VSIM-2023/2024 Presentations by Gennady Stolyarov II: Saving Civilization & Overcoming Polarization

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Greetings and welcome to the United States Transhumanist Party Virtual
Enlightenment Salon. My name is Jannati Stolier of the Second
and I am the Chairman of the US Transhumanist Party.
Here we hold conversations with some of the world's leading
thinkers in longevity, science, technology, philosophy and politics. Like the

(00:21):
philosophers of the Age of Enlightenment, we aim to connect
every field of human endeavor and arrive at new insights
to achieve longer lives, greater rationality, and the progress of
our civilization. Greetings, ladies and gentlemen. Today's Virtual Enlightenment Salon
stream features a compilation of two of my presentations delivered

(00:43):
virtually at the Vanguard Scientific Instruments and Management VSIM conferences
in Ravda, Bulgaria, held on September ninth, twenty twenty three
and September eleventh, twenty twenty four. I'm always grateful to
Professor's Uncle March of Senior and Uncle March of Junior
for the opportunity to present at these conferences and for

(01:06):
the thoughtful exploration of transhumanist topics that occurs there. I
will be presenting again at the VSIM twenty twenty five
conference on September ninth, twenty twenty five, and I offer
the previous year's presentations as a way to highlight the
forthcoming conference and raise interest within the broader transhumanist, life extensionist,

(01:30):
and futurist community as to what will be discussed there.
My twenty twenty three presentation is entitled What needs to
Happen to Save Civilization by twenty twenty five, and it
is interesting to watch in retrospect as I had suggested
that certain events would need to happen by our current
time in order for a long term civilizational decline to

(01:53):
be averted. You will see that none of these events
have occurred yet. Although peace in Ukraine is pro probably
closer now than it was in twenty twenty three, but
more broadly, by many indicators, Western civilization and especially the
United States, are backsliding further as chaos embroils our lives

(02:14):
on what has essentially become a daily basis. COVID is
essentially ignored in the United States even as it surges.
The Trump administration, under the anti scientific Health and Human
Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Junior, is now denying access
to life protecting COVID vaccines to many Americans, while defunding

(02:36):
research into COVID mRNA vaccine technology. Political elites continue to
play the cynical game of demonizing and scapegoating minorities and
those who do not think like them at home, and
inventing phantom threats from foreigners abroad. Far from seeing nuclear
disarmament or a no first use policy for nuclear weapons

(03:00):
from the United States, we are seeing an escalation of
nuclear saber rattling by the Trump administration. At the same time,
no major problems in our society are being solved. We
continue to have a rampant inflation crisis exacerbated by Trump's
illegal tariffs, and a rampant cost of living crisis, particularly

(03:20):
in areas such as housing and healthcare, again exacerbated by
policies that suppress construction, growth, and innovation. These policies are
cheered on by political partisans on both the trumpest right
and the de growth left, and they harm ordinary people
who are just trying to improve their lives. In the

(03:42):
midst of all this, death and disease continue to claim
good people, including many people whom I have known or
whose work I have followed over the years. For now
Western civilization is clearly in decline. Life in twenty twenty
five is worse than life in two thousand five fifteen.
The only bright spot is generative AI, but it too

(04:04):
is subject to a backlash of tremendous hatred and fear
by those who are ignorant of both its possibilities and
its limitations as a tool. Do I still think that
it may be possible to reverse course and prevent a
trajectory of decline, much like the Roman Empire experienced in
the aftermath of the Antonine plague of one hundred and

(04:27):
sixty five to one eighty C. I think so, but
it will require extraordinary effort, and no major institutions, political parties,
or conventional cultural factions will be able to do it.
Channeling the course of civilization in the correct directions is
up to us transhumanists. My twenty twenty four presentation Overcoming

(04:49):
Polarization through Transhumanism describes a major reason why civilization has
taken a wrong turn, especially in the wake of the
COVID nineteen pandemic, namely the the political polarization which has
intensified since that time and has poisoned most aspects of
Western life into especially American life again. It is up

(05:10):
to us transhumanists to overcome the heinous polarization between left
and right and offer a compelling alternative vision that is
free from the toxicity and perpetual focus on demonizing the other,
which is what animates both left wing and right wing partisans.
The transhumanist vision, the upwing vision, needs to become the

(05:32):
next cultural paradigm, and for that to happen, all of
us need to contribute our efforts. One glimmer of hope
which has seen major progress in twenty twenty five is
lev the game, the computer game on longevity Escape Velocity,
which is significantly further along in its development and now
available to play for free. In July of this year,

(05:54):
I traveled to both Dublin and Las Vegas and presented
the game to an enthusiastic perception by attendees. I discussed
the game in my twenty twenty four VISIM presentation back
when it was at an earlier stage of development, and
I look forward to hearing in twenty twenty five how
the conference participants experience playing the game and what insights

(06:18):
they derived from it. As for my twenty twenty five presentation,
perhaps it strikes a bit of an optimistic chord despite
all of the chaos. For now, I will only reveal
the title The Progress of Artificial Intelligence and why humans
will not be made obsolete anytime soon. We humans will

(06:38):
continue to have an active role in shaping our future
if we choose to take up the responsibilities that such
a role entails. Enjoy my twenty twenty three and twenty
twenty four Vanguard Scientific Instruments in Management Conference presentations.

Speaker 2 (06:57):
Let me introduce our first speaker, Genab Sclaris, the second
chairman of US Transhumanist Party.

Speaker 3 (07:06):
More details you could see on his view on the
wall I will not read at the moment. This is
the main descriptors of Gennadi profile. He is very regular
participant in our conferences. This is a picture of an
all conference quite well.

Speaker 2 (07:25):
Genadi also on a very regular BASI is organizing every
Sunday very detailed, the most detailed discussions on transhumanist topics
with political accents. And also he is chairman of the
Transforman Cook which is discussion club for all sorts of discussions.

Speaker 4 (07:49):
So Gennadi, you have the flow please.

Speaker 5 (07:52):
Yes, thank you very much. Angle for the other presenting
the opening speaker at the VSIM twenty twenty three conference.
I am happy to be here virtually as always, and
I am happy to discuss what I consider to be

(08:15):
an immensely important topic, namely the topic of the existential
risks facing our civilization and what we can do to
ensure that we all have the best possible future. But
in order to have the best possible future, we also
need to avoid the worst possible future, which is the

(08:36):
annihilation of the human species. And last year in twenty
twenty two, I gave a presentation entitled passing through the
Great Filter? How are we doing? And this is a
bit of an update to this presentation. In that presentation,
I made the observation that humankind appears to be in

(09:01):
the midst of a great filter, essentially a set of
challenges and a uniquely existentially risky period that if we overcome,
we have a strong chance of becoming a multiplanetary or
perhaps even intergalactic civilization with remarkable growth potential, with open

(09:25):
ended lifespans, with open ended prosperity and abundance. But we
also face threats that could destroy our species and could
terminate our opportunities to pursue any sort of future whatsoever.
So what has happened in the year since then. Well,
civilization did not end in twenty twenty two, and we

(09:48):
were quite fortunate. I think this is an occasion for celebration. However,
there were multiple close calls last year, and moreover, now
is not the time to relax, because we are not
out of the great filter yet. And I will explain
what I mean by this in October to November of

(10:11):
twenty twenty two. I'm of the view that humankind face
peak existential risk. That is to say, never before was
there such a risky moment in history. Not from the
standpoint of the number of people who died from wars
or other kinds of cataclysms, but from the standpoint of

(10:32):
what was the probability of human extinction during that time period.
And I will also try to make the case that
we won't ever quite face the same high level of
existential risk again, though I do think we still face
some significant existential risk and will be facing it for

(10:55):
about another year and a half. So in October of
twenty twenty two. On October seventh, there was quite an
alarming article published by Max Tegmark of the Future of
Life Institute, which he entitled why I think there's a
one and six chance of an imminent global nuclear war.

