Closing Session: a discussion on COVID-19 and the interconnectedness of our world

Speaker 1

This is meant to be a roundtable discussion. Everyone is currently muted. If you can, feel free to just test your unmute button. Don’t necessarily say anything, but just feel free to do that, unmute and then mute yourself again. And then just whenever once I open it up for discussion, then feel free to chime in. And we’ll go from there.

Speaker 1

But first thing, what I want to do is share a number of links and just general thoughts on how this whole situation is going. And then I’ll give some of my personal thoughts on what that means for the MTA. So let me share my screen. And then if I could just get some feedback from you on how this looks.

Speaker 2

You’re in Kiko, just so you know. You want to be in Kiko?

Speaker 1

Yes. Yeah. I do.

Speaker 3

Yeah, we see your screen.

Speaker 1

Fantastic. Okay. So yes, this obviously is pre existing the crisis, but there are tools like this are just going to keep getting better and better. with the need to support meetings and everything online. So that’s optimistic, fantastically optimistic, that we’ll be able to communicate and collaborate better and faster.

Speaker 1

And as far as just how people are reacting and not just getting down and feeling sad and lost and stuck. In this situation, so many people are putting their best foot forward, creating new things. Case in point, there are many dashboards. For the numbers. And obviously, these numbers can be scary. But one of the best dashboards I’ve seen is this one. It was actually made by a 17-year-old. In the United States, and he just manages this by himself. And people are giving him crazy amounts of tips. So you can actually go up here Buy me a coffee. So it’s a nice little service, kind of like Patreon, but just a flat $3 is the only option. And so you can send him a message. And since this site started to go started to gain a lot of traffic in the past few weeks, he’s been tipped Thousands of dollars per day to basically people thanking him for making this information available. to some degree, I’m sure you could contact him and get access to some data. Wow. But it’s just insane that he can keep that all up to date, but he’s doing this service that a lot of people like. And frankly, it’s important for people to know the state of the issue so they can make informed decisions. So that’s one thing.

Speaker 1

Obviously, one important result of this is that it strengthens international cooperation. Immediately, the conversation is more away from How do we implement sanctions? How do we execute some foreign military operation? And now it’s more how do we share our medical technology? How do we speed up production of important goods and services so that we can get through this and set ourselves up in a better pos preparation position in the future So that’s fantastic.

Speaker 1

And then people are having amazing discussions on on social media. People are asking, hey, if schools are going to be out until the fall, can my sixth grader enroll in an online coding school, which currently only serves adults? And so we’re thinking active discussions are happening now. How do we implement that? How do we create some kind of a new program that gives students a better option to set themselves up for a career in a work from home position? something that can benefit them and society at large in a much more proactive way. So that’s an amazing thing.

Speaker 1

And I’ve been discussing With the CEO of the coding school I teach at and the CEO of another organization, Prenda, which many of you I’m sure have heard of. that does micro schools, micro charter schools located in people’s homes, small groups of kids. And then they also operate coding clubs and libraries across the country. So definite amazing things happening there.

Speaker 1

And then all kinds of individual engineers and medical professionals are doing things like this in Italy and other places. They’re just 3D printing the parts that they need to address shortages that they have in medical supplies. And these are functional things.

Speaker 1

In addition to that, obviously, tons of links of independent labs that have shared their results. with testing different medications for treatment of disease. And those results just go far and wide very quickly. And everyone is excited to do that. That I pulled open because I was curious about one of the discussions. And this is a beautiful thing, too. The moral high ground that has developed in the past few decades, even. over businesses that are willing to continue to pay their hourly workers that are that are currently at home, not doing their work. They’ve been given this respite to continue getting something approximating at least their income. And for most of these it’s two weeks, but some of these it’s four weeks, six weeks. or until the crisis is averted.

Speaker 1

And in addition to that, you have many businesses that as a result of this, there’s still a ton of demand To switch to remote work or to at home work. So TTEC is another company I work with, and they’re hiring up to 20,000 people for customer service jobs. And so There’s that, there’s an intense demand obviously for webcams and headsets as we as we are currently experiencing right now. To transition people to work from home. And these and those are in general trends that were already in place, that were already continuing, slowly growing, but we are experiencing a dramatic shift in those right now. So, those will continue.

