 Now, next speaker will be Gennady Stolarov. He is next generation transhumanist of the United States. He is the second in line chairman of the U.S. Transhumanist Party after Zolton Lutheran. He is also well known here in our conference because he is already third time speaking in our conference. This detail that you use on the poster, you could read it later on. I had present lap time him as a composer. He wrote the International Transhumanist March. He hoped his long day all the world will sing that march. I will not repeat last year. He will speak about another aspect of transhumanism, maybe political fear. Considerable change is put place in the political situation of the transhumanist and the longevity parties. I will give the floor to Gennady. And then we could comment. Of course, tomorrow we will continue quoting that because main stress in Europe on political issues is connected with longevity because it's more practical. Okay, Gennady will have the floor. Yes, thank you Professor Marchiv for that kind introduction. This is my third year presenting to the VSIM conference and I'm quite pleased to give you an update regarding events that transpired during the past year since I have spoken with you last. These are notable transhumanist political developments in the United States. I hope that you will be able to view my slides because I will go through them in sequence. But the first development that I would like to discuss is on the second slide and it pertains to version 3.0 of the Transhumanist Bill of Rights. The Transhumanist Bill of Rights is a remarkable document. It was originated by the founder of the U.S. Transhumanist Party, Zoltan Istvan. He wrote the first version, the first six articles and he traveled to Washington D.C. to post this first short version of the Transhumanist Bill of Rights onto the walls of the U.S. Capitol building. It was there very briefly but it was there as an opportunity for publicity for the ideas of transhumanism and for the kinds of political and societal transformations that we would like to see in order to have the right of those who pursue technological progress, technological enhancements, a better quality of life through technology to be respected. When I became chairman of the U.S. Transhumanist Party, I opened the Transhumanist Party to membership and we now have close to 1,800 members. At the time of the first vote of the U.S. Transhumanist Party was taken, we had fewer members than that. We had about 200 but we decided to solicit input from the Transhumanist Community as to what rights would look like in a future world where the extent of sentient and sapient entities could be much broader than exists today. There could be augmented humans with a variety of enhanced physical and mental capabilities. There could be uplifted animals. There could be sentient artificial general intelligences. We might encounter intelligent life from other worlds and how will we treat those beings? How will we make sure that we don't have the kind of situation where those beings are not acknowledged as having the same kinds of basic rights and perhaps some of the more advanced rights that we humans hope ourselves to enjoy? So this is a document that definitely looks forward toward the future. And in 2018, we had the occasion to once again enhance and revise it. In December of 2018, we held an electronic ranked preference vote among our members to further clarify and expand these ideas. So version 3.0 is available for free on the Transhumanist Party website. It contains 43 articles. This is an increase from 6 in the original version 1 and 25 in version 2. And since that time, the Transhumanist Bill of Rights had received some media coverage but version 2 received some misleading media coverage. I think there are some media outlets that unfortunately like to be sensational and like to misrepresent transhumanist ideas. Or they may be stuck in a kind of status quo bias where they don't realize the extent to which technology can solve some of the problems of our era. So we had in article 4 of the Transhumanist Bill of Rights the right to end involuntary suffering. And some media outlets misrepresented that as a right to euthanasia as if the only way to end suffering is to end life. And of course that's not what transhumanists consider to be the scope of options for ending suffering. Indeed, technology can cure diseases. Technology can eliminate disabilities. Technology can ameliorate psychological suffering as well so that people can go on living. It's very much aligned with David Pierce's concept of abolitionism to abolish suffering through science and technology so that people can live fulfilled lives. So in article 4 our members voted to clarify that that ending suffering doesn't mean ending life. It means using technology to improve life. And likewise some media outlets took the reference to universal healthcare in article 7 and considered it to necessitate government provided healthcare when in fact in the Transhumanist Bill of Rights we had stated nothing of the sort. There are different opinions within the transhumanist community about how healthcare systems should work, how healthcare should be funded and delivered but we are not prescribing one particular political solution. We believe that there should be a goal in mind of healthcare being universally available and abundant and affordable of course. We believe that treatments to extend the human lifespan when they become scientifically and technologically feasible should be spread to as many people as possible at as low a cost as possible. But how to accomplish that is very much an open question. It requires a lot of insights into economics, into political science and into the circumstances of any given society. So we clarified in article 7 that the right to universal healthcare