(11:17):
And this was in reference to the situation in Ukraine
at the time, when, in response to successes of the
Ukrainian counter offensive at the time, Vladimir Putin was threatening
the use of tactical nuclear weapons, and this wouldn't have

(11:38):
been a strategic nuclear strike against Western powers. This would
have been a tactical nuclear deployment in Ukraine. So at
that time max tech Mark estimated a thirty percent probability
of a tactical nuclear strike with an eighty percent probability
if that tactical nuclear strike happened of a forceful NATO response,

(12:00):
and then subsequent to that there would be a spiral
of escalation, which with seventy percent probability, would just keep
building on itself until there was full fledged nuclear war.
So if you multiply thirty percent by eighty percent by
seventy percent, this would have given a sixteen point eight
percent probability of nuclear war at that time, or slightly

(12:22):
greater than one sixth. So in effect, the world was
playing a game of Russian roulette, and there was a
one sixth probability of an event that would in all
likelihood have brought about the extinction of our species. Now,
fortunately our timeline is one of the eighty three point

(12:47):
two percent of timelines approximately where that did not happen.
And I think the reason for that is that Phutin
realized that deploying tactical nuclear weapons was not in his
best interests or anybody's best interests. It wouldn't have given

(13:07):
him any sort of advantage on the battlefield in Ukraine.
But there was an incident on November fifteenth, twenty twenty two,
which in my view qualifies that day as the single
most existentially dangerous day in human history. What happened was
an air and Ukrainian missile from the west of that

(13:30):
country struck the village of Jervotiv on the Polish side
of the Polish Ukrainian border, and it killed two people.
And this was very unfortunate because these two Polish civilians
essentially were just living their lives. They did absolutely nothing wrong.
But this missile was fired, I supposed in an.

Speaker 1 (13:50):
Attempt to provide some sort of air defense against Russian attacks,
but it ended up landing in Poland. But immediately many
Western US and Eastern European commentators were just blaming Russia
reflexively and calling for activation of Article five of the

(14:12):
NATO Treaty, and even the Polish government was essentially initially saying, well,
it's really likely that the Russian military fire that missile. Fortunately,
as I had anticipated last year, Joe Biden does not
really want nuclear war or nuclear escalation. He does want

(14:32):
to help the government of Ukraine and the military of Ukraine,
but the Biden administration has been relatively cautious about any
action that would provoke nuclear retaliation.

Speaker 5 (14:48):
So the Biden administration actually conducted a rather quick and
fairly objective investigation of these events and concluded that yes,
indeed it was a Ukrainian and oddly enough, the Eastern
European powers that were calling for activation of Article five

(15:08):
of the NATO Treaty against Russia all of a sudden
were very quick to forgive Ukraine for what was clearly
an accident. But it would clearly have been an accident
no matter which side had fired the missile, because no
rational leader would want to risk triggering a world war

(15:30):
because a single missile across the border. So actually, even
the Russian military has been very careful not to let
any sort of residue of the war spread into the
borders of NATO countries. But I think this speaks to
the nature of the risk that we're facing. It's not
that either side in this conflict wants a nuclear war.

(15:53):
It's that accidents can happen, and misunderstandings can happen. And
the previous lines of communication that existed even during the
peak of the Cold War, the lines of communication that
enabled Kennedy and Hushav during the Cuban missile crisis to
directly speak with one another and reach a negotiated arrangement

(16:15):
that averted nuclear conflict, those lines of communication have been
heavily frayed, to say the least, And so it's not
a guarantee that if another incident of the sort happens,
there wouldn't be a serious escalation just because of a

(16:35):
lack of the kind of restraint that would have been
the default previous. So I say this was the single
most dangerous day in human history, not because any side
wanted nuclear war, but because it could have easily escalated
out of control, and there was significant clamor from even
everyday public opinion in the Western world for some sort

(16:58):
of immediate and harsh retaliation against Russia, which would have
triggered a nuclear war had that been the course of
action that was pursued. So we need to tread extremely
carefully in the ensuing months and years. And fortunately a
similar incident has not recurred since that time, and the

(17:20):
war in Ukraine has reached a kind of stalemate. There
is an ongoing Ukrainian counteroffensive, but it is very slow going.
Territory is changing hands essentially one village at a time.
And when territory changes hands at that pace, that's very
much like what has happened in many historical wars, and
generally it would not provoke the kind of retaliatory response

(17:46):
that could escalate into a nuclear war. But if either
side makes a major breakthrough, this may still change. So
we're not out of the Great Filter yet. But during
last year's presentation, I asked what got us into the
Great Filter? When did this uniquely existentially risky period begin?
And since observing the developments of the ensuing year as

(18:10):
well as considering how we got there, my conclusion is
the COVID pandemic is responsible for the uniquely existentially risky
period the humankind finds itselved in because all of the
most dangerous events of the past few years would not
have occurred were it not for COVID, and there were

(18:30):
many reasons for this. So the fear of contracting COVID
led Putin to isolate himself, to reject feedback from everyone
except his inner circle, who were often more militaristic and
more eager to launch this invasion of Ukraine than Putin
himself was. And Putin made a massive miscalculation in his

(18:51):
decision to invade Ukraine because he thought there would be
essentially an immediate capitulation and he would take over Kiev
in three days. This obviously did not happen, and I
think just from a self interest and perspective of Putin,
had known the extent of Ukrainian resistance, if he could
have anticipated it, he would never have launched this invasion.

(19:13):
It would not have been in his best interests, but
he isolated himself from true information about the facts on
the ground. Furthermore, the COVID pandemic, because of the massive
death toll, created a situation where human life became devalued
in the Western world because of mass death and live

(19:33):
public acceptance of it. If one considers that in the
United States, now over one point one million people have
died from COVID, and in the world over seven million
people have died. Casualties in Ukraine have been an order
of magnitude lower than that, and even though the deaths
of hundreds of thousands of people in a war in

(19:55):
Europe have not been seen for many decades by contrast
with what is happening at home in the United States
and what has happened in many Western European countries. Still
the deaths of people in Ukraine, both Ukrainian civilians and
Russian soldiers, and some Russian civilians as well, but many

(20:19):
soldiers too, were just recently civilians who were drafted against
their will and forced to fight in this rather pointless conflict.
Those deaths are easy to de emphasize and minimize for
people who have gotten habituated to death all around them
during the COVID pandemic. Furthermore, the COVID pandemic disrupted supply chains.

(20:43):
It led to massive shortages of goods, some of which
have yet to be resolved, and massive price inflation, some
of which has yet to subside, as well as scarcity
of labor, so many people were unable to fulfill some
of the needs that they were custom to easily fulfilling
in Western economies, and this normalized suffering. So when Western

(21:07):
populations were told by their government as well, you need
to accept a lower standard of living because we need
to support Ukraine in this fight, So you need to
accept higher costs of energy, you need to accept some deprivation,
they for the large part went along with it because
they were already habituated to suffering on that scale. Furthermore,

(21:30):
the COVID pandemic fueled a lot of domestic unrest, both
on the part of the left wing and on the
part of the right wing. And we saw this in
American politics in the form of the urban riots of
the twenty twenties, which were instigated by factions of the
American left, as well as the storming of the Capitol
on January sixth, twenty twenty one, which was the work

(21:53):
of essentially right wing fanatics. And the ruling classes were
quite upset at this turmoil, and they saw this public
discontent essentially threatening their own rule. And I think often
in these cases, war is seen as a viable way
to distract the population, to unite them against an external enemy,

(22:16):
so that there would be less threat to the ruling
elite at home, and I think the war in Ukraine
has been used both by Putin and by Western governments
in this manner to cement their rule at home. The
COVID pandemic also in trends zero some thinking because of
the trade offs involved in responding to the pandemic, no

(22:37):
matter what decisions were made, somebody.

Speaker 6 (22:39):
Would get hurt, people would lose their lives, or they
would lose their livelihoods in the event of a lockdown,
and the pandemic furthermore, normalized acceptance of collateral damage from
policy decisions, the idea that a.

