Navigating the Future
Transformations at the IEET
Twenty years ago, the first Board members of the IEET were debating setting up a think tank, which was first to be called the “Human Futures Institute.” Professor Mark Walker—who is still on our Board of Directors—suggested the "Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies" (IEET), and we were off to the races.
For the rest of that decade, the far-flung IEET community would meet before or after Humanity+ gatherings, organizing seminars on think-tanky topics like “How to argue for a longevity dividend from anti-aging therapies” or “Mitigating global catastrophic risks.” But by the 2010s, we were fully autonomous, organizing meetings with science fiction content creators to discourage dumb anti-tech tropes, or with moral philosophers and neuroscientists to discuss moral enhancement, or bringing together animal rights and robot rights philosophers to talk about personhood rights. During all those years, we published almost 10,000 articles from several hundred contributors. Under the direction of Mark Walker and Steven Umbrello, our Journal of Ethics and Emerging Technologies (JEET) has grown in recognition.
In 2017, the IEET developed an ongoing collaboration with the Center for Applied Ethics at the University of Massachusetts Boston. With the generous gift from the Otten Trust, we have been supporting post-doctoral fellows in Boston, such as Alec Stubbs, our 2022-2024 Future of Work fellow. We have worked on policies for a democratized metaverse and issues around the rise of chatbot therapists and friends. Alec and I produced a podcast series on the future of work, we’ve posted many talks to our YouTube channel, and in November 2023, we hosted a conference on AI and the future of work in Boston.
Our second Boston Fellow (2024-2026), Cody Turner, will address the philosophical issues surrounding brain-computer interfaces. Cody’s thesis was on brain-computer interfaces and augmented reality, and he is especially interested in exploring the extended mind thesis.
Our managing director, Steven Umbrello, who is based at the University of Turin, was assisted by our second Fellow, Cristiano Cali, where we are incorporating the Turin Hub for Ethics and Emerging Technologies (HEET). The Turin team manages our curation of a book series with De Gruyter on The Politics of Human Enhancement, for which the first manuscript has been submitted and the second is in the works.
The last year has been a dramatic one in the field of emerging technologies. Debates that had long churned in our tech ethics domain about the prospects for artificial general intelligence were suddenly impacting trillions of expected profits, and possibly the global strategic balance. Andrew Yang’s Presidential campaign and income support during COVID-19 had already boosted the visibility of universal basic income (UBI), and now many more people accept the inevitability of technological unemployment. We suddenly have effective gene therapies, diet pills, brain chips, and humanoid robots about to become more widely available, albeit each with its own raft of issues and risks.
The pace of innovation is still accelerating, and the issues that we had a hard time getting people to take seriously are now taken for granted by millions. The distinction between existing technologies, “emerging technologies,” and science fiction seems harder to parse. We have always seen our role as the building of a network of technoprogressive public intellectuals, open to the possibility of a better technological future with more freedom and equality, but acknowledging the need for skepticism, caution, and regulation.
Along with the wider technological world evolving rapidly, so is the landscape for promoting ideas. We still have a Twitter account but are hedging our bets with other accounts. After several years of experimenting with publishing on Medium, we’ve decided to move to Substack. We hope you will follow us and our work, and look forward to publishing your submissions here.
For submissions inquiry, please email Steven Umbrello at steve@ieet.org