All right, welcome, ladies and gentlemen. It's a pleasure for me to speak here at the organizing convention for the Washoe County Libertarian Party. I'm honored to have been invited. My name is Janati Stoller of the Second. I'm the chief executive of the Nevada Transhumanist Party. And as of several days ago, November 17, 2016, I'm also the chairman of the United States Transhumanist Party. You can see the two URLs here on the slide. Transhumanist-party.org is the new website for the United States Transhumanist Party. And the second URL, www.rationalargumentator.com, slash index, slash Nevada-transhumanist-party, slash, is the page containing the constitution and bylaws of the Nevada Transhumanist Party. Now, if we can go to the next slide, I'll give you an overview of the Nevada Transhumanist Party. The Nevada Transhumanist Party was founded a year and 2 and 1 half months ago on August 31, 2015. That was when we first officially registered with the Secretary of State's office in June. We went through the process of filing our certificate of continued existence. We are a minor political party. We do not have valid access at that time. Of course, getting valid access in Nevada would require thousands of signatures. So at some point in time, that will be an objective. But right now, we are trying to build up the infrastructure of the party and of the transhumanist movement in Nevada. Currently, we have 140 members. The way to become a member is to join our Nevada Transhumanist Party Facebook group. I will point out, membership in the Nevada Transhumanist Party does not conflict with any registered party memberships. So you can all be registered libertarians and still join our Facebook group and become members of the Nevada Transhumanist Party. Your party registration with the Secretary of State's office will still be held. And furthermore, we are quite inclusive in terms of whom we admit as members. We have two membership categories. Nevada members, which are those who are eligible to vote in Nevada elections, and allied members, which consist of anybody else with a rational faculty and an ability to form political opinions. So as transhumanists, we look forward toward the future. We value human rationality in all of the forms that manifest itself. So for instance, we have some international allied members of the Nevada Transhumanist Party. If someone is a precocious child or a teenager who has political opinions and has a tech-oriented future, oriented point of view, that person would be welcome to join. Hypothetically, if in the coming decades we come into contact with intelligent extraterrestrial life or develop sentient artificial intellects, the Nevada Transhumanist Party will admit them as members. So we are that inclusive. We do not have any candidates running at the state level for the foreseeable future. To do that, of course, we would require valid access. But we are quite open to reaching out to other organizations and individuals irrespective of their official political affiliations, as long as they share some of our objectives. And we are primarily focused on discussions of policy, education, and the role of emerging technologies in our lives. As compared to the US Transhumanist Party, which I will talk about a little bit later, the Nevada Transhumanist Party is more explicitly libertarian in its platform. The reason for that is I am a libertarian transhumanist myself, and I wrote the Constitution and Bylaws of the Nevada Transhumanist Party. And we are kind of essentially the font of the transhumanist movement here in Nevada. Hopefully it will grow beyond this area. We do have some members in the Las Vegas area. And hopefully it will grow substantially beyond myself and my wife, Wendy Stolerov, who is our secretary-treasurer. I wrote the Constitution and Bylaws, which you can find on our website. I believe we have 34 detailed platform planks, as well as a rudimentary framework for decision-making within the party and the framework that outlines our philosophy of activism. And I'd like to direct your attention to Article 5, Section 2, the Nevada Transhumanist Party shall focus on campaigns of education, information, discussion, and policy advocacy intended to advance the objectives of the Nevada Transhumanist Party platform. So I am fulfilling the mission of the party just by being here and speaking with you today. This is the kind of outreach that we need at this early stage of our party's existence. On our Facebook group, we have vibrant discussions. We have people posting news articles about emerging technologies and the intersection of technology and politics. I encourage all of you to join our Facebook group and post stories, post questions for other members and get involved. If you want to propose platform planks to be included in our Constitution, you are welcome to do that. And we would welcome your voice. In terms of our tone and our demeanor, we emphasize completely peaceful civil activism. We wish to be inclusive across partisan lines. So we are a trans-partisan party, if you can characterize it as that. We want to collaborate on projects to create a better future. So our emphasis isn't on our team versus somebody else's team. It's not on ad hominem attacks on other candidates or other political parties. It's on creating something that would improve, hopefully, the lives of everyone. Right now, we are an example of what happens when you take money out of politics, because we don't take any donations. It is just a lot messier if you mix money and politics. Maybe at some later stage, once we have some candidates, we would set up the infrastructure for monetary donations. But right now, it's based on volunteer efforts and essentially the projects that people want to affiliate with the Nevada Transhumanist Party. And we've had some discussions. We've had some outreach events in the local area. We've had some online panels. I had an interview with the EMG radio show in Las Vegas two days before the election day. So now I'd like to talk to you about the US Transhumanist Party on the next slide. The US Transhumanist Party was founded a little bit earlier on October 7th, 2014 by a gentleman named Zoltan Ishtwan. Now, Zoltan is an adventurer. He is a journalist who has traveled to over 100 countries. Sometimes he filmed war zones. He created some poignant documentaries. He was once in Vietnam doing a feature on individuals who essentially harvest parts of landmines that had been left there since the Vietnam War. And at one point, he nearly stepped on an unexploded landmine. And he realized he essentially had been moments away from losing his life. He didn't want to take that much personal risk again. And he wanted to rededicate his career to doing something that would fight against the dangers and perils that we all face at this state of our advancement against the fragility and vulnerability of our human organisms. So essentially, he founded the Transhumanist Party to advance the fight against death and disease through science and technology. Zoltan ran for president in 2016. As a journalist, he used his knowledge and he used his media connections to a mass considerable publicity. He had over 70 million page views to his articles and to the old Transhumanist Party website. And he was quite famous for his immortality bus tour. He essentially purchased an old RV and personally redecorated it to look like this coffin-shaped bus, essentially a metaphor for the predicament that we all find ourselves in as mortal and very vulnerable human beings today. So he toured the country with this bus. He was raising awareness for perhaps the possibility of overcoming this predicament in our lifetimes. He was the first chairman of the Transhumanist Party. He led it for a bit more than two years, gathered considerable publicity. He was a writing candidate in many states because, again, getting FEC registration for a new political party is extremely difficult. One already has to have ballot access in several states. One has to have candidates in several states and it's just too early to do that. So de facto, he was a writing candidate in states that allowed write-ins. And I know a few people who voted for Zoltan, including members of my own extended family. In Nevada, we do not have write-in candidates on our ballots. I voted for Gary Johnson, whose principles I am very much aligned. And I will talk today about the complementarities of libertarianism and transhumanism. But after his presidential run, Zoltan essentially decided that he wants to hand over the Transhumanist Party to the broader transhumanist community. His goal, of course, with this campaign was not to win. He realized a third-party candidate, especially a minor third-party candidate, does not have much of a chance given the way the US electoral system is designed. His goal was to raise awareness and set the groundwork for this movement. But it would be people who hold these transhumanist views that would advance the movement going forward. So Zoltan selected me to be the new chairman of the United States Transhumanist Party. And he told me that essentially he wanted two key principles to be preserved during my tenure. One is the US Transhumanist Party would be run, again, in this transpartisan manner. So it wouldn't be one particular political slant. It wouldn't be libertarian or democratic or Republican. It would be open to all perspectives within the transhumanist community. And eventually, the decisions within the party would be made by consensus or majority rule of the members. So with that, I am kind of a transitional chairman overseeing this transitional period. Zoltan ran the party essentially as a one-man show. His detractors might have said, Zoltan ran it in an autocratic fashion. And that's not a value judgment. I would be running it in more of a technocratic fashion. That is, I would be setting up the infrastructure for the party to become a self-sustaining movement, a movement that would be independent of any one person's leadership or a handful of people's leadership. So it can actually function on its own irrespective of who's the next chairman. So that would be a transition to a small D democratic form of governance for the transhumanist party again, not in terms of political affiliation, but in terms of how decisions get made. And as a result, for the first time, we have opened the party up to membership. So we have established a membership form on our website. And it's very easy to sign up. You just fill in your name, your email address, answer a couple of yes or no questions. And you can be included on our membership roles. The esteemed David Holborn is a member of the US transhumanist party. So we invite you again to join in as well. I'm not going to dictate what our platform will ultimately be since I have agreed to be this impartial facilitator. However, if it so happens that a lot of transhumanist whole libertarian views and want to include some of those views in our platform, that would be great. I'm going to be reaching out to transhumanists of every stripe as well. Not all transhumanists are libertarians, though many are. Some would call themselves centrist or apolitical. Others would call themselves progressive or left liberal or even socialist transhumanists. And that's fine. I want to be fair to everyone. I want to be inclusive of these diverse perspectives. So next, let's talk about what is transhumanism and how it can cross party lines and it can point the way to a better future. So if you look at the Latin roots, transhumanism means beyond the human. So overcoming the historical limitations of the human condition that have existed. And another common way of conceiving of transhumanism has