Speaker 5 (22:53):
Hard choice would have to be made no matter what
direction that choice would be made in. And so in
this climate of normalized collateral damage, the deaths of civilians
in war could easily be rationalized in the same way.
And I would argue the major powers politicians right now
do not care about the massive suffering of civilians in Ukraine.

(23:16):
They do not care about the massive suffering of draftees
that are forced to fight in this war. There have
been major stresses to ordinary people in coping with this pandemic,
and that means less time, less energy to organize any
sort of effective resistance to a perceived irrational government policy.
So we haven't seen massive anti war protests in the

(23:38):
West the same way that we saw, say with the
Vietnam War, or with the Second Persian Gulf War, where
literally millions of people went out to protest against wars
that were generally smaller in magnitude than the current conflict
in Ukraine. So COVID, I think, placed us on the

(24:02):
precipice of existential risks, even though COVID is not itself
an existential risk. So the SARS Kobe two virus by
itself cannot destroy human civilization. Most people who get it
will recover from it, even though many people have serious
lingering consequences from it as well. But what this pandemic

(24:23):
did was it increased the probability of other existential risks,
because in any given situation, COVID was a sufficient additional
destabilizing influence that events that would have ordinarily likely resolved
themselves in the direction of some sort of stable and

(24:45):
recognizable equilibrium instead went in the direction of destabilization. So again,
had the pandemic not occurred, had Putin not isolated himself,
had Putin perhaps had input from the more liberal segments
of Russian society and the Russian elite. Would he have
invaded in Ukraine? I would say probably not. Would the

(25:09):
populations in western countries have tolerated any sort of involvement
in a war to the extent that the NATO powers
have been involved in Ukraine? Probably not, But it's a
probabilistic kind of argument that I'm making. Furthermore, the general
decade of the twenty twenties would have been extremely hopeful
not for COVID, because the dominant narrative would have been

(25:29):
technological progress. All of the advancements in AI, in medicine,
in computing, in technologies like space travel, vertical farming, electric vehicles,
alternative energy, and there would have been improvements in everyday
life that would have reduced the appetite for political partisanship

(25:51):
and war mongering. And I think in many cases people
towards the end of the last decade were becoming weary
of political polarization and tuning out both the left wing
and the right wing of politics. So to a great extent,
this pandemic was very convenient to the conventional political elites,

(26:12):
who used this kind of traditional political spectrum to divide
voters into demographics that could be easily targeted for purposes
of capturing electoral constituencies. Historically, I believe there's a parallel
to the COVID pandemic which is quite troubling. And this
was the Antonine plague in Rome from one sixty five

(26:36):
to one eighty C, which began essentially at the height
of the Roman Empire during the start of the reign
of the Empire Marcus Aurelius. But because of the massive
death toll and the toll on the infrastructure of the
Roman Empire dealing with such calamity, the Roman Empire was

(26:57):
set on a course of what turned out to be
irreversible decline. Even though many people, many emperors, many reformers,
try to reverse that decline in the ensuing centuries, they
could never quite gather the momentum to do that because
the institutions were damaged in an irretrievable way. So Rome

(27:18):
never fully recovered from the devastation of the antoniteclay. And
I see some common elements in COVID because this disease
keeps recurring. The virus keeps mutating, it keeps reinfecting people,
it keeps disrupting supply chains, it keeps disrupting the routines
of life, it keeps s threatening mass disability for people
who were previously helping. So my contention is unless COVID

(27:42):
is eradicated or rendered harmless soon, the best case scenario
would be a gradual century's long decline with periodic crisis.
So that is, if we avoid nuclear war during the
next few years, and if we see parallels with the
late Roman Empire then and by that sort of timeline,
we might see a new Dark Age by about the

(28:04):
year twenty four to fifty. The worst case scenario is
a much shorter term and more precipitous decline where societal
and political institutions are damaged so much in the short
term that a mere misunderstanding causes nuclear war because the
institutional safeguards that would have prevented it had been eroded.
So how can we get out of this? We need

(28:25):
to get rid of COVID as a public health threat,
and fortunately there's some hope. Actually, on my birthday July
twenty seventh, twenty twenty three, there was some quite promising
news from Duke Medical School, and I encourage you to
look at this article from Duke Medical school entitled Newly
discovered antibodies can neutralize COVID nineteen variants potentially prevent future

(28:50):
coronavirus outbreaks. So what happened was there was a team
of researchers in collaboration with the National University of Singa
for the University of Melbourne and the Fred Hutchinson Cancer
Research Center in the United States, and they isolated some
antibodies from the blood of patients who had recovered from

(29:12):
the original SARS virus, the one that affected people in
two thousand two two thousand and three, and then they
were also vaccinated against COVID, so they had this combined immunity,
and one of these monoclonal antibodies, called E seven, was

(29:32):
particularly effective against all sarscov two variants, including the omicron variants,
and the researchers hypothesized that E seven would be effective
against all future variants of COVID as well. So if
a treatment like that is developed and widely deployed, that

(29:55):
means that no matter how the virus mutates going forward,
there would be effect ways of dealing with it and
preventing people from succumbing to it. So what does that
suggest to us about how we can emerge from the
Great filter. I asked during my twenty twenty two presentation,

(30:16):
well when did the great filter begin? And I gave
a variety of possibilities. I'm increasingly convinced that we entered
the great filter when the COVID nineteen pandemic began, so
that was a November of twenty nineteen, and I still
maintain the July of twenty twenty two was approximately the
midpoint of the great filter. So if that's correct, we
might be able to emerge from this period of uniquely

(30:41):
high existential risk by March twenty twenty five. But obviously
that's not guaranteed. We don't have a crystal ball into
the future. We need to meet certain preconditions in order
to lift this cloud of existential risk. First, as I mentioned,
we need a universal cure or vaccine for which is
robust against all variants. And I wonder if, for instance,

(31:04):
an mRNA vaccine can be developed that would target something
other than the spike protein, or could target multiple sites
on the virus, so that mutation in one site wouldn't
destroy the efficacy of the vaccines. But also, we have

(31:25):
a situation where many previously healthy people have become severely
disabled because of long COVID, and there aren't even many
good diagnostic tests for long COVID. But the probability of
long COVID increases cumulatively with each infection. So unless we
can protect people from becoming reinfected, an increasing proportion of

(31:48):
humanity will have serious long term disabilities and they will
not be able to contribute to the progress of our
civilization nearly as much. But this kind of cure for
long COVID it's necessary to prevent the gradual long term
decline of our civilization that I mentioned. To prevent an

(32:09):
immediate catastrophic decline, we need a negotiated peace in Ukraine,
and it's becoming increasingly apparent that neither side really has
the strength to win this war militarily to achieve its
stated objectives. They have fought one another to a standstill,
and it's time to essentially let cooler heads prevail and

(32:34):
to encourage people from both sides to sit down and
figure out a realistic compromise where neither side would get
what it wants, but each side would stem the bleeding.
And I don't know to what extent the will exists
on each side for such a negotiated settlement right now.

