A look back at our accomplishments in 2009.

The IEET was founded five years ago. In 2005 the forces of biopolitical reaction were ascendant in Washington D.C. and bioliberals were regrouping. The Republican “war on science” was in full swing and the science policy community was beginning to call for a “new Enlightenment.” The little transhumanist movement had just held two successful international meetings in New Haven Connecticut and Toronto Canada, and was beginning to establish the legitimacy of transhumanist ideas outside of its subculture, which would shortly lead to the creation of institutions like the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford.

But some of the WTA leadership understood the limitations of a fractious(!),  global, democratically-governed ideological movement organization like the WTA,  and we began to discuss the need for an organization with a more focused policy thinktank agenda. We wanted an organization that could build the network of disparate bioliberal thinkers and organizations who were not necessarily self-identified transhumanists, and who agreed on the importance of ensuring that emerging technologies are safe, accountably governed and universally enabling.

Since 2005 we’ve accomplished quite a bit. We nurtured and promoted the careers of dozens of interns and fellows. We’ve developed a loose ideological framework to define our “technoprogressive” point of view and published thousands of articles providing a technoprogressive perspective on technology, culture, politics and the future. We’ve held and co-sponsored seven major meetings, focusing on issues ranging from the biopolitics of popular culture to threats to the existence of intelligent life. We’ve produced a weekly podcast, dozens of video lectures, and a ten week online curriculum for longevity dividend activists. We’ve maintained mailing lists and news feeds, and recruited Russell Blackford to build the Journal of Evolution and Technology into a vibrant site for critical reflection on transhumanist ideas. Most intangibly, we have served as a hub for the serious networking, media contacts, and collaborative intelligence that make a serious impact in the world of ideas.

But in the Spring of 2009 we began to take our work even more seriously than we had before, thanks to Mike Treder’s agreeing to come on as Managing Director. Mike had been serving as the Executive Director of the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology, and as a Fellow of the IEET. But it was clear that his interests had always been far broader than nano-policy, and his writing for CRN spanned the breadth of geo-political and futurist topics that are the IEET’s mandate.

As soon as Mike joined the IEET staff and began daily blogging at Ethical Technology our readership began to soar. But Mike was also much more aggressive about identifying technoprogressive writers and inviting them to contribute to the IEET. Writers like authors Gregory Benford, Charlie Stross and David Brin, tech policy writer Andrew Maynard, philosopher Philippe Verdoux, culture critic Kyle Munkittrick, health policy expert Richard Eskow, and science writers Darlene Cavalier and Andrea Kuszewski.  Our fellows and interns also began to write more. Over the last nine months our readership and average site visits have doubled.

In the Spring Mike and I reviewed the IEET website and core documents, and revised them. Then we worked with our interns to develop a core list of technoprogressive terms and concepts, and write short descriptions of them for our wiki. In this task our new intern Ben Scarlato rose to the challenge, and did a stellar job of writing almost all ninety entries in the technoprogressive wiki. This year we will push on to flesh out the topics in the technoprogressive “platform.”

With our new core statements of purpose and an agreement with the IEET Board about our agenda Mike and I began carefully inviting a new Board of Trustees to help build our philanthropic backing. The three prominent technoprogressives who have joined our Board of Trustees thus far are Martine Rothblatt, an attorney, philosopher, and biotech and satellite entrepreneur; Arthur Caplan, director of the University of Pennsylvania bioethics program, and the most prominent bioethicist in the United States; and Dan Stoicescu, a chemist, philanthropist, and pharmaceutical entrepreneur. With their assistance the IEET budget has risen from $5000 for 2009 to $50,000 for 2010. This is still an order of magnitude short of our goal, which is to have the funding to work for the IEET full time and support interns and fellows in the kind of policy development work that other think tanks do. But now that goal seems much more realistic.

For our fellows this was also a very productive year. It was difficult to keep up with all the publishing and public intellectual work our fellows did this year:

- IEET Fellow Douglas Rushkoff published his critique of central currency-driven capitalism, Life Inc., and put up a series of videos to dilate on its themes. He also started a weekly radio show at WFMU, and continued work on his National Public Television documentary series Digital Life, which is due to broadcast in 2010.

- IEET Chair Nick Bostrom and Julian Savulescu published Human Enhancement, their collection of essays on the human enhancement debate.