been as humanity plus in that in pursuing science and technology to expand the boundaries of what is possible for us to do and overcome our shortcomings, we don't lose what it means to be human. We don't lose any of the good things about what it is to be human. We just lose all of the negative aspects. The things that hold us back or ultimately destroy us. Transhumanism is, in my view, the logical extension of 18th century of enlightenment to humanism. The 18th century enlightenment philosophers sought to apply reason to improve the state of humankind, which as Thomas Hobbes observed was nasty brutish and short in the state of nature. So to apply reason to that suggests we can live better lives, we can solve the pervasive problems that are all around us. The American founders were certainly greatly influenced by that ideal in designing a system of government that endeavor to preserve human liberty rather than subjugate people to the tyranny of a few. And through science and technology and reason, today we have better tools for doing so than the 18th century philosophers and statesmen had. And as a result, we can be more ambitious in what obstacles we would like to overcome. So for instance, in voluntary death, diseases, poverty, scarcity of basic needs, war, pollution, and I would say some of the great menaces within the human psyche, the tendency toward tribalism, toward cognitive biases, toward mob behaviors. Wikipedia defines transhumanism as an international and intellectual movement that aims to transform the human condition by developing and making widely available sophisticated technologies to greatly enhance the intellectual, physical, and psychological capacity. And transhumanism on the next slide has some historical antecedents. You could really say that prototranshumanist thinkers have existed since at least the early enlightenment with Sir Francis Bacon who said, nature to be commanded must be obeyed and he laid out the rudiments of a scientific method or Benjamin Franklin who wrote toward the end of his life that he laments that he was born too soon. And in a thousand years, the human condition would be tremendously improved. He made many predictions. Virtually all of them have come true already even though it has been a lot less than a thousand years. One of the predictions he made was that human lives would be lengthened at pleasure beyond even an anti-Diluvian standard. So that would mean essentially beyond a millennium. So it was very interesting that these enlightenment or proto-enlightenment philosophers looked forward a few centuries and saw the potential of this transhumanist movement that has emerged more recently. But the term transhumanism began to be explicitly used in this contemporary manner by Julian Huxley in 1957. Julian Huxley was a famous biologist also related to all this Huxley of brave new world fame. And he wrote, up till now, human life has generally been, as Hobbes described it, nasty brutish and short. The great majority of human beings, if they have not already died young, have been afflicted with misery. We can justifiably hold the belief that these lands of possibility exist and that the present limitations and miserable frustrations of our existence could be in large measure surmounted. The human species can, if it wishes, transcend itself. Not just sporadically, an individual here in one way and an individual there in another way, but in its entirety as humanity. And even since the time he wrote that passage, we can observe considerable progress and life expectancy and the quality of our medical care. I would say for most of us, life is still too short, but maybe it's not so nasty and brutish anymore. So that's progress, but we'd like to take it a lot further. Transhumanism as a large scale movement and a formal organized philosophy began in the early 1990s in California. Max Moore was one of the key foundational thinkers of transhumanism. He wrote, transhumanism is a class of philosophies that seek to guide us toward a post-human condition. Transhumanism shares many elements of humanism, including respect for reason and science and commitment to progress and a valuing of human or transhuman existence in this life. Transhumanism differs from humanism in recognizing and anticipating the radical alterations in the nature and possibilities of our lives resulting from various sciences and technology. So again, we're taking humanism a step further. We are overcoming perhaps this perception of a fixed human nature that even the humanist philosophers had. And we recognize that what is considered to be human nature is really a function of both the external physical constraints we face and the internal mental and biological constraints within ourselves. And if we can list some of those constraints or modify some of those constraints, then human nature will be different. The transhumanist declaration was developed in 1999 by the leading transhumanist thinkers of that time. At article one of the transhumanist declaration reads, humanity will be radically changed by technology in the future. We foresee the feasibility of redesigning the human condition, including such parameters as the inevitability of aging, limitations on human and artificial intellect, unchosen psychology, suffering and our confinement to planet Earth. So with that, when developing just the basic groundwork for the US transhumanist party as it is going to be moving forward, I wanted to distill these ideas in as broad and inclusive a manner as possible. And I came up with these three core ideals and these form the immutable portion of our constitution where essentially members can develop their own policy planks and ideas about how we get to this future. But I wanted to frame in a very basic way what does it mean to be a transhumanist, to subscribe to this transhumanist philosophy? And there are three core ideals of the transhumanist party. The first is that the transhumanist party supports significant life extension achieved through the progress of science and technology. The second is that the transhumanist party supports a cultural, societal and political atmosphere informed and animated by reason, science and secular values. And the third ideal is that the transhumanist party supports efforts to use science, technology and rational discourse to reduce and eliminate various existential risks to the human species. And this is one point that bears emphasizing in the sense that many people have known that technology can be a double-edged sword and that technology can be used for good or for ill purposes. One example of technology being used for ill purposes would be nuclear war or say a pathogen that would be artificially engineered and then released out into the wide. So we do need to be cognizant of those kinds of risks. And we also need to be cognizant of the existential risks that the human species is faced with today. For instance, the risk of a large asteroid impact wiping out advanced life forms. There should be technological safeguards developed that might enable us to deflect or destroy these kinds of asteroids should any be discovered that enter onto a collision course with Earth. So technology, I would say, can pose these kinds of risks but the way to overcome those risks is again through more technology and more rational and responsible use of technology. So those transhumanist ideals themselves are transpartism. One could be a libertarian transhumanist or one could be a socialist transhumanist and still potentially agree with those ideals. But now we will come to why libertarians should agree with those ideals and I'd like to give the immortal words of Patrick Henry give me liberty or give me death a new interpretation and that is as a factual statement. That is to say, you cannot be free if you are dead. You will either have liberty or you will have death. And for those of us who actually want to live in a free society someday and not just discuss the principles of a free society or what a free society might be like, I would suggest we need a lot more time than we currently have. And therefore within our lifetimes, it is a factual statement, we will either have death and no liberty or perhaps someday if we work hard enough for it, liberty and no death. But to be realistic about it, we should all support the progress of medical science and technology to turn back the clock of biological aging or senescence because that's the only way we will be around to see this free society embody libertarian ideals emerge. And I would say life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, property rights, they're all prominent libertarian values, they're values that I hold. And the right to life in libertarian philosophy is recognized as a negative right. It's the right not to have other people infringe upon your life, not to have other people injure you or take your life away. But it's still the case that the positive condition of life is a prerequisite to all those other rights that libertarians cherish, the right to personal liberty, the right to private property, the right to the pursuit of happiness. So in terms of achieving the libertarian ideal, on the next slide we'll see why it will take a long time. The 2016 election results are a prime example of this. I voted for Gary Johnson, over 4.1 million people voted for Gary Johnson. That's about 3.2% of the popular vote. That's about 3.23 times the 2012 count. But nonetheless, it is nowhere near a majority or even a plurality of the American electorate. And while these are impressive gains, and I do think Gary Johnson has done a good job in reaching out to other individuals who may have an affinity toward libertarian ideals, perhaps he was too generous to the American people at large to suppose, as he has said, that most people are libertarians already, they just don't know it. I don't see that in the prevailing attitudes of the American people today and I certainly don't see that in the way that this election has turned out. And I would note that even if libertarianism as a set of ideas is gradually gaining ground, the fact is oppression of individuals on the ground is on the rise. There is a lot of institutional oppression right now that didn't exist in the 1990s even. We didn't have the kind of mass surveillance, the kind of intrusive airport security, the extent of police militarization or the wanton reliance on civil asset forfeiture to take away the property of people who have not even been accused of a crime in some cases. Instances of economic protectionism or cultural protectionism, if you would, are on the rise and crony capitalism, cronyist politics are very much alive and well in both mainstream political parties. There's also a lot of informal oppression, of private individuals by other private individuals. One thing to keep in mind is the libertarian ideal asserts that there exists a right to life, not just a right against the government, but a right not to have another private individual kill you or take your property. So there is a lot of that right now. In the wake of this election, there has been a massive spike in racially motivated violence or xenophobic violence. There has been a spike over the entire election season in harassment both in person and online in the form of trolling that involves threats of rape or death, which in my view are completely unacceptable, irrespective of what one believes politically or what the other side believes politically or what the other side might have said or done. And we even see it on the roads in terms of a rise in aggressive driving behaviors. The number of deaths on America's roadways actually reached a low circa 2012. It almost dipped below 30,000 fatalities. Now