If I might, just before, so I can address something rather than at the end, I'm glad you brought that up because I was going to point out that it's not limited to fiat currencies, but at the same time the performance of Bitcoin does not indicate long-term stability, the opposite in that it's an investment more than anything else. And as such, it fluctuates in value and people have made and lost fortunes. So I don't see that imparting this ability that you're assuming it would provide. Could you explain that, please? Yes, that may well be at the early stage of cryptocurrencies because we don't see yet widespread day-to-day acceptance of the cryptocurrencies in a lot of mainstream commercial transactions. A lot of people have different expectations about how widely adopted they're going to be and what sectors, how quickly. And I think that's what is driving a lot of the volatility. As is the case with all markets for commodities or securities or other similar instruments, a lot of the resale value is driven by expectations. Now, what would a more mature currency of that sort look like is an interesting question. And furthermore, what would a world look like in which the productive capacities are sufficiently great that one doesn't have to worry about engaging in extensive commercial transactions to satisfy one's basic needs? A good example of that today is email. I am old enough to remember the time when people paid for email on a subscription basis and had these very low-quality dial-up connections and associated email inboxes from the internet service providers. And now, of course, for all practical purposes, email data storage is unlimited and free to the vast majority of people. So can we have that with other goods within the economy? Can we have that eventually with 3D printing of small-scale consumer products? We probably can. The issue is I think at every stage of human existence there will be scarcity somewhere. It will just be further removed from everyday life. So let's say we have a Star Trek-type society with replicators that can produce every conceivable small-scale good, but there are still these large-scale construction projects, say building a spaceship like the Enterprise or terraforming a planet that would probably require the application of certain scarce resources. So I think there would still need to be a system for determining who gets those resources based on some manner of value creation and productive contribution. What that system would look like is very interesting, of course, to think about. That's a very good response. Although what I detect in the kernel of its proposition is a new variation on disaggregation and therefore inequality in resource access and distribution, because it's only available to some. In principle, it's no different than the practice of capitalism that is seen almost excruciatingly in the United States at this time, where there's more money than it's needed to take care of everyone. No one should be without food, which I wanted to point out that you made a statement about abundance of food in this country. Well, no, there are people without food and without medication and all the rest of it. So I would say that the longer-term plank of any transhumanist project and party would be to look towards an environment that was essentially point-to-point in the sense that the same technologies that would allow the location of retrieval of processing of and manufacturing based on and distribution of resources in response to supply and demand, without involving a monetary element, would be the only equilibrating solution to the insistence that scarcity will always be with us. It's also the case that the same technology can be used to have direct democracy in its true definition, which would not require any representational government but would in fact be more of a peer-to-peer referendum with all involved. Now, that implies, of course, a necessity for a level of education that's relatively ubiquitous for all involved and was certainly not anywhere near that yet. But again, this is all about looking at things that need to be but that are not available yet. So I think we have to be very careful in making even the smallest assumption that some of these scarcity-based practices that exist today will have necessity exist in the future. I don't see that as a necessity, but that's perhaps a point where we differ. I think it's definitely reasonable to be open-ended in one's views of what scarcity will look like in the future, whether there will be scarcity in certain areas because there could be factors in future technologies that we can't even anticipate from today's vantage point. So I will give you that. It's just from my present vantage point I find it difficult to imagine how without some sort of allocation of scarce resources one can initiate a planet-scale terraforming project or construct a massive spaceship. But that's kind of on the edge of the issues that we're discussing today. I think in the vast majority of areas that are directly relevant to everyday life, scarcity could be abolished or at least significantly alleviated through technology. So that's a broad area of agreement. At the same time, there I think should also be a pragmatic aspect to how we approach such a future in the sense that we should recognize that even as scarcity decreases, it's not going to disappear overnight and we may have on occasion a two steps forward, one step back type of situation as well. You know, agreed, agreed, agreed, of course. It's not smooth sailing to use that metaphor. I would just close by pointing out one of the greatest falsities and the assumptions of the relationship between scarcity and value. The scarcest gem, if you will, mineral in the planet are these crystalline forms that form only in the higher regions towards the opening of an active volcano. Now once the eruptions at the high heat dissipate, they just spontaneously deconstruct into their component minerals. They are the most rare and they have no monetary value whatsoever. They're only of interest to geologists. So the point is that it's being impressed by the population for forever as far as I can tell that scarcity equals higher value and upper higher cost and it's a conard. So we need to keep these intentional contradictions in mind when we're looking towards a future