Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, Inc.

Focusing on emerging technologies that have the potential to positively transform social conditions and the quality of human lives – especially “human enhancement technologies” – the IEET seeks to cultivate academic, professional, and popular understanding of their implications, both positive and negative, and to encourage responsible public policies for their safe and equitable use.

The liberal democratic revolution, centuries-old and still growing strong, has at its core the idea that people are happiest when they have rational control over their lives. Reason, science, and technology provide one kind of control, slowly freeing us from ignorance, toil, pain, and disease. Democracy provides the other kinds of control, through civil liberties and electoral participation.

Technology and democracy complement one another, ensuring that safe technology is generally accessible and democratically accountable. The convergence of nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology, and cognitive science in the coming decades will give us unimaginable technological mastery of nature and ourselves. That mastery requires progressive democratization.

Our purpose, therefore, is to stimulate and support the constructive study of ethical issues connected with these powerful emerging technologies.

The IEET has partnered with the Applied Ethics Center (AEC) at the University of Massachusetts Boston to offer a full-time Post-Doctoral Research Fellowship (24 months) on the Future of Work (2021-2023). Some forecasters believe automation and other emerging technologies will cause a rapid loss of traditional employment in the coming decades. Other forecasters argue that there will not be a net loss of jobs, but foresee instead a rapid innovation of new jobs, and transformation of existing jobs. Policies to address the rapidly changing labor market include reforming higher education and job re-training, shortening the workweek, a federal jobs guarantee, and a universal basic income. Whether work is threatened or not, some see a post-work future as a desirable goal of public policy, while others believe work is essential to meaning and social engagement. How can higher education focus more on non-automatable skills like creativity and social-emotional intelligence? What are the impacts of employment versus guaranteed income? Many of us find the primary locus of meaning in our work. Would living in a world with less, or transformed, work be less meaningful? Or do we generate a newer version of Athens, this time without slave labor, a society in which work is not the main context in which we meet and value each other? The Future of Work Fellow will help the AEC and the IEET research the academic and policy work being done on these questions.

Central to IEET’s goal in the promotion of technoprogressive research is in the publication of peer-reviewed papers in high impact journals. However, in order to promote transparency as well as stimulate the dissemination of this important knowledge, the IEET aims to publish their papers Open Access (OA).

Over the course of the next decade, the IEET aims at promoting and exploring technoprogressivism through academic research. In order to break new ground and to do this successfully, new postdoctoral fellowship programs have been designed to set up new doctoral graduates to promote the exploration of technoprogressivism and its intersectional domains at a high academic level. Thanks to donations received in 2020, we have successfully funded the first of our three proposed fellowships.