Speaker 1

So, many of the consequences of this preventing large gatherings some increased social distancing, less handshaking. Those are going to be part of our culture to a larger degree going forward. A lot of people will go back to normal, but a lot of people are going to modify their behavior a little bit. So that’s a those those in general are things that were slowly happening, and this has accelerated them.

Speaker 1

Now of course there are huge negatives. I’m sure most of you are either personally affected or know someone in your family that’s personally affected by their schedules changing, their work changing in the short term. And we hope that everyone does their part to do what we need to do to keep distance so that we can get through this faster and so we can get back to what we need to do. But with that, I just want to say that, and I’ll stop sharing my screen.

Speaker 1

What this means for the MTA is generally that We are a voice for how this technology that we’ve been given, and basically what these are is just concentrated implementations of our natural resources. And ideas that other people have had before that we’re building on top of. So much of it we see as inspiration. We can be a voice that people can go to, and the organization, the association can be a place where we can share our thoughts. And not just that, but also organize to do more charitable work and help people at least feel some confidence and improvement in the future. And realize that, yeah, most of the thing most of the results of this may actually be positive in the long run. And while we are going through the hardest of it we can step up and help each other and try to be as creative as possible in that venture. So yep.

Speaker 1

So with that, feel free to unmute. if you’d like to chime in. But one of the first questions I would ask is, what would you recommend that the MTA do? in the next six months, especially, as everyone is acting differently and reacting to this event as best that we can. So that’s where I would start it off.

Speaker 3

Looks like Janati has a question.

Janati

Yes. So, thank you for that overview, Pace. And I really appreciate the opportunity to participate in this conference. I think one. strong suggestion that I would have for the MTA is, first of all, put on more of these virtual events. And second, I would invite all of you to take part in more frequent video conferences, whether of a formal or an informal nature, with other transhumanists, members of the U. S. Transhumanist Party. We have a great platform for these conversations in the form of the Debt Nation Show with Steele Archer, who has now created over 190 Episodes and he loves to have guests over. He, I think, would really appreciate every one of the speakers in this conference to come on his show, have a one-on-one interview with him.

Janati

The opportunity that this disruption offers us is this compression of distance because Whether you live across the street from me or whether you live halfway around the world, because I can’t go out and talk to you in person anyway. The distance of the physical distance of separation doesn’t really matter anymore. We’re all equally close in the sense of being able to communicate. So I think this is our opportunity to build a more cohesive transhumanist movement in which everybody participates.

Janati

And I would also encourage everyone on this Call to go to the U. S. Transhumanist Party website. That’s transhumanist-party. org, because we are currently deliberating. what our proposed COVID nineteen response measures should be. There are eleven proposals up there right now for public exposure, and there will be others that will be posted shortly. We start a three day voting period on Wednesday.

Janati

The reason why I mention this is I think we could have a significant influence on how the world responds to This pandemic. My own view is that the response has been unduly reactive and defensive. So, as the projections worsen every single day, the measures are those of retreat, of hunkering down, of removing oneself from. Society of shutting down the economy. And my inclination is the response should be the opposite: ramp everything up, a kind of mobilization as would exist in wartime. Expand our hospital capacity so that we actually have enough infrastructure to absorb the patients coming in and refocus the entire priorities of our society toward combating disease, overcoming aging. and death, because without biological aging, most of our population would not be as vulnerable to COVID-19 as it is right now. So, I think this is a moment for transhumanists to really enter the public discussion and have a much greater degree of influence. Than they formerly did. And I think the Mormon Transhumanist Association can play a crucial role in that You’re very well organized. You’re a very dedicated, committed group of people. And I think the rest of the world needs to see this, and the rest of the world needs to hear your voice. As well.

Speaker 1

Fantastic. Thank you. Yeah, I think definitely.

Speaker 5

I’m thinking about, you know, we’ve got, we just had actually another earthquake. I said that earlier today here in Utah. In Salt Lake City. And we’ve got this pandemic and the possibility of having other pandemics is high, I think. And there’s also the possibility of cyber attacks on banking or communications in general. And I’m not sure how if anyone else is considering that and how that plays into how we’re reacting. Or maybe it that is just the total shutdown and we just stop and take care of our immediate surroundings. I’m just curious if there are thoughts about that.