- IEET Fellow Russell Blackford and Udo Schuklenk published their set of fifty essays from non-theists, Voices of Disbelief, and Russell did a book tour to promote the volume.

- IEET Senior Fellow Jamais Cascio published his collection of essays on geoengineering, Hacking the Earth, started publishing a regular series of essays at the site Fast Company, and the Atlantic Monthly published his article “Get Smarter,” about cognitive enhancement, catastrophic risks and human evolution.

- IEET Fellow Susan Schneider published Science Fiction and Philosophy: From Time Travel to Superintelligence.

- In January IEET Fellow Ben Goertzel was elected to the Humanity+ Board of Directors. After Nick Bostrom, James Hughes and Mike Treder step down from the Humanity+ Board this month Ben will serve as Chair of the Humanity+ Board for 2010 along with IEET Board member Mike LaTorra and former IEET intern Todd Huffman. In the meantime Ben has continued to run his two AI development companies, commute to China to teach AI, and organize his annual AGI conference, held this year in Virginia in March. Ben also spoke at the Singularity Summit in New York City in October, while the NY Future Salon hosted Jamais to give a different take on the Singularity.

- In February the journal Global Spiral published seven IEETers’ (Bostrom, de Grey, Vita-More, Blackford, LaTorra, Walker and Rothblatt’s) articles in defense of transhumanism, edited by IEET Fellow Natasha Vita-More.

- The 2009 frequent flyer carbon footprint award is probably a toss-up between IEET Fellows Aubrey de Grey, Jamais Cascio, Natasha Vita-More and Andy Miah who have collectively spoken this year across the U.S. and in Belgium, Canada, Germany, Spain, Netherlands, Ireland, Australia, South Korea, Switzerland, Portugal and Dubai.

- IEET Fellow Andy Miah published Human Futures: Art in an Age of Uncertainty and organized the Abandon Normal Devices conference in Liverpool in September to launch the book, at which IEET Fellow Russell Blackford and IEET intern Heather Bradshaw spoke.

- IEET Fellow Aubrey de Grey served as part of the faculty for the new Singularity University in August, along with Ben Goertzel. Aubrey also held his fourth SENS conference in Cambridge in September.

- In October IEET Executive Director James Hughes moderated a panel with IEET Trustee Martine Rothblatt and Ray Kurzweil at the Woodstock Film Festival, discussing the new film “2B” which Martine had helped produce.

In 2009 we also finally made a significant dent in our biopolitics of popular culture programmatic agenda. Our Biopolitics of Popular Culture seminar in Irvine California brought together writers, filmmakers and critics to parse how popular culture shapes our images of technological possibility. About 50,000 people tuned in to watch the webcast of the proceedings, and we will put up all the audio and slides shortly. IEET intern Ben Scarlato, a high school student from Hartford Connecticut, began writing popular weekly pieces on the biopolitics of television shows like Battlestar Galactica and True Blood. IEET intern Kristi Scott wrote about cosmetic surgery and the show Jon and Kate plus 8. We began posting Kyle Munkittrick’s feminist-transhumanist reflections on Fringe, District 9, Glee, Ratatouille, the Muppets and the Venture Brothers.

In December we were delighted by the recognition that Nick Bostrom and Jamais Cascio received when Foreign Policy named them both among the hundred most influential thinkers in the world.

All in all it was an eventful year. What do the next five hold? I’m optimistic. The IEET continues to grow in support and impact. Mike and I are working on the bioethics cruise in October, and a major project involving two books and a conference which we will announce shortly. Our issues continue to move into the mainstream, and our mix of practical technoprogressive policy thinking and visionary futurism is increasingly acknowledged as necessary to address them.

In the U.S. the Obama administration is appointing its new bioethics commission which should again become a focus for biopolitical debate. Once the U.S. health care reform package is passed attention will turn to “entitlements” and the looming retirement of the Baby Boom, which is our opening to insist that a lot of that problem will disappear if we can use longevity drugs to keep seniors healthy and able. Rising unemployment in the U.S. and Europe creates an opening for discussion of automation, structural unemployment and a basic income guarantee. The failure of climate change negotiations is pushing debate about geoengineering and genetically engineered crops higher on the agenda. In every area we are positioned to make a major contribution.

Thanks for your help, and happy new year.