it's around 35,000 fatalities per year. And the entirety of it is not explained by just the increase in number of miles driven or by the economic recovery or anything of that nature. Anecdotally, I think we've all observed the rise in aggressive life endangering driving behaviors, which speaks to a problem in our culture. So on a wider scale in the Western world, we've seen the rise of so-called far right or nativist political parties, which are not at all like traditional American conservative political parties, which have tended to be more universalist, more focused on ideas and principles, even if they were, say, the principles of American exceptionalism. These parties don't care about what you believe. They care about where you were born. They're the kinds of blood and soil political parties that should really give libertarians great pause and great concern because it's not about tolerating individuals and it's not about individual freedom at all anymore. So one concern that we have today is will this rise and oppression undo the progress that has been achieved for human freedoms over the past two centuries more generally and over the past 30 to 50 years more specifically where we have seen a rise in cosmopolitanism and diversity and tolerance in this country. Is that going to be reversed? I hope not, but there does need to be advocacy toward essentially encounter to these tendencies. So on this slide we see left and right as conventionally conceived are obsolete ways of looking at the political situation. The new dichotomy is between open and closed forms of politics. And this was actually envisioned by some transhumanist, techno-optimist, and libertarian thinkers in the late 20th century. Ferry Dune M. Esfandieri, better known by his nom de plume, FM 2030, wrote Upwingers, A Futurist Manifesto in 1973 and he also wrote an essay called Upwing Priorities in 1981. And he wrote, throughout the 20th century, the world has veered left. In the coming years, we will wing beyond left and right, we will move up. Now FM 2030 was a highly techno-optimistic individual. He believed that by the year 2010 we would have colonies in space, we would have indefinite lifespans, social structures would be completely different than they are, in fact, today. 2010 hadn't quite turned out as FM 2030 had envisioned. Virginia Postrell, in 1998, wrote a book called The Future and Its Enemies where she posited that the new political conflict is between dynamism, which is openness to progress, to creativity, to exploration, very much aligned with individual freedom, and stacicism, which is an ideology that is driven by fear of change and a desire to control the culture, control the development of technology, control people's economic activities. But what didn't happen yet is the emergence of a politically powerful dynamist coalition that Virginia Postrell wanted to arise as a counter to stacicism. In 2013, Bradley Ducey, who is a Canadian libertarian, noted, if technology has not stopped evolving, the dynamist coalition Postrell envisioned to defend the future does not yet appear to have become a significant player on the political scene. Part of the reason is surely the 2001 destruction of the World Trade Center in New York. And I would say that is where American political life and, to some extent, Western political life in general pivoted away from this expansion of freedom, opportunity, cosmopolitanism, tolerance toward this more closed, stasisist, fear-written mentality that has only been exacerbated over the past 15 years. So what is the political spectrum like in 2016? Moving away from left to right, I've rearranged it from up to down. So let's look at the closed or stasisist, or as FM 2030 would put it, down-way types of politicians. We have our president-elect here, Donald Trump, along with the architects of Brexit, Boris Johnson, and Nigel Farage, and keep in mind, Brexit was not primarily a reaction to stultifying European Union bureaucracy. Most of the advocacy for Brexit came from a fear of economic openness, a desire to clamp down on the good parts of the EU, which were relatively open trade within the Union, and relatively open migration of persons. So xenophobia certainly played a great part in the outcome of the Brexit vote. By great, I don't mean good, I mean substantial. And then we have Marie Le Pen of the National Front in France, who is going to be running against Nicolas Sarkozy in the 2017 elections. She's also amassed a frighteningly high level of support. And of course, we have our autocrats here, Vladimir Putin in Russia, and Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, both of whom have undone decades of relatively, let's say liberalizing in a classical sense, and relatively secularizing policies that preceded them. So in the center, we have the conflicted middle, kind of the old center-right or center-left or progressive political establishment. What PGA O'Rourke classified as being either right or wrong within normal parameters. And he pointed out, well, he disagreed with Hillary Clinton on pretty much everything, and he thought that Hillary Clinton was quite wrong, but she was wrong within normal parameters, whereas Donald Trump was not within normal parameters at all. So I would put Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama in that category, they have made overtures toward at least a certain degree of social freedom and tolerance, a certain degree of openness to technological progress, particularly with Obama and his views on space exploration or autonomous vehicles. On the other hand, they've also favored a certain restrictive or redistributive or communitarian policies as well. Under Obama, mass surveillance and deportations of immigrants have spiked dramatically. Obama has overseen a very interventionist foreign policy as well. And we have other politicians here. Canada's Justin Trudeau, kind of a progressive, left liberal, probably less interventionist, less willing to use violence than Clinton or Obama. Anglo-America, center right, German politician trying to hold the European Union together, kind of technocratic. Bernie Sanders and Jill Stein, left progressives, they're good on some issues like opposition to mass surveillance, for instance, support of certain civil liberties, but they are into a great deal of economic planning as well. So they're kind of conflicted. There are certain aspects of their views that would be friendly to a high-tech future of individual flourishing. There are other aspects where I think they haven't reconciled themselves with an open, futurist type of orientation yet. And on the other side, I would put Gary Johnson in there because Gary Johnson actually is quite a strong advocate of technological progress. Zoltan interviewed for about a day with him for the vice president position. Ultimately, William Weld got elected, that Zoltan does have an article recounting his conversations with Gary Johnson. And Gary Johnson is very fond of the prospect of radical life extension. He's very fond of autonomous vehicles and other emerging technologies. So he certainly sees the relationship between liberty and technology. And I would include, what in my view is a great political hero, Edward Snowden. Although he is not an elected official, one could say he transformed American politics to a greater extent than many elected officials have done by disclosing this entire facet of the violations of our liberties through indiscriminate mass surveillance. And by the way, that's another example where technology could be used for good or for ill. And Edward Snowden is trying to use another type of technology encryption and advocate the use of that technology and essentially to try to win territory again for the individual and his or her liberties as against the central government. So the transhumanist party certainly aligns itself with the open or upwing side of the spectrum. But the question is, is that going to be enough? Is that going to be enough to form a powerful coalition to resist this stasis push that we're seeing throughout the Western world now? And that's why I put in there, will we have you? Will we have enough of you to make a difference there? And I do encourage all of you to sign up for membership in the transhumanist party. So what do we think will make a difference in promoting liberty? If these technologies are given the time and space and political and economic freedoms to flourish? Well, first of all, we have advances in biotechnology and genetic engineering, which are happening today. And life extension, which to some extent is happening today at a pace of two to three years gained per decade in the Western world. But of course, in order to really achieve what is called longevity escape velocity, we would need life expectancy to increase by more than one year every year that passes. That would, in effect, mean that human bodies would be rejuvenated through medical treatments that don't exist yet but might exist in 20 to 30 years. And Dr. Aubrey de Grey, who is a famous advocate of life extension of the SENS Research Foundation, he is a Cambridge-trained biogerontologist, has identified seven types of damage to cells that is associated with the process of senescence. And while human metabolism is very complex and all the workings of human metabolism are not well understood yet, his proposal is an engineering-based approach to try to address each of these causes of damage in terms of repairing them without re-engineering the human metabolism but just going in every 10 to 20 years and fixing the damage that has already arisen, resetting the body to a younger state. So if that happens, maybe longevity escape velocity will arrive in time for us. And nanotechnology is one part of that. If we can affect cells on a nanoscopic level if we can deliver targeted treatments, that's already being done, for instance, with treating various types of cancer through targeted doses of chemicals instead of this broad-based chemotherapy. Artificial intelligence is emerging certainly. It's already applied in certain instances, famous instances, IBM's Watson, which is being used for certain medical diagnostic purposes and these AI algorithms are going to continue to improve. Space colonization is important. It's important in large part as a way of protecting us against existential risk. We don't want to be sitting ducks on a single planet, put all of our eggs in one basket. In the case there's an asteroid impact or a massive super-volcano or climate change from whatever sources, seasteading the development of politically autonomous communities on the oceans I think would be great for advancing the libertarian ideal, allowing experimentation with different forms of governance, vertical farming to enable a lot more food to be grown on less land so that a population growth isn't going to be a problem. There is already more than enough food to feed the people in the world who are alive today. I would say through emerging technologies that's the way we can dispel all of these overpopulation fears that are prevalent within the general public. Economical alternative energy. If it makes economic sense to switch away from fossil fuels as it is increasingly becoming the case, then that's what should be made. Companies like Elon Musk's Solar City are already developing means for that to happen. Actually, that was one of the main reasons why the Nevada Transhumanist Party supported ballot question three in the 2016 elections to allow people to pursue these alternative sources of energy when they do make more economic sense and not have them locked down by a particular monopoly. Automation of production. The more production is automated, the less