does not necessarily imply government provided healthcare. Instead we look at the goal of universal healthcare. Just like today in fairly advanced countries in the western world for instance as well as for example in Japan and South Korea and much of China there is the ability to access food universally. Very few people starve if they don't want to starve in the western world and that's not because food is given away by the government it is because food is generally abundant and affordable even for people of limited means. So our challenge as transhumanists and it's an extremely important mission is to achieve the same kind of accessibility of healthcare but it might be done through a private system it might be done through some aspects of government service provision and other aspects being private and it may vary in how healthcare is provided by jurisdiction by society depending on the situation. Article 19 of the Transhumanist Bill of Rights pertains to universal basic income and most transhumanists support some form of universal basic income where a particular amount of money or other resources are provided to individuals irrespective of who they are irrespective of how wealthy or how poor they are irrespective of whether they have any other income sources irrespective of how they choose to spend that money and there are many advantages to a universal basic income over contemporary welfare systems. One large advantage is it could be more economical from the standpoint of the budget of the government because one doesn't need a lot of overhead that exists in administering a conditional welfare system but the original version two of the Transhumanist Bill of Rights described universal basic income as being a necessity because of the alleged inevitability of automation displacing jobs and really there are multiple hypotheses about what impact automation will have on jobs and there are other transhumanists who are actually skeptical that automation will do away with jobs rather they suggest automation will change the landscape of jobs and different types of jobs will become available so we generalized article 19 to state that whether or not automation is going to replace jobs a universal basic income is still desirable for other reasons for instance providing opportunities for individuals to exercise more creativity in their lives if they don't have to fear losing the basic necessities no matter what happens they may be willing to spend more time for instance on artistic pursuits or entrepreneurial pursuits and that's another argument in favor of a universal basic income that may have nothing to do with the prospects for automation necessarily and the final major type of change in the Transhumanist Bill of Rights has been the integration of all of the provisions of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights directly into the Transhumanist Bill of Rights so that we once again look at the kinds of rights that at least in many societies have been recognized as desirable for humans to have and we try to generalize them to the extent possible now there were certain phrasings in the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights that were connected to human biology in some way and we had to alter those phrasings to be independent of biology independent of the specifically human ways in which those rights were instantiated because we might encounter entities that are quite different from us biologically or may not even be biological entities but might be sentient entities in the future but the Transhumanist Bill of Rights is a continually evolving document in the sense that as technology advances as we gain more insights about what the future may be like we will revisit this document and members are certainly welcome to suggest articles or revisions to existing articles and once we accumulate a critical mass of suggestions we may hold another vote or multiple votes in future years moving on to early 2019 the US Transhumanist Party is now the sole Transhumanist Political Organization in the United States because of a number of developments that transpired earlier this year one of these developments has been our integration with a smaller party called the Transhuman Party very similar name but it had a bit of a different premise it was limited to 25 members, it had no leadership it was a kind of experiment in direct democracy but that experiment failed because of a lack of member engagement so ultimately the Transhumanist Party ended up acquiring the website of the Transhuman Party and reaching out to the members of that organization offering them membership in the Transhumanist Party and the ability to participate fully in our own processes and more than half of the Transhuman Party members accepted that offer and we also assimilated the name Transhuman Party as another option to call the US Transhumanist Party so essentially you can call us what you prefer between those two names either the Transhumanist Party or the Transhuman Party or you can abbreviate it as the USTP but acquiring this name Transhuman Party was a fortunate coincidence with the rollout of our social media campaign called I Am Transhuman the I Am Transhuman campaign seeks to bring to the public's attention the fact that we are already beneficiaries of some transhuman technologies we are already living in an era that could be considered transhuman in many respects because we live with technological enhancements that extend our capabilities far beyond what they would have been unaided so the goal of the I Am Transhuman campaign is to have individuals within the Transhumanist movement create short images or videos of themselves essentially explaining why they believe that they are transhuman how technology helps them expand their boundaries and expand their potential how the