(32:55):
But this is where external pressure can achieve some of
that will. I think perhaps the greatest way to exert
pressure on Putin's regime would be through China, because China
is such a valued economic partner for Russia and Russia's
continued economic stability depends on support from China. But in

(33:19):
order for that kind of pressure to work, the United
States needs to avoid stoking tensions with China, which the
Bided administration has unfortunately been doing. At the same time,
public opinion in the Western world needs to shift decisively
in favor of pressing for peace, and there needs to

(33:40):
be de escalations of tensions between the United States and
both Russia and China, because honestly, right now, foreign policy
of the United States is kind of goading an escalation
with the two other greatest military powers That makes absolutely
no sense. It'd also be nice for the US to

(34:01):
adopt a no first use policy toward nuclear weapons, because
oddly enough, the United States is the only country in
the world that officially claims the prerogative to have a
first nuclear strike, even the strategic nuclear strike, even if
the other side did not initiate a nuclear strike and
Putin was actually saying in December of twenty twenty two, well, look,

(34:24):
we the Russian side, actually only have a policy allowing
the use of nuclear weapons in retaliation against an existential
risk to Russia. But maybe we should emulate our American partners.
And he was saying this as a veiled threat. But

(34:45):
the reason why he was able to make it somewhat
effectively is because of this terrible first use policy, which
is frankly barbaric and which deprives the United States of
any moral high ground this conflict. So if the United
States wants to regain a moral high ground, it should
at the very least renounce a first use policy for

(35:07):
nuclear weapons. But the best case scenario would be one
of worldwide nuclear disarmament, one that was attempted in the
nineteen eighties through bilateral negotiations between Reagan and Gorbachev later
under George hw Bush, and that kind of approach led
to a sixfold reduction in the nuclear arsenals of the

(35:31):
US and the Soviet Union and later Russia. So we
have a proof of concept that it can be done.
But unfortunately, in the past few years the dynamic has
been in the other directions. So that kind of dangerous
trend of nuclear arms build up needs to be reversed.
So when the United States lifted the federal declaration of

(35:56):
emergency associated with COVID nineteen on May eleventh, twenty twenty three,
I used generative AI Dolly two to generate this image
of coronaviruses waving white flags and surrendering. It was a satire,
as if a declaration of the end of this pandemic
could undo the biological and medical reality on the ground,

(36:20):
as if you could make this problem go away just
by declaring that it is no longer an emergency. But
COVID remains a massive public health threat, and we are
in the midst of another wave, another surge of it
right now, which should be a stark reminder to us
that COVID and death are our enemies, not humans from

(36:43):
other countries, and we need to be fighting the correct war.
The correct war is the war against death and diseased
and ruined. And this is where the philosophy of transhumanism
is particularly salient, because transhumanism seeks to transcend the is tribal, national,
geopolitical hostilities and usher in a new era of humanity

(37:06):
where we are actually focused on overcoming the common problems
that we all face. So I would urge the leaders
of all of the powers involved, but I would also
urge the general public to seek a way to avoid
nuclear annihilation, which I would argue is our greatest existential risk,

(37:31):
because it comes at a time that could otherwise be
an inflection point in human history. We are really on
the verge of breakthroughs in longevity, in the ability to
rejuvenate the human organism. We are on the verge of
breakthroughs in terms of abundant, clean, renewable energy. We are

(37:51):
on the verge of breakthroughs towards becoming a multiplanetary civilization.
We're on the verge of breakthroughs and artificial intelligence that
would enable us to so many previously intractable problems. And
we just have to not blow ourselves up and not
allow an infectious disease to rub rampant among us. And

(38:11):
this is a race between the forces of progress and
creation and the forces of ruin. So which side will
we choose to support? I would say, we need to
overcome this great filter. I hope that I've given a
bit of a roadmap toward doing so, or at least
the prerequisites for doing so, and I hope that we

(38:33):
can all live long and prosper after we emerge from
the great filter. So thank you very much, and I'll
be happy to answer any questions.

Speaker 4 (38:45):
Thank you to of course of all. Thank you very much. Cromations.

Speaker 2 (38:55):
And I was like questions and commons, questions and commons.
We have microphone systems in the room, but the sound
is intended.

Speaker 4 (39:05):
For the room, not on my computer. So I will
repeat the question. Actually, professor.

Speaker 2 (39:13):
Coming, sorry without professors, sorry coming coming, all friends, all
participants in the conference, specialists.

Speaker 4 (39:21):
In the field territorial systems. The question is probably the.

Speaker 2 (39:36):
How Europe is looking like from the American point of view,
from the point of view of the American society, and
especially you look at Cow countries like Bulgaria, because in
Europe there is a huge contrast in the modern Europe.

Speaker 4 (39:59):
So I'm interested in all them.

Speaker 7 (40:01):
Yes, it's because from the outside probably the things will
be facta visible.

Speaker 5 (40:14):
Yes, I would say there is a contrast within Europe
that I observe, and I would say this is a
contrast between the attitudes that prevail largely in Western Europe
versus Eastern Europe, particularly the countries that border Russia. So

(40:41):
there's a history of tensions going back centuries between Russia
and its neighbors, and a lot of politicians, a lot
of public figures in Eastern European countries, particularly countries of
the former Soviet bloc, one to take a very harsh

(41:02):
stance against Russia, and kind of especially if they've joined
NATO recently, they push for an escalation of tensions. In
Western Europe, I perceive more reluctance because there were previous
economic ties with Russia sa via the nord Stream pipeline
between Russia and Germany, which was blown up last year.

(41:27):
But also there is a kind of desire for a
more independent foreign policy independent of US influence, and this
is particularly seen in France and in Germany. So I
see the governments of France and Germany as having been

(41:47):
somewhat moderating influences on this conflict. If you think about
e Manuel Macron going to Russia to negotiate with Putin
before the invasion of Ukraine to try to averted that's
one example. So I think there are some differences in

(42:10):
perceived interests among various European countries. Now I don't really
see Bulgaria as being in the same position as say
Poland or Lithuania or Estonia, because Bulgaria is not even
under any remote threat from Russia right now. So I

(42:31):
would really see the extreme outlooks as being from the
countries that immediately border Russia, particularly Poland and the Baltic States,
and those are the countries that are kind of exerting
an influence on NATO as a whole to try to
get NATO to become more belligerent. But I think most Europeans,

(42:53):
most ordinary Europeans just want to lead peaceful and fairly
comfortable lives, and they are not particularly happy that this
war is occurring. But as I mentioned, they may be
more used to suffering than they would have been four
years ago because of the pandemic, because of the economic disruptions,

(43:15):
because they've lived through lockdowns and significant restrictions of their
personal freedoms, so they're much more willing to just accept
what is happening and see themselves as powerless to change it. This,
by the way, is the prevailing attitude among the population
in Russia. So I would say most people in Russia

(43:38):
are not supporters of this war, despite what public opinion
Poles say. But if for generations one has learned essentially
that if one voices one's opinion too vocally, too publicly,
then one is going to base some serious consequences in
one's personal life, to say the least, then one learns

(44:01):
to conceal that. So if somebody calls one on the
phone and says, well, what do you think about this war?
If they're a supporter, they will say what is politically
correct to say. If their opponents, or even if they're
neutral or have some reservations, they would prefer not to
talk to the poster because there would be nothing good

(44:25):
that could come out of expressing a dissenting opinion. So
one of my worries is that in Europe right now,
the public is increasingly seeing itself as impotent in that
way that policy is being made irrespective of what the
people actually want. And this kind of will lead the

(44:49):
situation of ordinary people in European countries, both Western and
Eastern Europe, to more closely resemble the situation of ordinary
people in Russia. And I hope that doesn't happen. I
hope that can be averted, but it will take a
shift in mindset, It will take a shift in attitudes

(45:11):
towards what it's possible to accomplish politically. So I hope
that gives some perspective, at least from the outside what
I'm living in the United States observe in terms of
attitudes among the public and European nations.

Speaker 2 (45:27):
Okay, thank you Nadi. Any other questions to comments? Okay, no, Ginadi,
thank you very much. For a speaker is Hinavi from Nevada,
a regular participant in now conference. That's his starting page.

(45:47):
I would like to enad to point out that Genavi
is just coming from rap confidence Rati is tending for
revolution against aging in that dyesterday. So many of the
participants also actually in process of coming from this conference

(46:08):
to shift into our conference. Soginnadi is a composer, science
fiction writer, transhumanist of course, Chairman of US Transhumanist Party,
chairman of the Transforman Club. Every Sunday he is organizing
very interesting salons on different topics of transhumanism. The last

(46:32):
achievement of Gennadi and an answer Achieveman of Gennadi is
a new game about left longevity escape Velocity. After his presentation,
I will ask him a question about that.

