Sergio Martínez de Lahidalga Tarrero, Presidente

 

Sergio Martínez de Lahidalga Tarrero, President

 

Sergio M.L. Tarrero (Madrid, 1970) is a video producer, director and editor, book editor, philanthropist, and transhumanist and suffering abolition activist.

 

During his youth, his main hobbies were music—Sergio is fond of discovering good music, and playing the keyboards, electric bass and drums in his free time—, photography and audiovisual production. He also regularly practiced several sports (soccer, tennis, running, cycling, full contact karate and others).

 

Sergio studied physics, math, music and film production at the University of Miami (1988-1992). He then studied television production, film and dramatic art at various centers in New York (NYU and Baruch College in 1992-3 and Lee Strasberg Theater & Film Institute in 1997). He worked in the administration of 2 commercial buildings in Miami (1994-5). He founded a music and video production and recording studio in Miami (1993-4), Sonic Boom/The Zoo Studios, which he later moved to Atlanta (1995-6) and New York (1996-8). In New York he worked on the team of film director Marcus Nispel (1996-7), who was then shooting commercials and music videos.

 

After his return to Spain in 1998 and a period working at Antena 3 Television (Sabor a ti, Club Megatrix, etc.), Sergio moved to Marbella in 1999 to supervise the construction of an apartment building.

 

In 2000, back in Madrid, he discovered memetics, and spent several years studying books on memetics, Darwinism, cognitive science, psychology, political philosophy, and other subjects. The ideas would inspire his future educational efforts through films, documentaries, and social and political activism.

 

In 2002-3, while working in Seville on the restoration of a historical house in an olive farm, Sergio discovered the possibility of radical life extension (transhumanism) as well as the possible explosion of artificial intelligence (the Singularity) and began collaborating with futurist organizations such as the Foresight Institute, Humanity Plus, Lifeboat Foundation, Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI), Heales, VidaPlus, Sociedad Criónica and Foro del Futuro Próximo, filming the videos of many transhumanist, artificial intelligence and nanotechnology conferences, and collaborating in other ways with some of these organizations. Sergio has been on the Board of Directors of Lifeboat Foundation since 2007.

 

In 2007 he founded Editorial Paradigma, publishing Sam Harris's books The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation. In 2015 he published Paco Mota's first work, If Darwin and Socrates, Global Sciocracy.

 

Since 2007 he has worked with Philippe van Nedervelde on several futurist projects and organizations.

 

Since 2010 he has collaborated with several animal rights associations and sanctuaries in Spain and Latin America, mainly through the production of videos, and in 2012 he was Coordinator of the Animalist Party PACMA in Seville.

 

In 2013 Sergio co-founded Alianza Futurista, the first transhumanist political party in the world. Since then he has worked for the party, leading its preparation and administration, and producing many videos on party-related topics since 2014. In 2018, Alianza Futurista covered the international event TransVision Madrid 2018 (at the Ateneo de Madrid) on video. In 2021 Sergio collaborated with José Luis Cordeiro organizing periodic transhumanist events, both in person at the Ateneo de Madrid and virtual. Also through Alianza Futurista, Sergio produced videos and streaming broadcasts of the international congresses TransVision Madrid 2021 (held at ICOMEM) and TransVision Madrid 2022 (held at the Instituto Europeo de Salud y Bienestar Social).

 

Sergio has a passion for improving the world in radical ways. He has always seen science and technology as a light at the end of the tunnel, as the essential tools that humanity uses to improve the lives of so many people, to reduce human suffering and make life a much happier and less precarious experience for the individuals they positively affect. But at the same time, he is very aware of the most serious risks that threaten humanity, especially those created by us, since he saw films like “War Games” and “Terminator” as a teenager. It was the ability of cinema to create stories that become part of humanity’s collective memory that made him want to dedicate a large part of his life to audiovisual production. He thought that a good film or documentary can change the world. Unfortunately, most audiovisual productions are made to entertain, or to sell something, and rarely with the express intention of improving the world. But some works do, in subtle or not so subtle ways. Unfortunately, most audiovisual productions are made to entertain, or to sell something, and rarely with the express intention of improving the world. But some works do, in subtle or not so subtle ways. Many literary works, both fiction and essay, also have these characteristics, and of course many works have changed the world. But most people read little, in an audiovisual world, so some audiovisual products can have a greater memetic impact on a society or culture, or on a global level.

 

Sergio considers that the ideas that populate people's minds are incredibly important, both for the individual happiness of each person, and for collective happiness—to try to ensure that the maximum number of sentient beings possible have the happiest lives possible, or at least minimize suffering. Hence his fascination with cultural evolution and memetics, critical thinking, the paradigms through which we filter the world (religions, scientific theories, cosmogonies, etc.) and the possibility of revising or changing them. In order to understand each other, we must constantly strive to distill truth from lies, reality from falsehood in the world, and to discover the "consensus reality" at any given moment (the view of reality revealed by our best sciences and which at any given moment has scientific consensus). But we must also try to educate each other on a daily basis, because most people are confused, and rightly so: the religious ideas imposed by our parents and religious institutions (in many families) are mainly memes (or memeplexes), networks of ideas that form a coherent story, pre-scientific hypotheses of how the world works, but far from reality; and the sciences help us see the world as it is, and build models of reality based on scientific evidence—but they contain complications and uncertainties that most people prefer to avoid. The situation is serious, from the point of view that it is child indoctrination that perpetuates (or keeps alive) those pre-scientific ideas accepted as truth by large sectors of the world's population. In Sergio's opinion, childhood indoctrination—as Nicholas Humphrey argues in his essay What Shall We Tell Children?—, still accepted today in most of the world, is an abuse of the integrity and psychocognitive freedom of children. This is serious because children have the right to not have their cognitive freedom restricted by religions, which have evolved unchecked for hundreds and thousands of years, when we knew nothing about the world around us.

 

The ideas that populate our companies and our political institutions also affect the happiness or suffering of many people, and many animals. After a decade in which he witnessed many political debates in the international transhumanist community, Sergio saw a political vacuum in the fact that there was still no transhumanist political party in the world, and that all the traditional parties did not address most of the most important issues for our future, given the exponential trends of technological advancement, and NBIC (NanoBioInfoCogno) convergence. For this reason he decided to found and dedicate part of his life to Alianza Futurista, a new political project that is becoming more necessary every day. Because a better future is not going to emerge on its own. We have to imagine and build it ourselves.

 

Alianza Futurista, as an alliance of free people, of diverse political tendencies (without pigeonholing into the "left" or the "right"), of respectable causes and objectives (transhumanism, prevention of major risks, longtermist ethics, protection of the weak/security, etc.), and always with an eye towards the ultratechnological future that lies ahead, can help improve our collective situation in many ways. But this can only happen if a significant social movement is formed around it, and the citizens give us their support. For the good of all, let us hope that this happens. Sergio is putting his work and his enthusiasm into this ambitious and visionary political project.