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The Enhanced Games: A Controversial Project

The Enhanced Games present themselves as a radical alternative to the traditional Olympic Games by explicitly permitting the use of performance-enhancing substances—whether biological, chemical, or mechanical—to push human limits. Backed by influential investors such as Donald Trump Jr. and Peter Thiel, this project aligns with a transhumanist …

3 months ago · 2 likes · 1 comment · Marc Roux

RELATED PODCASTS

J Hughes, Sarah Shahed, Matteo MacDermant discuss Sarah’s editorial on age verification laws. We all want to protect children from harm, and age-gating social media websites has broad support. But mandating age-verification means identifying everyone, giving platforms much more information about consumers and putting the anonymity of journalists, activi…

Age Verification Laws

2 months ago · James J Hughes

Alex Williams is a political theorist and lecturer in digital media and society currently based at the University of East Anglia. His writings include Political Hegemony and Social Complexity, Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work…

Who is AI For?

2 months ago · 1 like · Matteo Rossi MacDermant

London Futurists Podcast

AI-driven automation of cognitive labour is not merely another technological transition but a structural discontinuity that will end, sooner or later, the central role of wages in how society operates. This discontinuity can be called “The End of Postwar Capitalism”. That’s the conclusion of a tightly argued set of essays, “The Discontinuity Thesis”, written by our guest in this episode, Ben Luong.

Georg Theiner teaches Philosophy at Villanova University, and Tracy J. Trothen is teaches ethics at Queen’s University, Canada. Georg and Tracy are contributors to the book "Technologies of the Future Self: An ethics for transhuman flourishing".

New Issue of JEET Published: Vol. 36 No. 2 (2026)

IEET — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 11:15:37 GMT

The Journal of Ethics and Emerging Technologies (JEET) is pleased to announce the publication of Volume 36, Issue 2 (July–December 2026).

As emerging technologies continue to reshape nearly every dimension of human life—from healthcare and public infrastructure to governance, memory, and education—ethical reflection has never been more important. This issue brings together scholars from a wide range of disciplines to examine many of these pressing questions through rigorous philosophical, empirical, and policy-oriented research.

Highlights from this issue

This issue opens with an editorial by Steven Umbrello, “Industry Self-Flagging and the Insufficiency Critique of Alignment,” which examines current approaches to AI alignment and argues that voluntary industry commitments alone are insufficient for governing increasingly capable AI systems.

The research articles span an equally diverse set of topics.

The Leuven Ethical Question Framework, by Tijs Vandemeulebroucke, Yvonne Denier, Alice Cavolo, and Chris Gastmans, presents a practical ethical framework designed to help researchers, healthcare professionals, and policymakers evaluate health technology innovations.

In “The Moral Cost of Agreement,” Kallen Zhou, Manning Littlejohn, Isabella Garrard, and Jonathan Barlow introduce a quantitative framework for measuring user-framed sycophancy in large language models, addressing one of today’s most actively debated challenges in AI evaluation.

William Sims Bainbridge explores the ethics of digital remembrance in “Challenges of Artificial Intelligence Memorialization,” examining how AI systems increasingly shape how societies remember the dead.

Pauldin Lawrence contributes “A Documental Theory Based Approach towards Digital Public Infrastructure,” offering a philosophical foundation for thinking about digital public infrastructure and institutional trust.

The issue also includes a letter addressing the implications of space development for Global South countries, as well as a broad collection of book reviews covering AI governance, cyborg rights, educational AI, technology governance, and responsible AI.

A Journal for the Ethics of Emerging Technologies

JEET exists to foster interdisciplinary scholarship at the intersection of:

Artificial Intelligence
Human Enhancement
Bioethics
Digital Governance
Neurotechnology
Robotics
Quantum Technologies
Philosophy of Technology
Responsible Innovation

As a fully open-access journal published by the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies (IEET), all articles are immediately available to readers worldwide without subscription barriers.

We Invite Your Submissions

JEET is continually seeking high-quality scholarship that advances ethical reflection on emerging technologies.

We welcome:

Original research articles
Review essays
Policy perspectives
Literature reviews
Book reviews
Letters to the Editor
Special issue proposals

Whether your work is philosophical, empirical, interdisciplinary, or policy-focused, we encourage you to consider JEET as a venue for your research.

Submissions are accepted throughout the year, and accepted papers are published promptly as part of our ongoing issues.

📖 Read the latest issue

✍️ Submit your manuscript

We look forward to reading your work and continuing to build a global community of scholars dedicated to ensuring that technological progress remains aligned with human dignity, democratic values, and responsible innovation.

Citizen Cyborgs for World Federation

James J Hughes — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 09:06:07 GMT

The text of a keynote address given by IEET ED James Hughes at the “Existential Threats and Other Disasters: Novel (Bio)Ethical Solutions for Novel Challenges” conference in Paris June 11-12, 2026.

Abstract

As Jonathan Moreno has recently argued, the project of bioethics is morally universalist and inextricably linked to liberal internationalism. The post-WWII liberal world order is now in a state of terminal decline, a collapse accelerated by Trump and the resurgence of reactionary nationalism based on ethno-state illusions. Nation-states, individually or as members of transnational bodies, are incapable of resolving the existential threats we have convened to address. This New World disorder is an historical opportunity to advance a more politically legitimate, ethically grounded, indeed revolutionary, democratic world federalism. This renewed globalist agenda, in turn, requires the rejection of national identities and the embrace of global citizenship. Drawing on the Buddhist ontology of no-self and Enlightenment cosmopolitan universalism, I argue that our moral subjectivity as persons presupposes the world-state. If the bounded self is illusory, so is the bounded nation that we arbitrarily find ourselves part of as the terminal unit of moral concern.