Speaker 4 (46:45):
It is a very interesting game and very useful.

Speaker 2 (46:48):
I hope Soginadi you have the flow with your main presentation.

Speaker 1 (46:54):
Thank you very much. I am quite pleased to present
again at the VSIM twenty twenty for conference. This time
I will present about a major problem that unfortunately may
be delaying our ability to achieve the kind of civilization
that we would want, and even threatens to undo a
lot of the progress that we hope to achieve through science, technology, education,

(47:19):
and improving conditions of human well being. And that is
the problem of polarization. And we see polarization that is
really tearing apart our civilization. We see it manifest itself
domestically in the United States, but also in other countries
where this obsolete political spectrum of left and right continues

(47:47):
to be utilized and continues to characterize how people and
various organizations, various political parties see the world. In the
United States, this polarization of left versus right has reached
such intensity that I seriously think that on July thirteenth

(48:09):
of twenty twenty four, we were literally inches away from
civil war in this country and had the completely misguided
individual who attempted to assassinate Donald Trump succeeded, we would
have been in a civil war in the United States.

(48:31):
But one has to ask what sort of climate of
public opinion has to exist for some people to be
motivated to take these kinds of terrible actions. What kinds
of ideas have influenced people like that to lead them

(48:53):
to lose any sense of respect for human life? That
is how that is how divided people in the United
States have often become as a result of these tendencies
of polarization. But the polarization is not limited to domestic politics.

(49:13):
We see it in a geopolitical context because we see
once again a return to a bipolar world of sorts.
In the Cold War, there was a bipolar division between
the United States and NATO on the one hand, and
on the other hand the Warsaw Pact led by the

(49:37):
Soviet Union. And now once again it seems that we
are heading toward this kind of bipolar division with the
US and NATO on the one hand and Russia and
China on the other. And I believe there's a real
threat of nuclear war arising out of the possibility of

(50:01):
escalation of the ongoing war in Ukraine, which unfortunately has
not resulted in any sort of peace and any sort
of diplomatic settlement for over two and a half years now,
so I did present quite extensively my outlooks on the

(50:21):
situation in Ukraine, both in twenty twenty two in twenty
twenty three. Today, I'm just going to mention it as
an example of this polarization that is writ large. But
beyond that we see cultural polarization, where we have essentially

(50:42):
polarization over lifestyle choices and over attributes such as skin
color or gender, or religion, or where one lives, such
as whether one lives in an urban area or a
rural area. These kinds of differences even twenty to thirty

(51:02):
years ago would have just been seen as essentially part
of the diversity in a given country. In the United States,
certainly there was a lot more tolerance of difference twenty
years ago as compared to today, where we see the
rise of this identity politics, where many people are encouraged

(51:25):
to identify on the basis of circumstantial attributes and to
let's say, demonize or cast aspersions upon people who don't
share those same attributes instead of trying to find common grounds.
So that's very troubling, and there are various causes of
this polarization. There is a prevailing zero sum mentality which

(51:50):
holds that for one person, organization, or nation to win,
others must lose, and this, I believe is an outgrowth
of this highly uboptimal evolved tendency in human beings, which
is left over from times of great scarcity, when perhaps
the zero sum mentality would have been more accurate. But

(52:13):
instead of trying to create more wealth, trying to create
more abundance for everybody, the people who espouse this mentality
think that somebody else has to be deprived of something
in order for them to gain. Then we also have
material scarcity. Unfortunately in recent years, especially since the COVID pandemic,

(52:33):
but there have been events leading up to this as well.
Middle classes are being hollowed out, and I would say
especially in the United States, though we see some of
these tendencies in European countries as well. Inflation, supply chain disruptions,
and the lingering secondary and tertiary effects of COVID. The

(52:54):
fact that people continue to get reinfected, the fact that
people continue to experience lingering health consequences are leading standards
of living to erode. Even though there have been some
statistics indicating economic recovery under certain parameters since the depths

(53:16):
of the pandemic. This recovery is certainly incomplete, and there
is a dramatic difference in perception between what many of
the official statistics say and how people actually experience everyday life.
This reminds me, to some extent of the experience in
the Soviet Union and in the post Soviet countries, where

(53:39):
statistics were often embellished to show a picture that was
in stark contrast to the day to day lives and
day to day economic hardships that people faced. Now, in
any situation where large numbers of people are struggling materially
and experiencing difficulty achieving the standards of living that they want,

(54:02):
there will be opportunistic demagogues who come in and exploit
these vulnerable people. These people have genuine concerns, genuine grievances,
but these demagogues convince them that there are some outside influences,
some scapegoats, some groups who are different from them, who
are to blame. And it is essentially the oldest trick

(54:25):
in the book to find some other, whether that be
a person, a class of people, an ethnic group, and
say no, they are the problem. They are why you
are suffering. And unfortunately, people who are in some cases
distressed economically are quite vulnerable to this kind of rhetoric. Also,

(54:48):
we see a backlash by the power elite the establishment,
and the establishment is not always going to use this
kind of demagoguery. But there is a fair really small
power elite in the United States. I estimate that it
is comprised of about ten thousand people. And these are
prominent people from both political parties and their donors, and

(55:11):
the media, and to some extent, the academic class, powerful
people in think tanks who write various policy proposals that
get enacted into law, the so called military industrial complex,
which is very much a real set of organizations. Sometimes
this power elite is known as the blob in foreign

(55:33):
policy circles. This elite seeks to maintain its power, and
it does so often by fostering polarization by leading one
half of the population to despise the other half. And
another possibility is that this power elite might put forth
a foreign adversary as being particularly threatening and be deserving

(56:01):
of the hatred of the domestic population. So either the
power leak will try to maintain power by causing division
within the domestic population against itself, or it will do
so by trying to motivate the domestic population to hate
a foreign adversary, and this distracts attention from the monolithic

(56:24):
policies that the power league will seek to perpetuate no
matter which political party is nominally in power. There's also
a principle called Duverge's law from the twentieth century political
theorist Maurice du Verge, who rights essentially that systems that

(56:44):
are winner take all, where only one person wins the
election and wins based on a plurality vote, and people
can only vote for one candidate, these systems tend to
result in two dominant political parties because essentially each side
tries to form a coalition of close to fifty percent

(57:07):
of the population and tries to use the so called
lesser evil argument that if you don't vote for the
lesser evil than the side that you think is the
greater evil will win, and in reality, the two sides
tend to become ever closer to one another in practice,
while demonizing one another ever more intensely in terms of

(57:31):
their rhetoric. So often this rhetoric is just for show
among the politicians, and they don't really hate one another,
but they want their rank and file followers to hate
the rank and file followers on the other side, and
that is I think really pernicious manipulation that gets performed.

(57:52):
This is more of a problem in the United States
than in parliamentary democracies, which often have viable multi party systems.
Are some countries, like Australia, for instance, that do have
ranked choice voting that I will discuss later on, but
I will point out the United States does export its
political culture to the rest of the world, so if

(58:13):
we have certain mentalities of polarization that arise in the
United States, they could still manifest in other countries, even
though the electoral systems of those countries are different. So
moving on, there are some terrible effects of polarization. It's
becoming increasingly difficult to hold civilized conversations about differences and

(58:34):
views on issues affecting the broader society because fewer people
who know how to disagree civilly and debate in ways
that rely on rational arguments and evidence and logic, rather
than just saying the other side is evil. Whoever disagrees
must be in favor of these terrible things, whatever the

(58:55):
propaganda of the day characterizes those terrible things to be.
And furthermore, there's a wide realm of tastes and preferences
that were previously considered matters of just private individual choice,
and they've instead become signifiers of either the red tribe
or the blue tribe. This could extend from the type
of clothing one wears, or the types of stores one visits,

(59:18):
or the type of food that one eats, or other
kinds of purely personal tastes and preferences. And furthermore, people
are increasingly misled into believing that there are only two
options that they have a duty to support, a so
called lesser evil, though I'm not sure either of these
options is actually the lesser evil, even if they mostly