material scarcity there will be. The more physical stuff there will be for each individual to enjoy. Furthermore, autonomous and electric vehicles. I mentioned the 35,000 fatalities on the roads today. Autonomous vehicles can reduce that by about 95%, which is the proportion that is due to human error. Electric vehicles can be designed to be much safer. The Tesla Model S, in spite of a few high profile crashes, actually has the highest safety rating of any vehicle in the world and the lowest count of fatalities out of any vehicle in human history. Flying cars. There are a few companies working on flying cars. One of them called TerraFugia has a prototype called the Transition, which is a kind of rotable aircraft. But if you have flying cars, again, you improve the potential for transportation. You reduce the potential for conflict on the roads. All of these aggressive drivers might become a distant memory of a prior era. Augmented reality. Think about, for instance, sitting at that table wearing augmented reality glasses, building a structure in the game Minecraft. The possibilities for that are already emerging, but you could see many applications for projects that can improve the human condition. Encryption. Again, a great tool for protecting individual privacy in an era of mass surveillance. The blockchain, Bitcoin and other altcoins, cryptocurrencies, but now there's also the potential to create contracts on the blockchain and even eventually create DAOs, distributed autonomous organizations that can function in an objective and partial manner so that no set of a few individuals can kind of game the rules of the organization in their favor. And Ectogenesis, which means essentially artificial birth through artificial wombs can solve a lot of the messy problems that we have right now in the abortion debate where there is truly a conflict between the liberty of the pregnant woman and I would say the rights of an unborn human being. So to resolve that conflict, I don't think laws are going to do it. And I think technology might enable a properly libertarian solution to that issue. So why are we forming a political party rather than say just a think tank or a nonprofit organization? Well, first of all, a political party, as Zoltan realized, gets a lot of publicity. It gets a lot of people talking and widespread public acceptance of these emerging technologies is crucial because what we really see throughout human history is it's not a particular philosophy or religion necessarily that renders people for against technological progress. There are technologically friendly atheists and religious people. Likewise, there are techno-skeptic atheists and religious people. There are some hardcore environmentalist Luddites who are completely atheistic. There are also Mormon transhumanists or Christian transhumanists or Buddhist transhumanists who interpret their religion in a way that's compatible with technological progress. I would say it's part of a more fundamental breakdown among human beings. The difference between hope and fear. So people whose views of the world are primarily shaped by hope will have more of this open or dynamist attitude whereas those whose views are shaped by fear will be stasisists that want to clamp down and they'll want to control change or even prevent change. So we want to be the party of hope and unfortunately right now we see the political spaces dominated by the parties of fear, the stasisists. We want to build a coalition that stands against that and constructively articulates what a positive future, not a dystopian but a positive science fiction future might look like. We do have more flexibility to advocate as a political party than a nonprofit organization would. I've seen several nonprofit organizations express reluctance at making political statements about a particular candidate or about a particular party's policies. As a political party we don't have that restriction and of course we don't worry about tax exempt status right now, we don't take donations anyway but even if we did we wouldn't worry about that just because I think a lot of people sacrifice so much just to get a few tax exemptions. I would rather if I had to pay some taxes, pay some taxes but keep the freedom to advocate the kinds of ideas that I think are necessary to advocate. Also there exist institutional barriers to technological advancement. Certainly for instance getting a drug or a new medical treatment through the Food and Drug Administration takes 10 to 15 years right now and much of that time is not devoted to demonstrating safety, it's devoted to demonstrating efficacy under a very rigorous definition but perhaps some terminally ill patients would be benefited by having access to those treatments a lot sooner since they would die otherwise, what would they have to lose? So we advocate right to try laws but ultimately to get those kinds of institutional changes there needs to be a change in public attitudes, the openness of the public to these emerging technologies and those attitudes are ultimately a function of what people are familiar with. There are right ways and wrong ways to deploy emerging technologies and we saw in the backlash against Google Glass the wrong way to do that which was a kind of exclusive experiment that wasn't available to the broader public that some people could opt into by paying a large amount of money and even then they weren't guaranteed to get Google Glass. So they were seen as a kind of closed elitin when they entered restaurants or other public spaces where most people didn't have access to Google Glass even if they wanted to. There was a lot of tension, there was a lot of suspicion of these people's motives. On the other hand, we have technologies like laptops and cell phones which don't arouse that kind of suspicion even though somebody can go into a public place and film you on a cell phone about as readily as they could film you using their Google Glass device. So it's a matter of what people are familiar with and what they feel is accessible to them. If you have the perception that some group of people is a closed aristocracy and only they can have certain benefits then you're going to have an uprising of everyone else or at least you're going to have deep skepticism from everyone else. And ultimately in my view, technological innovation, entrepreneurship, individual freedom of access are the ways to broaden that access. There's no conflict between this libertarian free market ideal and the ideal where the future is evenly distributed or more evenly distributed than it is today. And furthermore, we see mainstream politics almost completely overlooks these issues of emerging technologies. Obama and Biden talked a little bit about that with their cancer moonshot which in my view is a very commendable initiative and perhaps Elon Musk has pushed them to be a bit friendlier to space exploration particularly private space exploration but that was almost lost over during the 2016 presidential election where the majority of the focus was ad hominem. It was not focused on policy at all and we need to raise awareness that these technological issues are the issues that are going to be shaping our future. And furthermore, as a counter to this rising stasis-ist hegemony we'll need to supplement the technological message with support for individual freedom and tolerance of different ways of living and cosmopolitanism. Cosmopolitanism is a citizen of the universe, of the cosmos and that's ultimately the transhumanist ideal too. A key transhumanist concept is morphological freedom, the freedom of individuals to transform their bodies, to transform their potential, their opportunities in a manner that those individuals determine as desirable, not some external authority figure, not society at large, as long as they're being peaceful, as long as they're being constructive in what they're doing, they should have the freedom to be different and transhumanism takes that freedom to be different which libertarians also cherish and combines it with the advocacy of technologies that can help cultivate that meaningful difference. So, next, let's look more at how transhumanist politics is different. Today's politics is essentially shaped by the perception of scarcity, the scarcity of material resource and the scarcity of access to the political system. Frederick Bastia in the 1840s quipped that government is the great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else and that was certainly true of government in his time in France which had been rocked by a series of revolutions where different groups, classes within society came to power and as they came to power each one tried to expropriate the others, their perceived antagonists and these conflicting special interest groups, of course, manifest themselves in every political system today. The animosity we observed in this election season is just a more open and ugly form of these kinds of special interest dynamics but they're driven by a zero sum mentality, the idea that if you're going to win, somebody else has to lose. It's, again, this deeply ingrained tribalism that stems from the hunter-gatherer societies where gameless scarce berries or other fruits are scarce so if you have a certain catch, for instance, you can only split it up in so many ways and if person X gets something then that's something that person Y wouldn't get and unfortunately through the flaws in our evolved psychology, that mentality has persisted but what transhumanism promises is a future of widespread abundance where everybody will have these material benefits, everybody will have a comfortable life, a long life, a life where they get to control how they use their time so there won't be that temptation anymore to take from the other person, to risk one's own physical safety, to essentially cause somebody else's life to be worse off just so that one's own life could be only marginally better off and contemporary politics, I would say, doesn't even enable the lives of the winners to be marginally better off. Let's see what happens to the Trump supporters in the next four years, I'm sure, they're going to have some recriminations against their favorite candidate and the promises that he won't fulfill. People who are more prosperous and more comfortable and more fulfilled in their lives are less likely to act with vicious hostility toward others. We've already seen that Stephen Pinker, a Harvard psychologist, has written an excellent book about 800 pages called The Better Angels of Our Nature which goes into how the statistical preponderance of violence is dramatically decreased due to the progress in science and technology and classically liberal cosmopolitanism over the past several centuries. And what we seem to do is transform politics into what it should always have been which is a constructive focus on what policies are best for improving human well-being, solving the problems that confront us so it wouldn't be my team versus your team, it wouldn't be about getting power, it wouldn't be about making other people suffer, it would be about whose ever solution can result in a better world. And that's where our openness to other points of view and perspectives comes in because it could be that Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton have a good idea, it could be that Evan McMullen has a good idea, could be that Gary Johnson has a good idea or an uncle and miracle has a good idea and we need to listen to the extent that those ideas get forward a better future. But the political system unfortunately poses great obstacles, obstacles that we need to overcome. Ugly political rhetoric that we've seen escalate reiterates these