What Do You Think IEET’s Priorities Should Be?

Jul 20, 2013

In our recent survey of the IEET audience you gave a clear sense of what your top priorities were: better communication and outreach, and the themes of mitigating catastrophic risks, and promoting the basic income guarantee, the longevity dividend and technoprogressivism.

We asked you to rank our various programs and activities on a five point scale from “should not be an IEET activity” to “should be IEET’s top priority.” Most of the issues fell between 2.9 and 3.5, in the “about right emphasis” range.  But there was a higher priority given to three activities: developing the Journal of Evolution and Technology, cultivating new technoprogressive public intellectuals, and producing more IEET-branded podcasts and videos. 

In terms of producing more of our content I feel bad that Changesurfer Radio is on hiatus, but I recently have been experimenting with recording Skype interviews for an IEET Youtube channel, which seems to be the way things are trending. I want to also put those interviews up as podcasts. Hopefully that will get started this summer.  We’re also looking into drawing JET more into the limelight by starting discussion threads in the IEET site about JET article.





In terms of programmatic foci, catastrophic risks, basic income guarantee, developing a technoprogressive policy agenda, and promoting anti-aging therapies were the ones that received the highest ranks. Lefties in the survey gave higher marks to basic income and technoprogressivism, and the transhumanists and folks over 40 gave higher marks to anti-aging therapies.  We have decided to make technological unemployment and basic income a top priority for 2014, and are collaborating with the French group Technoprog! on a conference in Paris in 2014 on the social justice implications of transhumanism. But now we’ll think more about ways to do more on catastrophic risks (which is an enormous set of issues) and on promoting the longevity dividend approach to arguing for anti-aging research.

One way we have hoped to develop the technoprogressive agenda is by having interns and volunteers write short pieces of the Technoprogressive Platform wiki, along the lines of what our stellar intern Ben Scarlato did a couple of years ago on the peaceful exploration of the solar system.  If you would like to work with us to write a piece in the platform wiki on some topic please let Kris or I know.

In terms of our overall focus on the near-term versus the speculative, four out of five of you think we strike the right balance.  To the extent that there was a disagreement about that the younger folks in audience, and the left-wing non-transhumanists, were most likely to say that we erred in the direction of utopian and science fiction issues, although even for those groups most thought we struck the right balance.





Thanks again for the more than 470 respondents, and I’ll keep crunching the numbers.