Transhumanist philosophy motivates and inspires them to live their lives and to strive for a better future we have already created two video compilations of prominent transhumanists US Transhumanist Party members discussing these subjects and everyone is welcome to participate if you would like to make a video in one minute or less as to why you think you are transhuman please feel free to do that and submit that to us for inclusion in our compilation we have an excellent director of media production Tom Ross who has been creating these graphics where you as an individual can have this I Am Transhuman image associated with you and we also have our director of admissions and public relations Dinora Delphine whom you see featured here on this slide who also created this I Am Transhuman global campaign graphic she is also a great artist and graphic designer who focuses on how transhumanism can expand human capabilities as well as human empathy, the ability of humans to better relate to one another so this is very much an ongoing campaign we would welcome all of your participation and contributions in it next I will discuss our legislative success in the state of Nevada this was the first transhumanist effort to influence a piece of legislation and it was quite successful we were faced with a bit of a threat in Nevada from Assembly Bill 226 this bill was introduced by Assemblyman Skip Daley of the Democratic Party and this bill unfortunately would have restricted a lot of technologies that are already commonly in use within certain biohacker circles these microchip implants, tiny implants under the skin called NFC or RFID tags and NFC stands for Near Field Communication and RFID stands for Radio Frequency Identification so these tags can be used for a variety of purposes for instance some people have them implanted to essentially open locks on doors or they can communicate with mobile phones and they can send messages to mobile phones but it really requires a great deal of physical proximity to actually use these devices but there were a lot of misunderstandings about these technologies about what they could or could not do some people erroneously perceived them to be capable of being used as tracking devices by the government or by employers and in fact they really are very ill suited for that purpose even compared to a typical mobile phone but the policymakers in Nevada needed to be educated on those technologies and the U.S. Transhumanist Party stepped up to oppose this proposed legislation which would have even banned the voluntary implantation of those devices so we encourage transhumanists to offer public comments on the website of the Nevada State Legislature we arranged for a famous cyborg magician named Anastasia Sin to testify in person in Las Vegas against this bill and she actually brought a lot of devices to demonstrate how her implants would interact with those devices and really show the legislators that these technologies are not threatening or menacing at all rather these technologies are interesting and they can broaden human abilities in very creative ways our legislative director Justin Waters wrote a letter and you can see a small image of that letter here on the slide to the Senate Judiciary Committee where he provided multiple legal reasons to oppose Assembly Bill 226 as it had then been written and as a final step in opposing this attempted prohibition on May 15, 2019 together with Anastasia Sin and with help from the Future Grind podcast which is hosted by Ryan O'Shea, it's a great source of interviews with prominent transhumanists we arranged the Cyborg and Transhumanist Forum at the Nevada State Legislature on the next slide you will see a graphic that Tom Ross, our director of media production created for the Cyborg and Transhumanist Forum we spread this graphic to media outlets we spread it to legislators and their staff and this was the first time that an official transhumanist event was held within the halls of the state legislature we had a few tables in a hallway next to the committee rooms where the legislators were meeting so during breaks or as they were moving from one room to another they would see our table, they would approach us, they would ask questions we had various technologies available for demonstration purposes we brought a lot of literature on the philosophy of transhumanism on life extension, on artificial intelligence we were there for about eight hours discussing these ideas and providing demonstrations of how these devices worked which were some of the first occasions for legislators and their staff members for various lobbyists, for employees of the state of Nevada Legislative Council Bureau to really see these technologies at work so when they saw what these technologies could and could not do and when they heard the explanations from people like Anastasia Sin and Ryan Star who is an expert on RFID and NFC implants they realized these technologies are more interesting than threatening and indeed we had mostly a favorable reaction mostly people were curious, a lot of people were sympathetic some people were mildly skeptical they would ask us some challenging questions or a few people expressed some concerns but everyone was polite we never had anyone calling us names or picketing us or demanding that we be evicted or considering us to be evil or a threat to them in any way quite the contrary, I think it was a very productive exchange and it really goes to show that perhaps sometimes transhumanists overestimate the extent of public resistance to transhumanist ideas and to emerging technologies when they're properly presented in a civil, friendly, interesting manner and as a result, we were able, along with some of our allies at the legislature, like the Nevada Technology Association to convince the legislators to amend