centuries old fallacies, these fallacies that appeal to the lowest common denominator, people who haven't had the education or discernment or just time spent contemplating these issues to avoid the cognitive biases that we're all vulnerable to. Major fallacies include the fear of technology or trade taking jobs. If they see some factory workers getting laid off, they think, oh, that's so terrible, they don't realize that in the 19th century 90% of all jobs were agricultural and right now maybe two to 3% of all jobs aren't agricultural yet. Food production has increased, there's not this kind of massive unemployment due to the loss of agricultural jobs and the jobs that replace them have generally been more humane in terms of the working conditions and more remunerative. So the protectionists don't see a positive sum world where the pie is not fixed, the pie grows through innovation and through technological progress. And of course with the zero sum mentality some groups get pitted against others and overcoming that is a huge challenge. We want to see candidates who are thoughtful or creative, who are forward looking in discussing not just the issues of the day but our future for decades and centuries to come. So ultimately the transhumanist party isn't about any given election. It's not about just the world that we see today. It is about a long-term movement that's going to be here for a long time and it's going to be interfacing with these emerging technologies as they become available and hopefully pushing to make them available. But the biggest obstacle in the United States for policy oriented discourse is the two-party political system. The outcome of this election, the great animosity, the let's say portrayals of each major party's candidate as the absolute evil that must be avoided at all costs arose out of the two-party system. I would say if there were a truly open multi-party system in the United States, Donald Trump certainly wouldn't be the Republican nominee. He would be some sort of minor far right fringe party candidate. Hillary Clinton probably would be some center left or center right party candidate depending on whether you use the American or the European definition. She probably wouldn't have gotten elected either just because she does have some negatives, whether real or perceived. We would have had a lot more choice, a lot more openness. Gary Johnson probably would have gotten more than the 15% of the vote that he was aiming at. But unfortunately this two-party system channels people into this wasted vote and lesser evil mentality where they feel like to avoid what is the absolute evil in their view, they'll accept the slightly more tolerable mild evil. But that's not a way to achieve the greater good if you always keep voting for the lesser evil. And there are specific barriers that lead to people being channeled in that direction. Ballot access laws that I talked about, the Libertarian Party is fortunate to be on the balance of all 50 states, but even that project took 40 years to achieve. The control of the commission on presidential debates, despite Gary Johnson's near 15% performance in the polls at some point, the commission on presidential debates is controlled by the two major political parties. They wouldn't let him in. And as soon as they didn't let him in, his poll numbers plummeted just because he had less exposure and people again became retrenched within this lesser evil mentality. And then there's non-inclusive polling. A lot of polls just didn't mention Gary Johnson or Joe Stein or Zoltan or a lot of the other third party candidates that were running. And this system doesn't represent the actual interests of the people. It leads people down this road which everyone considers suboptimal. Most Trump voters didn't have Trump as their first choice. They just thought, essentially, well, this is our team, the Republican Party. We need to support our nominee. We need to oppose Hillary Clinton. And that's unfortunate because they, in so thinking, even though they themselves might not be racists or bigots or xenophobes, enabled the racists and bigots and xenophobes to win. So what are our positions on specific Nevada issues? This was with regard to the past elections. I want to focus on the ballot question. So on question one, transhumanists had different perspectives on gun rights, gun control, background checks. I personally voted against question one, but I know if you've transhumanists who voted for question one, we as the Nevada Transhumanist Party didn't take a position on this issue just to reflect the diversity of our perspectives. But on questions two, three, and four, there's a pretty clear position for the transhumanist party. We supported all three of those questions with regard to the legalization of recreational marijuana. Some might argue about the details of the taxation or regulation that would accompany it, but ultimately any legalization with any tax or regulatory structure is better than this punitive prohibition that we have today. I don't have an interest in consuming marijuana myself, but even people who don't can be victims of overwhelming force, if for instance, the wrong house is suspected of growing some marijuana plants or malicious neighbor reports on you or the police. Conduct a routine no knock raid where they knock down your door and shoot your pets as a matter of routine. So to stop that, I think legalization of recreational marijuana is essential to save people's lives. Question three, I already touched on, we strongly support eliminating the coercive monopoly that NV Energy holds. People should be allowed to choose their utility, to choose how they obtain electrical power in the same manner that they choose their cars or their furniture today. I certainly don't believe that there is any reasonable, natural monopoly argument to be made, especially with these new decentralized alternative energy technologies like rooftop solar or perhaps wind technologies that people can have on their property. And then question four, this is a very transhumanist initiative to eliminate the tax on medical devices. Sometimes those taxes can run into the thousands of dollars for sick patients, people who can afford those taxes the least but need those devices the most to stay alive. And in order to have those emerging technologies make a difference in improving our health outcomes, they need to be available and affordable to people who need them. So in terms of the future of Nevada, this is more generally what we see looking forward. Advanced technologies are the best fit for Nevada's economy in terms of diversifying it. Gaming is a declining industry in Nevada and something needs to replace it. I think Nevada has some great advantages for emerging technologies both through small startups and large corporations coming here. We have relatively modern infrastructure. We have wide roads, we have good bridges. We have ample convention space. There is a reputation into that for hospitality. There's a lot of skill in that. A lot of transhumanism today is concentrated in the Bay Area and in California more generally. California's infrastructure is let's say a lot more dated. I remember attending a transhumanist conference in 2014 in the Bay Area. And there were a lot of people there, a lot of interesting discussions there about the possibilities of the future. But the conference was held in a 1950s era building with only one restroom. Think about this, a transhumanist conference in a building with only one restroom where the ubiquitous requirements of human civilization are deficient. So in Nevada, that wouldn't be a problem. In Nevada, there's the space to accommodate growth and accommodate a lifestyle that is more compatible with a technological future. And furthermore, small businesses are an essential ingredient to that. I think it's great that Tesla is building its giga factory in Sparks. I think it's great that Faraday Future is coming to Las Vegas to build its auto facility there. But ultimately, small businesses, small startups have also been fonts of innovation over the past few decades and throughout human history more generally. And in the view of the Nevada Transhumanist Party, they should get similar favorable tax and regulatory treatment as Tesla and Faraday Future did. I think there's room for small and large scale innovation. Educational technology is absolutely essential. And it is essential for diminishing the prevalence of logical fallacies, diminishing the vulnerability of people to inaccurate information or propaganda being portrayed as fact. So for both private and public schools, however you think education should be administered, whatever you think the role of government should be, more technology is better. Educational apps and games that make learning fun. That perhaps might channel people to spend the time they might have spent playing World of Warcraft or other types of massively multiplayer online role playing games into similar types of gamifying environments that make learning addictive. That could be culturally transformative. Also, teaching rational critical thinking at an early age is essential. We've seen unfortunately in the new media environment, people are not used to confronting logical fallacies. They're not used to confronting filter bubbles and they're not used to essentially reaching out and engaging with other perspectives. So Nevada has historically been and will continue hopefully to be cosmopolitan, tolerant and diverse. The transhumanist ideal of morphological freedom is very much aligned with that. And so we need to make common cause with anyone, whether they're libertarian or some other political persuasion who espouses these values and has some of these ingredients toward a better future. So with that, on my last slide, I'm open to questions. I'm not sure how much time we have for questions, but again, you have my contact information here and the links to the US transhumanist party website and the Nevada transhumanist party website. Thank you very much for your time today and I am open to anything else you might have for me. Thank you, Janette. Thank you.


81% of foreign components of Russian missiles are manufactured in US. Russia uses electronic components manufactured in the United States, Switzerland, Germany and Japan to produce missiles, but the United States accounts for 81% of such microelectronics. It was stated in a new document of the Jermak-McFall sanctions group, which was obtained by Liga.net. According to the Jermak-McFall group, the K8101 air-launched cruise missiles contain at least 53 types of electronic components like microchips, chips etc manufactured by foreign companies. In particular, these are components of such companies as ST Microelectronics, Switzerland, Weikor USA, Zilinsk USA, Intel Corporation USA, Texas Instruments USA, Zilog USA, Maxim Integrated USA and Cyprus Semiconductor USA. At least 45 types of foreign-made electronic components are used to produce 3M14 caliber sea-launched cruise missiles. 9M723 ballistic missiles and 9M728 stroke 9M729 cruise missiles from the Iskander systems are equipped with at least 15 and 32 types of foreign electronic components respectively. As part of the K847M2 Kinzel air-launched ballistic missiles, at least 48 foreign components are used. And in the Russian Tornado S rocket, particularly in the warhead, a chip manufactured by the world-famous American company Intel was found. Most of Russia's foreign electronic component base for missile production is made in the United States, 81%. The second-largest share after the United States is in electronic components manufactured in Switzerland, 8%. Germany and Japan each have 3.5%.