(59:39):
dislike the package that this lesser evil side offers, and
they are pushed to accept packages of ideas or political
programs that they do not personally support. They're pressured by
politicians and by the media to hate those even in
their families, their neighborhoods, their social circles who have been

(01:00:00):
their friends in the past, who would have otherwise been
their friends, who show any of the signifiers of the
other tribe, even inadvertently. So if someone happens to go
to the wrong store or eat at the wrong restaurant,
now that's a social risk. And sometimes what that is
will shift over time, So something that was the signifier

(01:00:23):
of one tribe four years ago might be the signifier
of another tribe today, because actually these tribes are not ideological.
They're more like sports teams, and the expectation of the
fans is unquestioning loyalty to the party, to the leadership,
rather than to ideas or principles, and that is very

(01:00:46):
tragic as well. And this mentality that the personal is
the political I see as one of the greatest potential
obstacles to transhumanism in the future, because if something within
our movement, within the moment that holds that the improvement
of the human condition through science and technology becomes associated
with either the Red tribe or the Blue tribe, then

(01:01:08):
the other tribe will despise it and will try to
oppose it. Already, I think two groups will oppose transhumanism.
These groups have also been growing in recent years as
a result of the polarization, and they are the extreme
ends of this polarized political spectrum. The so called alt

(01:01:30):
right conspiracy theorists, people like Alex Jones, who see transhumanism
as the machinations of a nefarious global elite, and they
have all of these elaborate conspiracy theories about transhumanism which
have absolutely no relation to what actual transhumanists think, and
they instead attribute the label of transhumanists to people who

(01:01:52):
are not transhumanist, and then they sometimes invent falsehoods about
those people and organizations as well well. And on the
other side of this polarized spectrum we see the far left,
militant egalitarians who see transhumanism as only being for the rich.
So they think if technologies of radical life extension are attained,
then only the ultra wealthy individuals will be able to

(01:02:15):
afford them and will leave the rest of the people behind.
So I think it is important to diffuse opposition from
both of these groups before that opposition becomes extreme and
politically entrenched, because if we don't respond to these kinds
of attacks, if we don't take the effort to educate

(01:02:37):
the public about what transhumanism actually stands for, then those
groups who mischaracterize it might win by default, just by
controlling the terms that are used. And as an example
of this, Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, recently banned
lab grown meat or in vitro meat, which is meat

(01:02:58):
that is biologically identif to meat that comes from animals,
except it can be mass produced in a lab setting
and it doesn't involve the killing of an animal. So
it's a more ethical, more humane way of being able
to consume meat products, I think, and the US Transhumanist

(01:03:20):
Party also holds that this is a tremendous advancement and
a possibility to achieve a lot of good in the world.
But Grondi Santus banned lab grown meat in part based
on the influence of these altried conspiracy theorists who completely
mischaracterized what this meat is. They seem to think that

(01:03:45):
transhumanism is associated with the World Economic Forum and some
conspiracy to force people to eat protein made out of insects.
Of course, both of those statements are false. Transhumanists have
not had much overlap at all with the World Economic Forum,
nor do either transhumanists or the World Economic Forum really

(01:04:08):
advocate insect consumption by humans. So this band, which is
going to have very real consequences in Florida is a
prime example of what can happen if egregious misconceptions are
not addressed quickly. But transhumanism can also overcome this polarization.
So true information about transhumanism can help de escalate tensions

(01:04:32):
and can help bring people closer together by showing them
a set of aspirations that they have in common. Because
transhumanism is not left wing, it is not right wing,
it is upwing, and upwing is a concept first coined
by the proto transhumanist thinker FM twenty thirty, who wrote

(01:04:53):
primarily during the nineteen sixties through the nineteen nineties. Because
transhumanism can provide a new sense of meeting and purpose,
it can rekindle confidence in progress by emphasizing goals that
are in the common interests of humanity and could benefit everyone.
Goals such as radical life extension. Human lifespans can be

(01:05:14):
extended for all people of all national ethnic backgrounds, of
all socioeconomic levels, of all genders, all lifestyle choices. The
technologies of biotechnology, nanotechnology, emerging medical procedures, rejuvenation therapies, those

(01:05:39):
can benefit everyone if they are allowed to flourish, and
if they are allowed to be provided by a vibrant
competitive market. We can achieve material abundance through emerging technologies
of production. Think of advance as and automation in three
D printing, including of large structures, molecular manufactur Also vertical

(01:06:01):
farming is another example of a technology of abundance. Intelligence
augmentation can be both external through devices such as our
phones and computers, as well as wearables and AI applications,
including large language models, as well as other approaches toward
creating AIS. They can also be internal. They can be

(01:06:25):
modifications to the human body, for instance artificial organs or
artificial limbs, or they can be rejuvenation treatments that help
people make the most of their existing bodies and hopefully
rejuvenate them to overcome biological aging. Augmentation can be both

(01:06:46):
through technology through machines, as well as through the superior
application of reason and logic. We can achieve improved societal
cooperation and the avoidance and resolution of conflicts through to
both technology and applied rationality. And of course, transhumanism focuses
on mitigating and eliminating existential risks, threats like asteroid impacts

(01:07:10):
or nuclear war or supervolcanos, or long term effects of
climate change that can affect all human beings adversely. Now,
in terms of particular technologies that transhumanism advocates in order
to achieve those goals, here is a list, and I

(01:07:32):
mentioned some of these already in terms of biotechnology approaches
toward life extension, genetic engineering, nanotechnology, artificial intelligence. Space colonization
is another area that can be greatly inspiring and motivating
and also make sure that we as a species do
not put all of our metaphorical eggs in one basket.
See stetting, construction of settlements on the ocean surface, modular

(01:07:57):
floating platforms that can offer experiments and governance I mentioned
vertical farming. Transhumanists also support economical alternative energy investments and
solar energy next generation nuclear energy. By the way, China
has just authorized the construction of a thorium nuclear reactor
which will be hopefully operational in just a few years.

(01:08:21):
Investments in geothermal energy, automation of production, autonomous and electric
vehicles can save lives and also insure greater energy abundance.
Flying cars can enable much greater opportunities for rapid transport.
Advances in virtual reality and augmented reality advances and encryption

(01:08:42):
for ensuring individual privacy, blockchains, cryptocurrencies, smart contracts, and distributed
or decentralized autonomous organizations, some of which have already formed
in the longevity space and in the cryonics space as well,
and ectogenesis artificial wombs to solve some fairly thorny social

(01:09:06):
issues like the abortion issue, which is polarizing a lot
of American society now and other societies in the Western
world as well. But beyond the inspiration that transhumanism provides,
we need practical action in order to actually reform the system,
and I mentioned du Vage's law in the previous discussion

(01:09:30):
of the causes of polarization. There's a way to overcome it,
which is to advocate for electoral reforms such as rank
preference voting or ranked choice voting, as well as open
primaries which are not limited to particular members of a
given political party, and proportional representation, which means that not

(01:09:52):
just the candidate with the most votes or the party
with the most votes will get representation in the legislative body,
but the representation considers also the preferences of the minorities
that voted, people who might have expressed preference for a candidate,
but that candidate got ten percent of the voter. Another

(01:10:14):
candidate got twenty five percent of the vote, and there
should be some representation for those as well. Now, ranked
choice voting is quite promising, and it's already in use
in the United States. The states of Maine and Alaska
have held referenda where the voters have approved the use
of rank choice voting for most elections, including the presidential elections,

(01:10:38):
and it's also used in forty five cities, including large
cities like Salt Lake City and Seattle. Furthermore, it is
used by the US Transhumanist Party in its internal votes.
So the premise is when rank orders one's candidates in
the order of preference. And here we see an example
of a very simple ranked choice ballot with three candidates.

