We are pleased to announce that Alec Stubbs has been appointed a Postdoctoral Research Fellow on the “Future of Work” by the IEET and the Applied Ethics Center of UMass Boston. The fellowship is from September 2022 to the summer of 2024.
The joint IEET and AEC committee reviewed 22 applications from around the world before choosing Alec. Alec is currently finishing his PhD in Philosophy at Loyola University in Chicago with a dissertation on “The Political Economy of Capitalism in the Digital Age, Economic Democracy, and the Case for the Digital Commons.” He has published on automation, artificial intelligence and the digital economy, and his planned agenda for the fellowship includes bringing together experts on digital platform work and workplace democracy. The staff, fellows, and affiliated scholars at the IEET are looking forward to collaborating with Alec on this new Future of Work research program. Is there any evidence of technological unemployment, and if so, what should be done about it? Is automation liberating us from drudgery or just exacerbating inequality and exploitation? Now that the entire world has had two years to consider our relationship with work, these questions are more pressing than ever.
Alex writes, “I am thrilled to be working with both the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies and UMass Boston’s Applied Ethics Center on issues related to the future of work. Both organizations have an excellent record of public-facing scholarship and public policy work. Given my commitment to public philosophy and academic work that contributes to positive social change, I am eagerly looking forward to joining them in Boston this fall.”
About the Applied Ethics Center at UMass Boston
The Applied Ethics Center (AEC) is located in the Philosophy Department at the University of Massachusetts Boston (www.umb.edu/ethics) and promotes research, teaching, and awareness of ethics in public life. Through public conversations, specialized courses, and research projects, the center creates a forum for exploring topics ranging from the meaning of artificial Intelligence to the ethics of fighting terrorism to the status of controversial public monuments. The AEC is directed by associate professor of philosophy Nir Eisikovits, who writes on the ethics of war, transitional justice, and how societies come to terms with their past. The IEET’s Executive Director, James Hughes, is an Associate Provost at UMass Boston, and a senior fellow in the AEC.