Welcome to my channel, today you are going to be learning about model predictive policy learning with uncertainty regularization for driving in dense traffic. I know this is a mouthful of a title, but you'll be able to understand every singular part at the end of this talk. This is work done by Mikael Hinaf, myself, Alfredo Canziani, with a supervision of Yanlecan from NYU Courant. You can find me on Twitter, under AlffCNZ. Let's start by seeing what the policy does. So here we can see an agent represented by a pink drawing of a brain, which is performing an action AT, given that it finds itself in a state ST. After performing a specific action, he observes a consequence or cost CT. An agent interacts with an environment, here represented by a picture of the world. The real world is going to tell me what is going to be the next state, even that we start in a specific initial state and the action AT is performed. Moreover, it will provide us the information about the cost associated to a specific action. A policy defines the behavior of an agent at a given point in time. When we learn a policy by interaction with the real world, we talk about model 3 reinforcement learning. Model 3 reinforcement learning is very effective, but needs lots of environment interactions to learn from. It can be slow, expensive or dangerous. If you think about trying to drive a car in the real world. Model 3 reinforcement learning instead learns a policy by interacting with a world model, here represented by a blue drawing of the world. In order to train this world model, we simply have to try to copy the real world, here represented with a picture of the Earth. So we start by sharing the initial state ST with T equals 0. We then provide to the system the action AT, performed perhaps by an expert. And then we observe what is the unfolding of the future. So we are going to have an ST and a given cost CT. All we try to do here with the world model is going to be basically coming up with an S hat T and C hat T. And we are going to try to make those predictions as close as possible to the results shown by the real world. Sometimes the cost is an intrinsic and differentiable objective defined on a specific state. So we can take it out from the equation here and we just in this case have to learn next ST. In this case we talk about model predictive control. We still have an agent, which is going to be performing an action AT, even if it defines itself in a state ST. And on the other side, it interacts with a world model. We define an intrinsic and differentiable objective, ask cost, here provides us the C hat T. So we have talked now about three elements so far, ST, the state, the action AT and the cost CT. Let's start to see in more detail what these are for the case of autonomous driving. So we have seven cameras mounted on the top of a 30 story building facing a highway. In here we have just two pictures of how the cameras view look like. I have a point view transformation to fix the perspective. We have some tracking and identification of each vehicle. The same vehicles appear in both representation as we can see here shown by the yellow arrows. We have a third representation here, which is using the simulator I wrote. We can notice here how the same vehicle appear also in this representation. For every vehicle we have a vector PT representing the X and Y position and a vector VT representing the X and Y velocities. Moreover, we have another vector AT representing the acceleration in the longitudinal and in the transverse direction, so X and Y. We have now a final representation used for training our networks. Every vehicle here is represented with a green box. The lanes are red and the background is black. We can notice here how the same vehicles are mapped down to this last representation. For every vehicle I crop a rectangle showing me what is the context around every vehicle. So it shows me the lanes, the markings, and it also shows me what is the situation of the traffic of the other vehicles basically around myself. Moreover, I also place myself on a different level on the blue channel and so we can see here the central car became blue or the bus here is shown in the upper right corner. These are making my IT images a time T. So finally the set of position PT in the velocity VT and the images IT represent my state ST, whereas AT, my X and Y acceleration are representing my actions. We have two costs. We have a lane cost and a proximity cost. Let's start with the lane cost. Here I'm showing our own vehicle in blue and aligned to the X-axis. We have a potential here for the lanes so that when we plug this in our reference on the map we can see the intersection of the lane with the potential is non-zero if the car is not in the center of the lane. And we just get this value as our cost associated to the lane. For the proximity cost we do something similar but relatively to the basically closest car. So we have again our blue vehicle which is our self and we have a potential in the Y direction and we have also potential in the X direction. While the potential in the Y direction is fixed the potential in the X direction changes with the velocity of our vehicle. So if we plug this inside the simulator we're gonna see that the car here has a Y potential, has an X potential and then by performing the product of the two we can come up with the proximity cost. If there are multiple vehicles we can just pick the maximum. Let's see how we can reformulate the proximity cost in order to make it differentiable. So here I'm showing you a situation where we are moving around 20 km per hour on the left hand side whereas on the right hand side we move at 50 km per hour. You can see how vehicles are more distant one to each other on the right hand side. So on the left hand side if I multiply those two potentials I get the following image and the same for the right hand side. As I said before the potential in the X direction changes with the speed so when we go at 50 km per hour our potential is much longer. In order to get the final proximity cost we multiply pixel by pixel the map and the green channel and then we just take the max. And the nice point here is that it's differentiable. We can directly use it with our neural network and train it in order to minimize such cost. So let's see now how we train the world model predicting what's next given history and an action. So the world model gets as input a sequence of states S1 to T. Here each state is represented by the combination of 2D vector Pt for the position a 2D vector Vt for the velocity and the context image I.T. Representing both the situation of the traffic and the lanes that are surrounding us. Moreover it also gets the action A.T. perhaps performed by an expert. And it tries to tell us what happens next S hat T plus 1. The hat represents the prediction. On the other side we have the real world which has real observations of the real futures which are our targets S T plus 1. So let's try to start learning the evolution of the future with a deterministic predictive network. So we have our states our action which are fed inside a predictor. Then we get a decoder and we are getting the prediction S hat T plus 1. On the other side we have the targets S T plus 1 and we try to minimize MSC loss function. Here on the left hand side we can see an evolution of a real future. And on the right hand side we see how our deterministic model comes up with its own evolution of the future. The frame rate is 10 Hertz. We can see now that we are 5 seconds in the future. 10 seconds in the future and everything is just a mess. If we keep going we just see that things are getting very blurred out and especially when we try to turn a little bit everything just doesn't work. So what's the main problem here? Well we have to keep in mind that the future is multimodal. Let's think about having a pencil here on this plane. Let's have actually a top-down view on the right hand side. So I'm gonna make it fall several times and the pencil will fall in different directions. If I just try to learn this multimodal future with a deterministic or unimodal network well the network will say on average well it's never fell and we know this to be wrong. So we cannot use a unimodal network for learning a multimodal future. So we need to change something and so here we are introducing the variational predictive network. So far I haven't changed anything so this one we said gives us those blurry predictions. In the hidden state here I'm gonna sum something which is a low-dimensional latent variable which I expand in order to match the dimensionality. During training the latent variable is computed in the following manner. From the actual target ST plus 1 we send it to an encoder which is gonna be telling me what is the mean and the variance of a Gaussian distribution from which we are gonna be sampling. And so this is very similar to what has been done in a variational latent encoder. If you are not familiar with such network check out my lessons about variational latent coders. The link is posted below. So these two blocks represent the posterior distribution Q5 which is a probability density function of Z given my history as 1 to T and the actual future as T plus 1. And so we enforce some normality by enforcing some closeness between the prior distribution and the posterior distribution with the KL term here. So in this case we have to minimize two losses. One is the MSC and the other one is gonna be the KL. This is how we train this network. Let's see how we actually use it for when we don't have access to the target. So here we have this low dimension latent variable in green which is gonna be simply sampled from the prior distribution. Then we get the next prediction the S hat T plus 1. We feed the S hat T plus 1 to the input. We sample a new low dimensional latent variable and we get the S hat T plus 2. We put it back in the input and so on we are gonna get our sequence of predictions which are gonna be basically unrolling a potential future. So let's see how it looks like. On the left hand side we have the actual future which actually have happened. On the right hand side we can see four different evolutions of the future. Here we have sampled four sequences of 200 latent variable from the prior distribution. Pay attention to the car next to us in the white circle and the car behind it in the white square. You can see how differently the network predicts their evolution. None of them will actually repeat the actual future and they will show four different variants of the future. And if we compare these results to the deterministic model we can see how they are crisp and they are quite realistic as well. After training this network we notice a first problem. There is a action insensitivity from the network which means that the action effects are actually encoded through the latent variable by the encoder here. This is a problem because in this case we already know what the action consequences are and therefore we won't be paying attention to what is the current action fed to the predictive network. Here we are going to be observing a four-time spade-up version of the reality where we have the real sequence of latent variable z and the real sequence of actions. We can notice here how the driver steers a few times. And we show it two times here. On the left hand side we see now two different samples of latent variables and the real sequence of actions. In this case the car should be steering the same way, but it does not. Finally here we have the real sequence of latent variables but a different sequence of actions. And unfortunately here we can notice how the steering behavior is encoded in the latent variable rather than in the action sequence. In order to fix this problem it's going to be trying to interrupt this kind of flow of information going from the encoder network to the output. We do this by applying a dropout to the latent variable during training of the forward model. In this case the low-dimensional latent variable is not always sampled from the posterior distribution but is also sampled sometimes from the prior distribution. In this way we gain now sensitivity to the current action fed to the predictive model. As we can notice here on the right hand side we have two sequences of latent variables that one and that two and we have the real sequences of action. We can notice now how the steering behavior of the reality is matched by these two on the right hand side. So great, now we have a way to predict a multimodal future by using an internal switch which is this latent variable which allows us to switch our main deterministic network to learn a specific mode and act in a specific mode. So let's try now to see how we can learn the agent and distill a policy. Here the agent is represented by the letter pi which stands for policy. All a policy does is mapping an input state. For example here is a sequence of states from S1 to T where every state is represented by a 2D vector pt for the position, a 2D vector vt for the velocity and a context image it. And then it maps this input state to an action a hat t which represents acceleration or break and right or left steering which is the control. Training the agent in a naive way. So we have our policy which is mapping the input state to a given action.  