After six years serving as the IEET’s Chairman of the Board, Nick Bostrom will be stepping down and assuming the role of IEET Senior Fellow. And after three years service as managing director of the IEET, Mike Treder will be stepping down to be an IEET Fellow.  IEET Affiliate Scholar Hank Pellissier will be replacing Mike as Managing Director.

First, about Nick Bostrom. It is a testament to our affection and admiration for Nick that we implored him to stay as Chair this long. For years he has had more than enough on his hands running the hugely successful Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University, and working on its conferences, papers and collected volumes on Human Enhancement and Global Catastrophic Risks.  We thank him for his guidance and support, and look forward to continuing to promote his work as one of our Senior Fellows, especially his much anticipated forthcoming work on superintelligence and its associated catastrophic risks. 

Second, Mike Treder. Mike was one of the first people who recruited me (J. Hughes) to transhumanism back in 2001, and he was in from the beginning in our work on the World Transhumanist Association Board of Directors, and then the founding of the IEET. After several years of Mike directing the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology, and after I was facing the diminution of my time available for running the IEET due to my promotion at Trinity College, I was able to persuade Mike to come on full-time as IEET Managing Director. His passionate engagement has shaped us since then, from his fierce anger at the injustices and idiocies prevalent in the world, to his fervent optimism and hope for a better, more rational, future. He recruited dozens of new contributors, Fellows and Affiliate Scholars, and edited all their disparate contributions patiently and compassionately. He will continue to be an active part of our community, and we look forward to more of his own writing now that he has less of other people’s to edit.

Third, Hank Pellissier. Since Mike recruited him a year ago Hank has had an unerring sense for identifying issues and articulating viewpoints that ring like a bell in the blogosphere. He has generated the most hits on articles, and pages and pages of comments from our community.  Now Hank will be stepping up to help us grow to our next stage, by fundraising, building a more international network of collaborators, and organizing meetings. In the last couple days he has me feeling quite exhausted by his boundless energy and creativity. I think we’re all in for an exciting ride. But I’ll let him speak for himself:

I am thrilled and honored to be assisting the IEET in the future as Managing Director. 

Aside from fundraising and managing the website, and publishing fresh articles by our excellent staff of mind-bending scholars, I will be focusing on organizing conferences, such as “The Moral Brain” conference March 30-April 1 at New York University; then a “Cyborg Buddha” event, an event on technology and secularization, and an event on the enhancement of animal intelligence. I hope to meet many of you as we travel around the United States and the world building the technoprogressive community.

Each event’s success depends on the funding support that IEET obtains.  Please help? Donate to IEET here.

Thanks for your support, and thanks again to Nick and Mike.