Sean Hays Ph.D. has accepted appointment as the director of the IEET’s Securing the Future program.
Sean is a researcher at the Center for Nanotechnology in Society at Arizona State University. He is spending the coming year in Washington D.C. working with the New America Foundation to set up a joint CNS-NAF “Future Tense” initiative on emerging technologies. His principal academic interest is the integration of political theory into Science and Technology Studies (STS) as well as Science and Technology Policy (STP). He has also taught and written on public value mapping including an analysis of the research community at the National Institute of Justice, developing new pedagogies and heuristics for use in virtual worlds, and his dissertation research is on the disutility of linear historical analogies and narratives in STS, STP, and political theory. Most recently, he has completed work on an NSF-funded national telephone survey measuring public opinion with regard to a variety of human enhancement technologies and their potential socio-political and economic impacts.
This is a bit of Sean’s initial Mission Statement for the program:
The mission of the IEET Securing the Future Program is to assemble interdisciplinary teams of natural scientists, social scientists, humanists, historians, engineers, and futurists to work in goal-oriented programs designed to mitigate existential risks to humanity, and to the planet. The concept for the program is, first, to be directed not at merely discussing such risks, but to be a coordinating organization for assembling teams of scholars who can design specific responses to these risks. Each team will be organized in response to a specific existential threat, and invitations will be extended to particular scholars who possess the skills, knowledge, and social and human capital necessary to design a technological response to such a threat, whether it be a social or a material technology…
We will start by collectively identifying a set of the most plausible/probably existential risks, and then begin organizing our group activities in order to produce actual solutions to those risks, or at least outputs that could mitigate them. Ultimately, what the Securing the Future Program is not, is another assemblage of email lists for chatting about risks, and swapping news items or scientific papers. It is, instead, a goal driven organization designed to mobilize the breathtaking array of scientific and technical human capital at our disposal, i.e. some of the greatest minds in all of the relevant fields of inquiry, to begin producing real solutions.
He asked if that was too ambitious. We said we were open to erring on the side of ambition.