The word model needs to be fed with a sample from the low dimensional latent variable and therefore it produces a prediction has hat t plus one. From this prediction we are gonna be computing the loss and my loss in this case is gonna be simply the cost task we have defined before. So it's gonna be the proximity cost plus some lambda lane times the cost associated to the lane proximity. And then what next? Then we keep going.  Once more we provide the s hat t plus one and the new action to the word model. We sample new low dimensional latent variable from the prior distribution we therefore get the prediction s hat t plus two. We apply again our loss and we keep going. So we feed this to the policy. We get the next action a hat t plus two. We provide both s hat t plus two and the action a hat t plus two to the word model. We sample a new low dimensional latent variable and we get finally the last prediction s hat t plus three on which we compute the loss and therefore we can just run back propagation which is very similar to how back propagation through time works. We have here unroll a sequence of states and actions which are representing my trajectory. And then we just run back propagation through all the trajectory from the future back to the initial conditions. Does it work? Nope. So basically what happens is that while we are trying to minimize that cost the network will try to cheat by coming up with states prediction which are corrupted and therefore are minimizing the cost maybe because they are setting all pixels to zero for example. We are falling outside the manifold. We can notice here how we end up crashing outside the street or against other vehicles in the last case. So let's see how we can fix this and we can try to imitate for example the expert we have observing our data. So expert imitation, what do we do? Our loss is gonna be defined as the C task which was the sum of the proximity lane cost and then we sum some expert regularization. For this case we are gonna be trying to match what happened in the past. So we're trying to also minimize the distance between my targets and my predictions. In this case it works better if we actually do not use the latent variable because it's gonna be giving us the prediction which is as close as possible to the actual target. Does this work? Well it does actually. And we can see here the yellow trajectories that we are staying within the lanes and we are not falling outside the manifold. Are there other ways which are more generic? Yeah, so we can try to find a different manifold attractor so that we can avoid falling outside the manifold. So we are gonna be starting with our word model which is getting fed with the state, sequence of states and the action and produces the prediction s hat t plus one. From here we can compute the task cost and we have the ct plus one. Here the true cost is represented with the green dashed line and the training samples are represented with a red dot. If we go outside the training samples we can see that the predictions of multiple networks train on the same data but differently initialized are arbitrary and no longer represent what is the training function. To avoid going into these regions we can notice that here the variance between the different predictions is actually very high. By minimizing the variance in our cost lead our agent to stay in the comfort zone which means in the area where the data has been actually observed. So we can introduce here our regularizer which is the uncertainty regularizer. So how do we compute this uncertainty? So the initial sequence of states from S1 to ST it's fed to the controller to our policy which comes up with a action AT. Now these two are fed to the word model. We sample a latent variable ZT and therefore we come up with our prediction s hat t plus one. This is fed to the task cost which is the linear combination of the proximity and the length cost. Inside the word model we have some dropout modules. We turn them on during evaluation time. So we end up for example having the different dropout masks which will produce therefore the different predictions S tilde t plus one from one to D. We can therefore here compute the variance and multiply this by lambda and this is gonna be our model uncertainty regularizer. We sum these to the original task cost and therefore we come up with our new objective function to minimize. So all we need to do here is gonna be defining our loss as our C task our cost task plus some lambda multiplied by our uncertainty regularizer. And this just works. So how do we evaluate this policy? In this case we are gonna be taking one car the yellow one in this case replace the observed trajectory with our own policy. The yellow represent the original car the blue will represent our own car which is driven by our controller and the green are all the other cars which are blind to us because they are replaying their original trajectories. So we can notice now as we are driving that the yellow car actually chose a different trajectory and we are now stuck in a situation where no one sees us and we still had to survive until the end of the screen. In this case we said we are in front of the yellow car and we are just in between the preceding and the following vehicle. And now we are speeding up because there was no one in front of us. And in the third case again we are gonna be choosing a different path because we are just pushed by the other vehicles. And now we are by our own no one sees us and we still have to try to survive this dense traffic scenario. I promise you we would be understanding every term in the title. The main contributions are the uncertainty regularization the latent dropout for improving the action sensitivity the large scale data set of driving behavior from traffic camera. And finally we can additionally copy the past using the MPE expert regularization which is basically a model based imitation learning approach. Finally some info about this project. We've been talking about prediction and policy learning under uncertainty or WPW. So the speaker was me Alfredo Canziani. And again you can find me on Twitter under AlffCNZ if you'd like to keep up with all the work I'm doing in machine learning. This project was done in collaboration with Mikael Henaf and Yanlecan. Both of them on Twitter now. These slides are available at this link. The article on open review is available on this link. There is another version on archive. The code is available in pytorch at the following link. The website is the following and you can also find the poster online as well. If you like this lesson please feel free to like this video and if you'd like to keep be posted with new material please subscribe to the channel and enable the notification bell. Thank you again for listening. Bye.


So after that very successful summoning session, we're going through the update specifically what you're going to see based on the notes that dropped a couple of days ago. First is going to be your UI. So again, there's a bit of a change for the UI. It still seems familiar. The maintenance something here on the bottom is actually gone. It's actually the dorm that was just launched with this update. Then your recruit tab is actually going to be here. So it's going to be on your left side. So do not confuse yourself with looking for it here. It's not going to be here. And also next is going to be your dorm. There are two ways to get into your dorm so you can actually check out this tab and go through the dorm here or you can actually go through your HQ. Okay, so the dorm is there. So everything is there from your lab to your workshop to your hangar to your CEO's office and other rooms that you can actually open. So I'll have a more in-depth guide of the dorm as probably another video today or probably tomorrow. But let's move on to the new things that we have in this update. So as you can see, if you want to view your user or your units, you can actually take a look at them here. Then this is actually your new character stat interface. Okay, so don't be confused as well because there are a lot of information, you know, all bunched up on the right side. So your gear is here, your spells, you have your stats are here as well. But if you can see here on the upper portion where my mouse is, so you'll see here salary negotiation, limit break, and skill training. So all of that previously I think were in HQ or somewhere. Limit break and salary negotiation. No, it was actually salary negotiation was in HQ, but your skill training and limit break were here. Okay. We're in your lab. So it's no longer here. They actually put it all under management. So I was actually about to panic and look for it. But I realized that it's actually up here. So you guys might be confused on where it is initially, where it is now. But again, so it's here. So once you go through HQ, just look for management and go through your units and stuff. Then again look for it up here. Again, so don't, you know, don't make a fuss out of it. It's actually still here. Okay. So Fenrir Squad Animation, I won't go through the new animations for Fenrir Squad. So it's going to be, you can actually just take a look at it. So I actually took a look at one animation. It's not that big of a difference. I took a look at, I think Hilde, was it? So and for this update, we actually have, before we go to that, let's go first to an event. So we have a fateful summer event for this update and just have to clear certain stages here and you get rewards and you can exchange the currency here for some goodies. So what's best in this event is going to be your classified employment contracts if you don't have enough for awakened COU and then you can get them here. And also you have employment contracts are here and SATP cores are also good. And this one. So again, this shop will just give us additional, you know, additional materials provided that we do this event, the fateful summer event and clear some of these stages. These are easy to clear guys and more or less we can be able to farm the currencies for this event. Okay. Next would be your skin. So you have your vacation skins. Let's go to the shop. So it's the shop is actually still the same, still the same, the same layout. So let's, so the skins are here. Ula-la skin. So I already have jushi yung on the previous. I think it is a previous