All the anti-H+ essays generated by the four year Templeton grant to the Arizona State University project on Transhumanism have been published in Germany.

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Last month we asked “Is it ethical for an advanced military to use drones or robots to attack enemy soldiers?”  A third of you want military drones and robots banned, and a quarter believed they were unproblematic. But the center of opinion was that they should be under human control or used by both sides.

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In January, IEET Executive Director J. Hughes and IEET Fellow Wendell Wallach met with representatives of the Japanese Consortium on Applied Neuroscience (Japanese, English). They visited Trinity College as part of a national tour to meet with American neuroethicists.

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Eager to work with an ambitious think tank that promotes techno-progressiveness? Want to hobnob with visionary intellectuals on a regular basis?

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The IEET will begin publishing short science fiction pieces that reflect on the social, moral, political, economic or philosophical consequences of future technologies, in particular pieces that touch on the IEET’s core issues - the ethics and policy dimensions of life extension, human enhancement, moral enhancement, non-human personhood, structural unemployment and catastrophic risks. 

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Check out the new IEET donation premiums. And suggest your own.

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IEET Fellow Douglas Rushkoff is releasing A.D.D.: Adolescent Demo Division, a gripping graphic novel about a group of elite gamers who are also teen idols, reality TV stars, carefully developed corporate assets… and some things they haven’t been told. Like all the best SF, ADD will tell you much more about the present than any hundred news sites would.

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On Friday afternoon, January 13, 2012, at noon, a new journal dedicated to the promotion of unlimited life-extension (“Let Us From Now On”), in cooperation with the Israeli Transhumanist community, will hold a demonstration by the Trumpeldor Cemetery in Tel Aviv, against Deathism, and for Life-Extension‫.
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(1106) Hits • (3) Comments • Link

By a margin of nearly three to one, IEET readers responding to a recently concluded poll said morality can and should be separate from religion.

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We’ll answer that question by posting a daily countdown of the top 12 articles published on our blog this year, based on how many total hits each one has received.

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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.

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IEET Fellow Patrick Lin has co-edited a new volume, Robot Ethics: The Ethical and Social Implications of Robotics with thirty essays on different aspects on robot ethics, including contributions by IEET Executive Director James Hughes and IEET Fellow Wendell Wallach.

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After much hard work, the editor of the Journal of Evolution and Technology, Russell Blackford, and IEET Fellow Linda MacDonald Glenn are pleased to announce that the special issue that they have been editing if coming online.

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Help us Occupy the Future! By supporting the IEET you are making a commitment to hope and reason, science and optimism, to flourishing, free, diverse, resilient and sustainable societies.

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The new (December 2011/January 2012) issue of Free Inquiry features a set of articles on the prospects of human enhancement, and how these should be viewed by secular people. The positions range across the spectrum from enthusiastic to very resistant, and feature contributions by IEET’s Russell Blackford and James Hughes.

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According to results of a recently concluded poll, more than half of IEET readers enthusiastically support the ‘Occupy’ movement.

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Due to an unprecedented number of spam comments—now exceeding legitimate comments by ten to one—we have made the decision to require commenters to create an account with us and login before posting comments. Please use the link on the bar at the top right of this page.

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About two-thirds of those who responded to an IEET reader poll approve of the government spending money on exploring space.

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Some say it’s already here!

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IEET’s Kyle Munkittrick debated human enhancement with Brad Allenby, author of The Techno-Human Condition, and Nick Agar, author of Humanity’s End: Why We Should Reject Radical Life Enhancement, over at Slate. Check out the fascinating results.

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A majority of IEET readers age 35 or older who answered our recently concluded poll say they expect to die within a normal human lifespan. In contrast, a plurality of readers under age 35 believe that radical life extension will enable them to stay alive in their current bodies “for centuries at least.”

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Three out of four IEET readers expressing an opinion on a recently completed poll said humans should not attempt to enhance or uplift other species of animals.

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Asked this question in a recently concluded poll, IEET readers could not agree on an answer. Close to 30% said Less, close to 30% said More, and about the same amount said Neither.

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One third of those responding to a recent IEET reader poll expressed confidence that emerging technologies “will transform the world, leading to a fabulous future.” But a slightly higher number of respondents believe that some form of “progressive global governance” will be necessary to manage and regulate our technologies and the companies that create them, so that we can avoid various kinds of disaster.

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Thirty-one years old, Len was an Affiliate Scholar of the IEET since 2010. He was an internationally acclaimed cypherpunk and privacy advocate, a PhD candidate at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium, and a researcher with the COSIC research group. Suffering from depression, Len ended his own life on July 3, 2011.

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This startling, controversial collection of essays by pundit/provocateur and IEET Affiliate Scholar Hank Pellissier promotes his hedonist-transhumanist-egalitarian vision of the future. The articles, backed by data and optimistic imagination, examine numerous bio-ethical and politically flammable topics: sexbots, in-vitro meat, Israel, parent licenses, women-only leadership, public nudity, artificial wombs and cryonics. With a forward by IEET’s Dr. J.

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Fewer than one in eight of those who responded to a recently concluded IEET poll are confident that emerging technologies will easily be able to manage climate change. Almost three-fourths of our readers say that urgent steps should be taken to replace fossil fuels and/or prepare mitigation strategies.

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What’s the takeaway here? That a quarter of our readers think we’re nuts for even asking this question? Or that almost half of our readers seriously think we probably are living in a simulation?

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In a poll that was split almost exactly evenly between five different answers, only 40% of respondents said they were in favor of requiring prospective parents to first obtain licenses. Another 40% oppose licensing but would like to see more parental education opportunities, while the remaining quintile says we’re out of line even to discuss the matter.

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In identical polls conducted simultaneously during April 2011, readers at the two sites gave different answers regarding the potentially most powerful emerging technologies.

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