because otherwise we will bring those biases, those cognitive biases with us and that will not serve our long-term purpose. I'm inclined to agree with you. For instance, using my example of email access just because most people don't pay anything for email access today doesn't mean that they don't find it valuable. They do find it quite valuable and they use it every day. Exactly. That's a very good example. And at the same time, we see what happens because of the current state of human nature. It's not permanent. It can be changed. We can discuss that together if you'd like it a later time. But the point is there that you see that once it's free, it opens up not just the positive but for us free spam, free scam, free ability to invade and take other capitalists, unregulated capitalism to a free environment. So that's something else that has to be considered in the utopian state that we're discussing and wish to architect unless we have a method of raising everyone to a point of an ethical and enlightened state as you were alluded to earlier. We're still going to have some of the same problems we have today when others, some will seek to take advantage of others. And I agree with you that that is one of the fundamental foundations of what the kind of scenarios we're discussing. Yes, I do agree that it's desirable to minimize predatory behaviors to the extent possible. I do think at the very least this would be consistent with the institution of private property where people own what they have and they can do with it what they like as long as they don't harm others. The key is to achieve that abundance so that in essence, we don't have dire privation anymore. We might still have relative inequality but on an absolute level, people will have their basic needs met and they will have far more than their basic needs met. There is also sometimes the term equality is not really what we're talking about, we're talking about egalitarianism. It doesn't matter if one person has a little bit more of this and another person has a little bit more of that. As long as overall, the distribution matrix is not as extreme as it is today. It's much more normalized so that the outliers, the segments are much closer to the mean than anything we have currently today and for our history up to this date. So everything doesn't have to be exactly the same at all because nothing in the universe is non-dynamic, everything changes continually. But it has to be, in my view, within a much more narrow variance profile to make sure that we don't end up with an accumulated problem such that it starts to emulate the kind of disequilibrium that we have now. It's interesting that extreme disparities that you've described are very often the result of special interests influencing the political process. Exactly right, exactly right, yes. Yes, so perhaps this is actually an area where there is less disagreement between someone of your perspective and a lot of libertarians than might be envisioned because a lot of libertarians will say, also we need to remove the influence of special interests, for instance, in determining who gets subsidies or who gets special protections against competition. Those types of special barriers that serve concentrated few interests at the expense of the general public are also contrary to individual freedom. They're contrary to the opportunities that people should have to innovate, to compete, to experience social mobility if their efforts justify it. And I think in that world which would be more structurally open to social mobility the range of outcomes would de facto be narrower as you describe. That's a good point. As long as if we ever architect a situation like that it's kept in mind, and I don't know if I want to use the word, but it's often the case that there are different groups of libertarian thought and practice as well as there are in anarchy. There are very many forms of anarchy. And what a libertarian approach has to keep in mind which is often not the case in some of the libertarians for example in the United States is a sense of humanitarianism towards the people they are beholden to the representative's actions in other words. Pure libertarianism and all they want to do is minimize government and all the rest of it it often is the case that what Fuller used to call the have-nots will suffer because there is no one representing them adequately. So it has to be enlightened for libertarianism rather than the libertarian as a more far right instantiation of conservatism. Certainly and I think right now we are observing a significant divergence between libertarianism and conservatism especially in the wake of the Trump election when the majority of the Republican party has gone along with very illiberal populist nationalist borderline xenophobic or sometimes actually xenophobic ideas and of course historically libertarianism which is an outgrowth of classical liberalism and which espouses a more cosmopolitan type of individualism but that's very good and not to mention as you mentioned before of course really the largest caveat to me is the normalization of buying and along truths and the actual practice of promulgating all facts this is fundamentally attacking discussions like we're having because the meaning in any fact based and truth based and I know that we can just leave that definition aside for now those definitions aside for now but it is the case that without some attempt to have an allegiance to what is known to be true at the time of the discussion because facts do change continually even physics changes every 100-150 years profoundly but nevertheless to deliberately mislead means that the conversations that we just resolved from those assertions are meaningless and I'm glad that you mentioned it earlier in your talk Yes absolutely in order to make any sort of progress we do need to reference a common reality and a common base of facts and we can have different opinions different positions on what should be done what we should do what someone else should do but we are not all entitled to our own facts and I think and as long as those different opinions that none of them ideally are actually just rhetorical but hidden representations are powerful or a wealthy interested party behind the scenes which you also addressed so I was glad to hear that Yes indeed