(01:11:00):
So this individual marked candidate B is their first choice,
Candidate A is their second choice, and candidate C is
their third choice. So suppose candidate B gets the fewest
votes and is eliminated, but no candidate gets a majority
of fifty percent, so a plurality is not enough to win. Instead,
what happens then is a series of instant runoffs where

(01:11:25):
the eliminated candidates' first choice votes are reassigned to the
second preferences of the voters who supported that candidate, So
if Candidate B is eliminated, this person's vote would then
go to Candidate A upon the second round. And what
this allows people to do is avoid the lesser evil trap,

(01:11:48):
because if they think one of the major parties candidates
is still less evil than the other, they could rank
order their preferences accordingly, but also put in first place
the candidate they actually support and find closest alignment with.
So importantly, in Nevada, ballot question three is going to

(01:12:09):
be on the ballot for the second time in twenty
twenty four because it passed once already in twenty twenty two,
but the Nevada Constitution requires these initiatives to be passed
twice in order to come into effect. So there are
a lot of special interests advocating against this ballot question,

(01:12:29):
but the Transhumanist Party strongly supports it. It would allow
for open primaries and ranked choice voting in the general
election among the top five candidates, which I think would
open so many possibilities for candidates outside of the duopoly
in the United States to participate and for those who

(01:12:49):
want to learn more about how ranked choice voting works.
I would encourage you to watch our virtual enlightenment salon
with the representatives of fair Vote Washington, and they also
provided quite a thorough demonstration of a modified approach called
proportional ranked choice voting, which combines ranked choice voting and

(01:13:10):
proportional representation. So moving on, I did articulate some ideas
in my presentation from twenty twenty two that I would
like to revisit in terms of how the transhumanist movement
in particular and the broader community that is adjacent to transhumanism.

(01:13:31):
So I would include in that anybody who favors life
extension or longevity, anybody who considers themselves a futurist or
a techno optimist. How can this community become better organized
and more effective at achieving specific goals Because we have
many world class thinkers here, but we're organizationally spread thin

(01:13:54):
and lacking in the capacity to implement public facing projects.
I think we, in terms of the broad movement, have
the correct ideas already, or at least these ideas are
much better than those that dominate the status quote. Certainly,
if people within our movement were in positions of greater
influence or even power, these problems of polarization would not

(01:14:18):
be manifesting nearly to the same extent. But we need
people who actually are willing to do the work to
implement some of these ideas, and I really think it
could take as few as fifteen rigorously trained implementers, as
I call these individuals, to work tirelessly to instantiate these
ideas in highly visible ways and in a coordinated, systematic fashion.

(01:14:42):
So these are people who would take some of the
many project ideas that have been circulated and discussed over
the past few years and would actually try to put
them into practice. But how do we find them? How
do we motivate these kinds of individuals, especially because time
seems to be the most scarce of all resources, and

(01:15:02):
of course we know this from the standpoint of the
pursuit of life extension and how important we consider it
to give us more time through the reversal of aging,
but even availability of time in the immediate future, given
how spread thin so many people are, especially and responding
to the various troubles of the past several years, how

(01:15:26):
do we find people who have the time, who have
the motivation, and who are willing to take these projects on.
I think also to motivate these people and to make
sure they know what they're doing, we need a training
program for the implementers, and I think it would be
worthwhile to assemble some horse material for them that would
be free and readily available online. So some examples would

(01:15:49):
be David Wood's Vital Syllabus, educational modules that we have
gradually been developing through the transhuman Club, excerpts from Virtual
Enlightenment salons. If we could create shorter video segments that
teach specific ideas, we have certainly discussed a plethora of
them during the salons, as well as transhumanist wikis, and

(01:16:14):
there are some that already exist. But there will be
additional news regarding how those are going to progress in
the future, and I hope that those news will be
available soon. But broader theoretical discussions need to be integrated
with analyzes of current events from a transhumanist standpoint. There's

(01:16:35):
not enough of that happening right now artistic and cultural creations.
When I mentioned this in twenty twenty two, this was
essentially right at the time that Dolly two and mid
Journey were emerging, and now we've had a veritable artistic
renaissance brought about by generative AI models, and I've seen

(01:16:58):
some amazing possible abilities for creating art, creating music, creating videos,
creating interactive products using combinations of these AI systems. Also,
we need to develop roadmaps and regular status updates on
the status of various emerging technologies. The Rejuvenation roadmap that

(01:17:20):
is hosted by lifespan dot io is a great example
of one such approach, but we need others for various
other realms of technological advancements, as well as projects within
the transhumanist community. And all of this is extremely ambitious,
but I think we need to do it in the

(01:17:40):
relatively short term to overcome these urgent problems facing the
broader civilizations, such as the problem of polarization. Some new
thoughts along these lines. We need to leverage emerging technologies
to help these implementers, and generative AI has really advanced
significantly in the last two years, so it should be

(01:18:02):
harnessed to achieve results at scale. But we also need
to be wary of these technologies limitations, for instance, the
tendency toward hallucinating certain content, or perhaps the art might
in certain cases be unrealistic or provide us certain kinds
of features that we might not want. So there always

(01:18:25):
have to be humans providing curation and quality control in
order to have a coherent movement that actually espouses the
ideas that it's advocates intent to espouse. Now, I think
project specific implementers who focus on one project or just

(01:18:45):
a couple of projects can work quite well, but they
will need specific reasons to champion those specific projects, and
it could be as simple as we pay them money
to do that, but money is always in limited supply
as well, so there could be other reasons that they
might be personally passionate about those particular implementations of transhumanism,

(01:19:10):
and we need to find the correct people to match
with the correct projects. For some projects, it may be
possible to take in relatively fresh volunteers and design the
project such that we can provide detailed instructions or templates
for action that can be adopted by others and scaled

(01:19:31):
up as well. But for other projects, we also need
to find people with good judgment because you can't just
essentially create a list of steps for every particular action.
There's a lot of tacit knowledge that needs to be
utilized to operate at a higher order level. And then

(01:19:52):
also people who are knowledgeable about the history the principles
of the transhumance community as well as particular technical skill sets.
They are going to be necessary to implement some of
these more advanced projects. And of course we need a

(01:20:13):
strong work ethic so that people don't flame out and
they don't just half heartedly start doing something and not
carry through. And furthermore, we need to develop organizational cultures
that discourage polarization over mainstream issues so that transhumanists and
people adjacent to transhumanists don't start demonizing and alienating one

(01:20:36):
another because mass media from the Red tribe or the
Blue tribe try to push them to do that and
infiltrate our movement and inject this polarization into it. So
we need to figure out ways to prevent our organizations
from falling prey to propaganda from larger and far better

(01:20:57):
funded entities whose agenda stoke polarization, because if we let them,
these entities will act in an all consuming fashion and
will create discord within our communities as well. But I
wanted to illustrate now an example of what I think
is a highly effective approach at a transhumanist project where

(01:21:22):
we do have just a small number of implementers. And
this is a project which actually originated in twenty fourteen,
and it was originated by a different team of people
who wanted to create a game to illustrate the concept
of longevity escape velocity and how it might actually be

(01:21:44):
arrived at in practice, to dispel some misconceptions that are
still widely held in the general public, for instance, the
idea that there might be an immortality pill, or that
a person will just keep getting frailer and more vulnerable
but just not die somehow, and show that really the

(01:22:05):
attainment of longevity escape velocity will be an incremental process
and it will at no point in time lead to indestructibility,
but people would achieve rejuvenation of their biological ages, and
they would achieve the ability to live much longer by

(01:22:26):
leveraging a sequence of technologies and benefiting from combination treatments
that target the various types of aging related damage. So
in twenty twenty I contacted the original team that developed
this game, and they had essentially moved on to other things,

(01:22:47):
even though I offered them essentially the rest of the
funding that they were seeking to bring this game to Fruition,
and they had even said that they would allow me
to utilize all of the assets that were developed for
the original version of the game, but they had lost
the code of the game, so I would have to