Speaker 3

If it’s all right, I’d like to tie into that a little bit too and just add some thoughts around future trends. This is more of an observation than like a suggestion or a question, but one thing I kind of wanted to add to Pace’s projections and ideas is just to kind of frame the the dilemma a little bit. What the scientific report that many countries are basing their current strategy on That’s been published. I forget the name of this, but essentially what it says is that right now, like all eyes are on China and what will happen after China starts down like rolling back its lockdown? Because if we see that the disease starts to spread again rapidly, which very well or I think is a reasonable expectation. then what we’re discovering is that until a widely available vaccine is out there, then the only way to prevent

Speaker 3

are the main means of preventing us from getting over the capacity of the health care system and then causing much higher death rates than would would just be the result of the disease itself, would be through rolling and rotating kind of quarantines, right? And unfortunately, the rate at which a vaccine can be approved is apparently can like the earliest possible time it could be done is in about 14 months because of current Requirements to test a person who’s on the vaccine for a long period of time to make sure that it doesn’t actually do damage and hurt more people. So we’re in this situation where none of the alternatives are very good, where the alternative of staying quarantined and potentially suffering like Very heavy massive economic fallout. Yeah. Is next to the alternative of overwhelming the healthcare system. in various countries and resulting in a overall death rate that could be anywhere from fifty to one hundred million People globally, which would be more people than even died in World War II or in any conflict.

Speaker 3

And so even though it doesn’t seem like some people are saying, oh, it only affects old people. I think that even though that’s not entirely true, I think it’s mostly true, but I still think that the losses are s very significant and that obviously our care for humanity generally causes us to like be very sobered by those two two different, you know, two alternatives basically, or some medium between the two of those. So it’s a really big challenge, and it’s something that probably isn’t going to be resolved as quickly as people hope or like. It’s possible that there’s additional Interplay between the seasonality of the virus and other things that might mitigate the spread a little bit. This report anyway seems to show some pretty dire alternatives. And I definitely echo what’s been said about approaching it With an aggressive, optimistic kind of attitude is better than just hunkering down. But I think that a combination of all these strategies is going to be necessary. So that’s just my additional thoughts there.

Speaker 1

Thanks, Carl. No, definitely, the information that we’re getting over time will coalesce. Conclusions will be drawn from the differences in the way that it’s handled in different countries and how that impacts the results. Italy had a more elderly population as a percentage of their regular population than normal. And because of the the lack of measures taken near the beginning, then yes, it has overloaded and their death rate is much higher than the average. South Korea, in contrast, most of the infection happened in younger populations, and they took proactive measures to isolate their elderly so that they would not get infected. And as a result, their death rate is one tenth of Italy. So there’s definitely a a lot of variation And we can draw we’ll learn exactly what lessons we can learn from the differences there and how to implement them.

Speaker 1

And you’re exactly right. It’s going to take six months to two years to For most people to understand those lessons. And so, yeah, we’ll definitely need to focus as much as we can on on solutions. And proactive solutions are ones that address what are glaring issues, obviously, that everybody needs to stay home. So how are they going to do their work? How are they going to meet the demands that they have for food, shelter, anything else that they need to pay for? So a lot of those solutions are addressed by government But the faster solutions are currently being addressed by individuals making proactive decisions and collaborating with others to find solutions. So yeah, so we can definitely be a part of that. Anybody else? Jeremy?

Speaker 2

Blair, I think, had a comment too.

Speaker 1

Okay.

Speaker 1

Um, can you guys hear me? Yes. Yeah, we can hear you.

Speaker 7

So, one thing I think we could do as the MTA during this time. is well, actually, it’s not just the MTA. I would say this is also indicative of the entire transhumanist movement. is just sometimes we’re so optimistic and we’re so ready to fix problems and we’re so ready to go in there, guns ablaze and to make everything all better again. that we forget to sit and realize 700 people just died in Italy yesterday. That’s a sobering statistic. And I think that as transhumanists, well, specifically as Mormon transhumanists, we could improve on the scripture that says we need to learn to weep with those that weep. And so when from a marketing standpoint, if we’re going in talking about these solutions and optimism about what our technology can do for us and all these things

Speaker 7

Before we do that, we need to recognize and stop and take a minute to breathe with people and be like, shit sucks sometimes. And it’s okay to say it sucks sometimes. And Mormons have a hard time saying that. Transhumanists have a hard time saying that. Now, with that being said, that doesn’t mean you sit in the muck forever and you have to But it does mean from a marketing standpoint, if we as a transhumanist organization want to have any kind of influence in the conversation. We need to identify and empathize with the people we are actually trying to save and touch and persuade. If not, we’re just alienating ourselves even further. And people are like, oh, look at those transhumanists. We just can’t wait to come and make everything all better without recognizing sometimes it’s just bad.