skin banner that dropped for jushi yung. So more as I have her next is going to be live Alan. I'm not going to, you know, I'm for me, I'm just going to give you my thoughts guys. I'll probably get her if I have enough quartz. But for now, I'm going to settle for it at twins. Definitely not. Liu Mi definitely not. In terms of the look of her swimsuit for Karen Wong, not as well. I think she was ready, she already dropped previously. The only two swimsuits that I'm considering would be Yen Xing and Rosario Lee Freed. So I'm going to try to get them both since I have, I have admin coins saved up. So let's do a trial first. Let's do a trial and see how she does in her new skin. Okay. So it's a beach chair and the beams are now yellow, not, not, not red. So and her regular, her basic attack is going to be blue, which is actually cooler than it was before. So I like this. Let's try to use her skill again. So it's yellow then her ultimate. Let's try to do this. So she's okay. Nice. It's blue. Favorite color is blue, by the way. So let's move back and see Yen Xing. Let's do a, let's do a trial for, for what her skin is going to bring us. Nice swimsuit. Okay. So again, the colors are more blue because it's going to be a vacation on the sea, in the sea. Let's try to use her skill. Okay. Nice. Nice. Better. I think this is better. Let's go. Let's try to use her ultimate. Oh, okay. Good pose, by the way. So anyway, I'm going to purchase both right now because I, you know, I like these special skins if you know what I mean. So let's purchase her skin and I'm going to purchase Rosarius. There goes my admin coins. I'm a sucker for skins. Let's try to equip them guys. So you have here. Where's Rosaria? Share lady, where are you? Here she is. So skin is here. Equip, apply. There you have it. So she's eating ice cream in a bar. Okay. Next would be Genshin. There you go. So nice. Very, very nice. Very nice. Okay. So moving on from the skins guys. So you also have a new recruitment. Sorry. Horse of Habit. Normal recruitment you're going to have. We still have, we're going to have actually Liumi, Frederick Doma, Jyushyun. And in Frederick Doma, you're going to have Frederick Yuma as well. So here they are actually our new banners that have dropped today. This is for your normal recruitment and their probability is up. So for those who have missed Jyushyun and want to get her and Liumi, I think now is the best time that you can pull for them. Frederick Doma, as I recall, he is good at PVE. Not really that impressive, but kind of good. So if you want to consider pulling for him, you may. For the classified recruitment, we do have Awakensyoyun for this update. So she's going to be available for 21 days or 3 weeks. So we have here 20 days and 16 hours left. Okay. So we also have guys and attendance punch in a new one. So this is your office opening punch in. So we have a lot of rewards here.  We also have your office building completion package. So this is a free gift, by the way. So anybody may claim this, including free to play players. So you must pass by the shop to claim this one. And this one is also of good value for me because it has everything that you need in terms of summoning.  Okay. So what else? So you have here special package, classified recruitment package. And you also have a special recruitment for, this will give you admin coin and employment contracts as well. And also this will give you a good sum of maternum as well. You are going to be, actually, you're going to have a change of routine in terms of navigating this. And by the way, guys, I prefer this one, the rotating to be a triangle, not a flat surface or a flat structure. But anyway, it's a nice change for the UI. Anyway, guys, thank you. Thank you for staying this far in this video. And also please consider subscribing. Only 14% of my viewers have subscribed yet, as of today. So guys, please consider, you know, if you do consider subscribing, this helps my channel a lot. And also don't forget to click that bell icon and also put a like to this video. Thank you guys. Stay safe. Take care. This is The Warden and I'm out here.


Are you open to the idea of replicating the Isha Vidya and Samskriti model with like-minded organizations to increase impact? Isha Vidya, one hundred percent. There is nothing very unique about Isha Vidya. It is the dedication of the people, which has made the difference. It's a simple school, but the people who are managing this, people who are teaching there, people who are doing everything around it, are highly dedicated people. It's the devotion of their hearts, which makes it look different. I don't think anything that we are doing in Isha Vidya is something that any of you do not know. It is just the devotion of the people, which makes it look so different. Samskriti, see Samskriti is not designed to take in the entire population into it. It is designed as a niche. A certain number of people have to go into this because if you want to have a balanced, sensible society, where whatever tools that we have in the form of science, technology and so much knowledge about so many things today, if this has to be used in a sane way in a society, as many people as are going into science, mathematics, technology, similarly that many people should go into music, dance, art, aesthetic. It's very important. In homeschool also, we have all these aspects, but still the pressures of being a part of some board, that there is a curriculum to finish, never allows those children to really, you know, soak it up. But here Samskriti children are one hundred percent on that. You just saw them on stage, but you must see them how they are in their life. Above all, the stability that's come into their life is phenomenal. So you can Samskriti partner with other schools. If you want one of those disciplines to be taught, maybe we can look at it in the next few years, but you cannot transform a regular school like a Samskriti. It needs parental, total, you know, agreement with the parent that this is possible. I don't think a school like this would happen unless people were spiritually in a state of experience where they want their children to pursue something like this.


Freedom! Let's talk about cover songs. Cover songs are an interesting business. We've done a video in the past, I should just find an eye on screen now. Cover songs are an interesting business. They require different kinds of licensing. If they're here on YouTube and they're synchronized with images on screen, which is pretty much if there's any image on screen, more or less, they require something called a synchronization license. And if they're sold on physical media, they require something called a mechanical license. Now, when it comes to synchronization licenses here on YouTube, sometimes those are hard to get. A lot of times you have to pay for them upfront, which means that for smaller creators, you don't always know if you're going to make your money back if you're licensing a song. Freedom has partnered with a company called We Are The Hits, which allows you to get the synchronization license at basically a revenue share split. They take a cut and then the freedom partner gets paid after that, which when it comes to covers on YouTube is a lot better than the current system for a lot of people who do it without getting licensing, because a lot of times those videos end up getting claimed and you make nothing from them. So this is a huge thing for a lot of people currently, YouTube and freedom partners are allowed to select certain songs to do this with, but it's always sort of an after-the-fact type thing. You get a claim and you go, oh, this is a cover, which is only available for certain tracks. And this through We Are The Hits allows you to do your research ahead of time so you can search and see if your song is covered and then you can upload it. In fact, you should upload it through the We Are The Hits or WAF system so that they can immediately put that claim on it so it doesn't get claimed by Sony or any of the other rights holders so it can be claimed by them and let the rights holder know, hey, look, this is a cover, it's cool, leave them alone. This should be appearing in your dashboard in the next little bit. If it's not in your dashboard, right this very moment, it should be in the next 24 hours, maybe, well, let's see, this is a Friday, carry the one. Let's not pretend that math is my strong suit. This will be in the dashboard very soon. I could sit here and tell you why this is awesome, a million ways to Sunday. However, I would like to pass that along to you. I would like to ask you what your opinions are about this. I know that there are many people who frequent this channel who may not find a lot of use for this immediately, but there are a lot who will. So I am really reaching out to you. Also, I'm asking for your creative thought process. Even if you're not a channel who does covers solely, how might something like this help you? I don't really want to hear it doesn't help me in the comments. I want to hear creative thinking. I want to hear that sort of, that level of creativity that will catapult you into the next thing. Because let's face it, most of us are entertainers, and if you're an entertainer, something like this isn't too far from what a lot of us will end up doing one day. Even if it's not a great cover, maybe you've got a way to make it happen, make it work, even if it's just to poke fun at yourself or the song. I don't know. Ooh, wait a minute, wait a minute. In the description down below, you'll find a link to some support articles having to do with WAATH and We Are the Hits and cover songs and licensing and stuff like that in general. I'd like you to go ahead and check it out. Even if you don't plan on using this, those of you who consider yourselves sort of connoisseurs of freedom, those of you who consider yourselves sort of up to date on everything that freedom is doing, be sure to check that out because there's a lot of really good information there as far as the legalities of certain things and also what we offer. This might not directly help you, but it could directly help one of your friends, and you being knowledgeable about it may help you be the expert that helps them. So speaking of, I've been putting a lot of work into help and support articles lately. I would invite you to check that out because it may not affect you every day, it may not affect you directly, it may affect people around you, it may affect other people in the community, but I do hope that a lot of this work that I've been doing doesn't go in vain. I'm really hoping that some of this stuff does sort of touch you. Also, if you have any other questions, comments, matters of concern about freedom, about anything that freedom offers, sponsorship or otherwise, let me know in the comment section down below and we will get this taken care of. Hopefully write an article specifically for you or anyone else who has the same question. Anyway, yeah, I think that's about all I had to talk about. So check out Wath and the Dashboard. We are the hits because it's awesome. Even if you end up not doing covers, it's cool to know what they have. I was very surprised. You know, I actually, I was trying for about an hour trying to search for things that they had or didn't have. It took me quite a while to find songs and artists that they didn't have. So yeah, anyway, till next time, don't forget to like, subscribe and do all those things that make me love my job. Also, be awesome to yourself and amazing to each other. Bye, Freedom Family. I wanted to take a second during the end card to send a special like shout out to somebody very special here from the office that you may have never heard of before. He's a very important guy on the development team. His name is Allen. He's that guy right there. Anyway, bye.