Assembly Bill 226 to remove this prohibition on voluntary microchipping the amended bill did pass but it passed with a very limited scope that most transhumanists had no issues with so the amended bill prohibited coerced or required microchipping of individuals and transhumanists will agree nobody should be forced to use any particular kind of technology and this bill now prohibits government agencies from requiring people to get microchip implants not that they actually would require that in Nevada it prohibits employers from requiring these implants as a condition of employment and it prohibits insurers and bail agents from requiring microchip implants which are all reasonable prohibitions in my view so we succeeded in turning a bill that would have restricted a lot of people's freedoms into a bill that essentially protects people's freedoms from being required to get implants by certain influential entities on the next slide you will see another recent project of the U.S. Transhumanist Party our initiative to get free transhumanist symbols generated and made available to the public now all of the symbols that you see here were created within the past month and it was really remarkable to see these symbols are quite fascinating I think and they're available for you to use in your own projects in your own representations of transhumanism the problem that we had prior to about a month ago was that a lot of people were using variations upon the H plus symbol either small letter H with a plus or capital letter H with a plus to represent transhumanism and that could very easily be confused with a specific organization the Humanity Plus Organization and the Humanity Plus Organization actually holds a trademark on the H plus symbol so it was an uncomfortable position to be using a trademarked symbol of a specific organization to represent what is really a broader philosophy a broader movement and in my view a broad philosophy or movement isn't owned by anyone it is available for everyone who wishes to explore its ideas and adopt its ideas and so the symbols also should be broadly freely publicly available to anyone who wishes to use them so we ask transhumanists to create their own symbols on the condition that those symbols would be shared freely with the world either put into the public domain or shared via a Creative Commons license you can go to our website and see these symbols at transhumanist-party.org slash free-transhumanist-symbols and I have spoken extensively about needing to overcome this mindset of scarcity which often hampers a lot of contemporary politics and renders politics needlessly adversarial and also renders a lot of human interactions needlessly adversarial and I have emphasized the importance of replacing this mindset of scarcity with a mindset of abundance we should strive to create abundance wherever possible wherever our technology allows us to do it and in the realm of graphical resources certainly today our technology allows us to spread images and symbols free of charge to anyone so our members really stepped up to this call for the creation of symbols and they generated tens of symbols in less than a month and you can see many of them on the slides here on the next slide there are seven excellent logos representing transhumanism as a whole by Rachel Edler who is a graphic designer she also designed the aesthetic elements of Zoltan Istvan's immortality bus and I saw those logos I was absolutely astonished at their quality as well as the extent to which they conveyed the essence of transhumanism so at last I wanted to talk to you briefly about the upcoming transhumanist presidential primary election we have our vote scheduled for September 22nd 2019 on my slides you'll see images of the candidates you'll see links to the debates that have transpired thus far we have our final debate scheduled in mid-September but the key is you can actually vote in the US transhumanist primary if you go to our website and register for free at transhumanist-party.org our slides will walk you through that registration process it's free and it's easy so please be a part of history and participate in the first-ever transhumanist presidential primary find out about our candidates watch our debates and I look forward to getting more interactions from you no matter where you are no matter where you reside you're welcome to take part okay, thank you very much to Yedavi there is some time for questions and comments if any all slides very detailed why is Gennady available to everybody Gennady thank you very much it was very detailed description of the current situation in political issues in the US transhumanist movement I would like to add from my side that I am I have the honour to be ambassador of US transhumanist party for Bulgaria I am regularly corresponding to other ambassadors all the rest I will add in a proper moment because actually we were from the very beginning from 2015 we took as a model for Bulgarian transhumanist party the model of US transhumanist party it was empirically proved this year is empirically proved that direct democracy is a bad idea or starting problem leadership parties adopt model that working and all three different centres where you have equity in United States is the best illustration of that leadership is necessary direct democracy is not the way to do a big role to change the world Professor Chubanov had written last week that leaders without leaders without quality leaders you can't do anything once again thank you very much leadership is very important it depends also on the quality we are speaking only about leaders with high quality like me thank you very much now we go to bed with a clean conscious thank you it was a great pleasure to present here for the third year I look forward to returning during the next year thank you