Speaker 7

And so, I guess one of the things that I would like to do. is like, is it okay if that we as a conference right now take a thirty minute or sorry, not thirty minutes. 30 second like moment of silence to recognize all the people that have already died and all the people on the front lines dealing with this. And all the people who are suffering from this right now. And just take 30 seconds of silence to not think about the opportunities, to not think about, you know, the. the optimistic projections of the future, but to just say people are being seriously affected by this and to allow that feeling to come in. What’s his name, Jordan? I don’t know if you’re still here or not, but you gave a great presentation in recognizing that we’re going to be stronger as an organization once we get in touch with these feelings and recognize, wow, this really does suck. And that can be a better motivator and catalyst as don’t think about the bad thing, just think about the good thing. It’s like, no, bad thing’s still there, right? So that was kind of a jumbled mess. But those are just my feelings. And I think we could do better on empathizing and humanizing our cause to make us more effective in the long run.

Speaker 1

I think that’s beautiful, Blair. For one thing, if anybody is totally focused on how we can improve things We have to realize that no change will happen. Nobody will join in the change that needs to happen unless they’ve either processed or at least compartmentalized the stress that they’re under. And yeah. So many people are getting sick and hurt and dying from the disease. And so many people are also out of work, mentally depressed. and causing a lot that’s causing them a lot of pain. And things might be bad for them if they don’t get some help. Just having someone to listen to them about that. So yes, we haven’t we have thirty seconds until the end of the minute. I would be happy to help people have people think about it. But we do have just three or four more minutes. until the end of this discussion, and then we’ll be wrapping up the conference. So any other thoughts?

Speaker 1

I would definitely recommend that one of our one of our meetings or if we do another online event shortly, which I believe that we should, should be focused one hundred percent, not on the proactive and the technology, but more focused on What does transhumanism teach us about empathy and thinking about how we can help people process this? That’s a very good idea.

Speaker 1

Can anyone just jump in? Yes.

Speaker 8

Is this the this is the end of the conference? I didn’t really oh, okay. Well Yeah, I guess there’s not necessarily a good time for this. Might as well do it now. I was hoping to talk to fellow transhumanists about what I’m working on here in Menlo Park.

Speaker 1

So here’s my recommendation. Michael Eyn, what do you think about this once we officially end the conference? I don’t see any issue with whether we keep the recording on or off. continuing to have a discussion with as many people as want to stay.

Speaker 2

Yeah, that’d be my recommendation. Kent, like I would love to make like have you Participate any way you want to, but let’s just kind of stay on the COVID-19 topic. But I think people are going to want to hang around and keep talking, so let’s make that happen.

Speaker 8

Yeah, yeah, it’s all about COVID-19 for me. In a weird way. I’m caregiving for someone who’s in chemo at Stanford Hospital right now, so it’s particularly salient. But yeah, I don’t want to stomp on the discussion with some big announcement.

Speaker 2

So well, no, you want to give us the gist of that? We’ve got a few more minutes. And then I’d love to stick around and go into detail on it, if you could. Just a quick summary. Feel free, Kent. You’re muted still.

Speaker 1

Yeah, I’m uh I’m actually coming to you from a lab Demonpor loud. Lincoln never liked the name. It’s a little weird being a company called Demon Poor. But yeah, we’re I guess I’m not ready to talk about it. Okay, that’s fine. That’s fine. Yeah, yeah, let’s definitely take as much time as you’d like. Just keeping in mind this schedule. Any last thoughts?

Speaker 1

I have a comment if it’s okay. Please do.

Speaker 9

So one of the things that We and other transhumanist organizations have talked about for a very long time is that A key weakness and a key challenge of intuitive human thinking is that we don’t deal well with exponential growth. Precisely at the heart of the delayed responses to in many cases. Is that people have not recognized what the consequences of exponential growth look like. So I think there is an opportunity here. To illustrate this and to talk about this, whether there’s a high likelihood of a similar event happening. To help people take that kind of a long-term view. And my suspicion is that this pandemic will result in Major changes to society and that the recovery will be a long-term recovery. And this is one of the things that we Should be able to excel at, and that we should be able to help reach out and educate people on, and to help society look at this from a longer-term perspective. And so that’s just kind of thematically, I think, something that we have some history of and that I think might give us some direction on things that we can think about.