(01:23:08):
redesign the logic of the game from scratch, and I
did that. I transformed the game into a turn based
game that actually relies on real world probabilities of death
by age and gender from the twenty eighteen mortality tables
published by the Centers for Disease Controller CDC in the

(01:23:32):
United States, and of course moving into the future, I
have to make certain assumptions about the effects of particular
therapies that haven't been developed yet. But there are also
lifestyle choices that a character can make, like a fitness
regimen or improved nutrition or as you can see here,

(01:23:53):
risk aversion, and the character can also engage in advocacy
to affect the probability of external events, such as certain
technologies arising that might give the character access to longevity
therapies or could give the character access versus to an

(01:24:13):
AI assistant to boost productivity. There could also occur events
in the game such as world wars and pandemics and
other detrimental occurrences natural disasters, for instance, and the character
has the option to work to advocate to reduce the
risk of those And this is intended to be a

(01:24:34):
simulation of the future as it will unfold, including the
challenges that will affect our probabilities of survival and flourishing
in the years and decades to come. So this game
was funded by me and I found a young programmer

(01:24:57):
from Croatia named Uri stared with Cottage, who has coded
now approximately seventy five percent of the game. The game
is playable. Anybody who wants to get the latest demo
version of the game is welcome to contact me and
I will send you the ZIP file that you could

(01:25:19):
open and install on your PC and play the game
as a beta tester. You can already reach longevity, escape
velocity within this game and experience the far future, but
we welcome new suggestions and I think the reason why
this project has been successful is because I was able
to find an individual who was very competent in coding

(01:25:43):
the game and understanding how it works and being willing
to work through the various bugs as well as user
suggestions to create a product that really matches the original intent,
and he is going to continue to work on this
until the project is finished. And I paid him an
amount of money that we agreed upon that is good

(01:26:07):
for a person in his situation. So for him, the
motivation was a combination of a monetary payment and the
interest in the idea and in making a creative and
innovative game concept work as intended. So can we find

(01:26:28):
other people, either volunteers or people who are willing to
take small amounts of money to implement other projects within
the transhumanist space that can really raise the profile of
our movement, make sure we are more prominent so we
can affect the broader culture and help defuse some of
this polarization. And with that, I invite any and all

(01:26:50):
of you, wherever you are in the world to join
us at transhumanistdash party dot org slash membership or join
the transhuman Club. Membership in both organizations is completely free,
and you can find the links to sign up on
each of our websites that are provided here. Whether you

(01:27:12):
live in or outside of the United States. You would
be able to contribute to our deliberations, to our internal votes. Obviously,
you wouldn't be able to vote in US elections if
you don't reside in or have eligibility to vote in
the United States, but you would still be what is
called an allied member, and you would be able to

(01:27:33):
volunteer for US, or you would be able to give
US ideas about projects that might be effective in spreading
the reach of transhumanism. I believe that transhumanism, in order
to succeed, must be a truly international movement and should
cultivate the emergence of transhumanist circles and social groups and

(01:27:53):
activist groups anywhere in the world where there is interest.
So thank you very much for your time and attention today.
I would be happy to answer any questions.

Speaker 4 (01:28:05):
Okay, Genadi, thank you very much for your presentation.

Speaker 2 (01:28:10):
It was a very good introduction to the contemporary problems
of transhumanism.

Speaker 4 (01:28:15):
Thank you very much.

Speaker 2 (01:28:16):
One more about my question about presenting the game the
left game. We are highly interested to it. I will
suggest at least two suggestions in a minute. But first
of all, is there any questions or comments on Genavi's presentation,

(01:28:37):
Please not for the moment, So I am going also
to give my additional comments about ranking correlation methods. It's
something that is very close to my heart because long ago,
two thousand years ago, when I was student, my first

(01:28:57):
research published research was in the field using ranking methods
in setting goals, ato, mating, welding precisions. Since then, every
single student of powers Me and Junior is trained to
use ranking mathods for different purposes. It's part of the

(01:29:20):
educational process on one viol subject.

Speaker 4 (01:29:24):
So I am fully in a favor.

Speaker 2 (01:29:27):
Of your suggestions for using them in the political context.
Junior is doing almost every year a comparation between the
political programs of the Bulgarian political parties via ranking natives
with very interesting results. So ranking magis is a great

(01:29:48):
idea and we are one hundred percent supporting and practicing
that direction. I fully agree that that's the mate of
making political decisions leading to a better consensus against the
tendency of polarization. Another more important topic for me, more important.

Speaker 4 (01:30:11):
Is a left game one option. As a part of
the social.

Speaker 2 (01:30:15):
Activity in this conference, we have the practice to pray
collective lead games in the evening. So later afternoons for
five attock tee something like that, would you mind to
play that game? Not today but in the coming days,
probably Friday. Here in the conference, as better taskers yes,

(01:30:39):
but also as a collective experience of the conference. And
the second point I was on your demonstration. So I
have a good idea about the game. As you know,
we are trying our efforts, you are also contributing to
the great transhumanist game of of everything about everything. At

(01:31:01):
the moment, we have a step tower that a game
called Bulgarian Yogurt Business Game developing twenty twenty up to
the moment. It is run eight times in Bulgarian and
in English to publications not very much, but it is
designed to accept many different games as a sub assignment

(01:31:24):
for the prayers. For example, at the moment we have
a set of sixteen games for human resources selection. There
is such a company for Experience of Us who is
using games for selecting proper people for the clients. So
all students are supposed to play these games as being

(01:31:47):
incorporating in our big game. So I see left as
potentially possible to be incorporated as an additional assignment to
the teams of students because in the game there is
a lot of JVT and transhumanism aspects. So that's the

(01:32:07):
second idea. So would you mind to do that in
November when is the nearest. It is shduled the nearest
room of the game a power game.

Speaker 1 (01:32:19):
I think that's an excellent idea to have a levy
the game included as a module in the Great Transhumanist Game,
and absolutely I would be happy to take part in
that in November when that is underway, and in the meantime,
I have also shared the links to the latest build

(01:32:41):
of the game, which is built zero point seventy five.
So if you access the Google drive file, it will
prompt you to download a zip file. You can install
it onto a PC and test it out. You can
even test it out at this conference, either individually or
within a group setting. If you want to sit by
a computer and collectively decide the actions that your character

(01:33:05):
will take, that might be an interesting experience that might
motivate some interesting discussions as well. I have, as you
pointed out, done some video demonstrations of the game where
I asked the audience, even via the YouTube chat or
the chat in zoom, to suggest actions that the character

(01:33:28):
should take next, and I would pick essentially the first
suggestion from any audience member as the next action that
the character would take, and we would see with the
combination of those actions whether this character would survive or die,
and it is possible for the character to die, including
sometimes if the character had made most of the right choices.

(01:33:51):
To illustrate this unfortunate element of realism, but I think
it would be excellent to try out this game in
as many different settings as possible. I am planning to
make it available completely for free, including the finished version,
precisely because I wanted to spread, precisely because I want

(01:34:12):
people everywhere in the world, of every demographic to try
to understand this set of concepts of longevity, escape, velocity,
of transhumanism, of the confluence of emerging technologies, and really
envision how a future might unfold with all of these

(01:34:36):
ideas in play.

Speaker 2 (01:34:38):
Okay, in this case, I assume that you part of
the game in November. It will be with approximately one
famary sixty participants splitting about thirty teams, and you will
be part of a video newspaper saying something very short

(01:35:00):
out the game, and then they will have the chance
to make some points. The game is from making points.
Why I'm playing the game as an additional assignment in
parallel with all other assignments in the game. So I
will contact you in November to set up. It will
be Saturday Sunday as the days of the week. The

(01:35:21):
game is taking place on the end of the weeks. Okay,
other questions and comments. I'm very happy that we have
agree about that. It will be a valuable contribution. Thank
you very much again with genabu.

Speaker 8 (01:40:02):
Us out steps stout into the too too and and

(01:53:23):
and let look like a cock Boa

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