Speaker 1

Fantastic. Thanks, Chris. Alright, so to wrap it up, unfortunately, we’ll have to cut it there. But we’ve identified some very general themes. that we should be focusing on. We should definitely focus on humanism and empathy, and we should focus on the types of projects that we can be working in the act in that activism And we should focus on the education, on helping people understand the actual process of crises like these and how the world can change exponentially, in addition to just the viruses spreading exponentially. And then also more of the same transhumanist ideas about the long term, how we can eliminate disease, how we can eliminate aging. and how we can actually become more empathetic through virtual reality, through brain machine interface, all kinds of these lofty ideas that perhaps they’re going to take a back burner as we focus on activism as we focus on humanism. But but yeah, that’s this was a good discussion, unfortunately. And I’m happy to stick around because we could probably talk for hours and I don’t have a problem with that. But and I’d like to hear more from Ken as well. Probably no better way to end to end a conference on transhumanism than to talk about the innovation that we’re working on. So with that, I will turn it back over to Michael Ann. Anybody else, Carl, that’s wrapping this up? And we’ll yeah, it was fantastic that I had this opportunity, somewhat impromptu, to arrange this discussion. Let me know what you’re thinking. Feel free to contact me on Facebook to continue. Any private chat you want to.

Speaker 2

Thank you so much, Pace, for your willingness to lead that discussion. Thank you, everybody, for participating today. I think one thing we’ve all kind of felt is that we wish we just had more time just to. To sit and chat, and it’s been kind of a fast-paced thing. We did leave, if you could scroll back towards the top of the chat, Ben Blair, our wonderful, wonderful president, did drop a feedback form. And I’ll actually just copy and paste that again so that you all have access to it. We would love any thoughts that you had about how the tech worked for you or Topics that you particularly liked because it helps us kind of figure out to what degree something like this becomes part of our ongoing strategy or our conference next year. So many things, so many possibilities. Thank you again so much.

Speaker 2

If you’re able to turn on your camera really quick, I do want to do a couple screenshots of everybody who was here. I just would love to kind of capture that so we can have that memory. Let’s see, Sage, Kent, you guys want to. If you’re still here. Brad, we haven’t seen you yet. Okay, hold on a second. Rather thought I was already in there from talking earlier. No, I got turnout again. Brad, still don’t see you. I know. I’m sorry. I’m not presentable right now. Okay, Stephanie and Evan. So good to see you guys. Okay.

Speaker 1

Okay, so Sage, are you going to turn it? Are you able to turn it on or not? I don’t know. I turned on video just as I did earlier, but apparently it’s not. Your video appears to be on, but something’s blocking your camera. Just nothing’s blocking it. Okay, it might be some other program that’s trying to do it. It’s Linux. It’s Linux. Just kidding. Yeah, something’s probably Probably stealing the input. Okay.

Speaker 2

Probably if you lose that, and then let’s see, and I’ll get the second page. Okay, cool. All right. Thank you guys so much. Really appreciate it. And some of you as some of you already discovered, we do also have an online Facebook group. If you want to join the chat that way. And if you’re in Utah, we have monthly meetups where we get together and we talk about these kinds of things every second Sunday at eight o’clock in Provo. Ben, anything you want to add before we’re done?

Speaker 3

Yeah, I would just say that two and a half weeks ago, we were still planning to meet at the library and Big hat tip and praise to Michael Ann for pivoting and shifting, and big praise to Carl Youngblood for also stepping up. Kind of giving the confidence that we could do this and that we could pull it off. And people came, and it looked like I had a great time I know we’ll look forward to hearing everyone’s responses. But really hats off, Michael Ann, for being able to put this together in such a short notice. Could I just add one thing really fast as well?

Speaker 10

I just wanted to say thanks to Dallin and Bryant and Carl Hale. who we were prep we were preparing a quartet to sing some songs for you guys at the conference. And like we sounded I thought we sounded pretty good, but The a couple of guys got sick like at the last minute. And so I don’t think they were COVID. They came down with COVID. But anyway. They were unable to do the make it quite across the finish line, but hopefully next time we’ll have something. So thanks guys for being willing to help out with that. And sorry we didn’t quite make it over the finish line.

Speaker 2

And feel free to stick around, otherwise, good luck and blessings.