I explore how our technological augmentation dissolves local identity, augmenting our capacity for global empathy and “cyborg citizenship.” I present sociological evidence that the apparent rise of nationalism is an extinction burst of localized identity being eroded by Internet-mediated cosmopolitanism. Nearly half of the world’s population consistently feels more like global than national citizens, and a majority support empowering international bodies. While social media algorithms can reinforce moral insularity with echo chambers, and authoritarian regimes build Great Firewalls, digital life also forges new, boundary-defying communities of empathy and social action. Ultimately, this presentation argues that replacing the obsolescent nation-state model with democratic world federalism and post-national identity is the path forward for human survival. Bioethicists, as moral cosmopolitans, have a special responsibility to own the politics that follow from being global citizens.

Our Morality is Cosmopolitan

One of the attractions of Buddhism for me, as a teenage existentialist, was its simultaneous rejection of moral realism and its assertion that normative judgment flows organically from fellow feeling among sentient beings. Following both Buddhist and Western Enlightenment logic, this co-emergence of mind and morality — consciousness as both the origin and object of ethics — is universalist by definition. Enlightenment cosmopolitanism asserts that every individual is a citizen of the world, the term itself combining kosmos (world) and polites (citizen). We have moral obligations to all sentient beings regardless of race, religion, nation, gender, class, or species.

From these predicates, as a teenage Buddhist leftist, I saw world federalism as the natural corollary: our obligation to defend universal rights and secure global collective goods supersedes the pursuit of particular goods by specific polities. If all sentient beings are moral ends, democratic legitimacy requires that all those affected have a voice in the decisions that affect them. Global institutions are a logical moral requirement.

In Buddhist mythology, the righteous ruler who unites the world is called the wheel-turner. Righteous rule — specifically the prevention of poverty and inequality — calls forth an enormous wheel from the sea that peacefully unifies all nations, respecting their particularities while subordinating them all to shared moral values.

As a child collecting coins for UNICEF, I saw that project manifest in the post-WWII architecture of the United Nations and in liberal internationalism. World federalism was the background assumption in the science fiction I grew up with, from H.G. Wells to Star Trek. As a socialist adult, it crystallized in the project of socialist internationalism and the European project.

When I engaged with bioethics, my moral universalism found kinship in the work of Peter Singer — from his non-anthropocentric consequentialism to his advocacy for globalism in the book One World. My book Citizen Cyborg extended this logic, arguing for non-anthropocentric personhood as the basis for a transnational citizenship.

Jonathan Moreno has recently argued that bioethics, in particular, is morally universalist and inextricable from the liberal internationalism now in crisis. Our predecessors were key architects of global human rights, from the Nuremberg Code to UNESCO’s bioethics declarations. Bioethical values inform not only the global regulation of healthcare but also economic development and security, as reflected in the laws of armed conflict and the treatment of prisoners of war. I do not claim that bioethicists bear special moral obligations. But the bioethics tradition has largely reflected universalist values, even when it has stopped short of spelling out their attendant political commitments.

The Need for a Renewed World Order

Today, nationalism has gotten louder precisely because it has become anachronistic. The Peace of Westphalia gave us state sovereignty as the organizing principle of international order. It also gave us centuries of warfare, colonial extraction, and the systematic subordination of human welfare to national interest. The post-WWII liberal order tried to patch this architecture with human rights law, international institutions, and nuclear deterrence. That patch is failing, accelerated by Donald Trump’s protectionist foreign policies and the global resurgence of far-right, reactionary nationalism. Trump has broken decisively with core tenets of the liberal international order — NATO, democracy promotion, and human rights as goals of U.S. foreign policy, embracing protectionism against traditional allies. We have returned to nineteenth-century imperialism and spheres of influence. Europe alone lacks the clout, and China the will, to advance a new rules-based order.

Yet this New World Disorder presents a unique historical opportunity. As Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has framed it, the liberal world order — admirable in ambition if never consistently applied — is dead and won't come back, and should be replaced by a new order that empowers the world beyond the G7. We must seize this moment to advance a more legitimate, democratic world federalist agenda.

Fragmented nation-states are structurally incapable of resolving transnational crises such as climate change, global security, and fair trade. To address these collective action problems, we need transnational governance with genuine enforcement power, and we need to clearly delimit the scope of national sovereignty and subsidiarity — local decisions made locally, global decisions made globally. We are not merely obligated to help distant others; we are obligated to build the structures that make helping possible.

The ethno-state basis of most polities stands in direct opposition to Enlightenment universalism, and national identity is a morally arbitrary construct, an empty signifier. Like the self and the other baggage it accumulates, ethnic, religious, and national identity causes suffering. Yes, we all come from some place, and we all feel particularist obligations that compromise perfect universalist impartiality. But just because we all fall short of the moral ideal does not mean we do not recognize it and strive for it. Empirically, people who identify with humanity as a whole tend to be more prosocial across a range of domains, from giving to international charities to volunteering for humanitarian causes. Global social identity is thus superior, both functionally and philosophically, to parochialism.

The Sociology of Cosmopolitan Identity

Contrary to the dominant narrative that globalization inevitably breeds nationalist backlash, recent global surveys reveal a surprising resilience in cosmopolitan identity. Gallup polls consistently find that nearly half of the world’s population feel more like citizens of the world than of their own country, and a majority support granting international bodies the power to enforce global solutions to problems like environmental pollution. Transnational and national identity can and do coexist, but a recent study of 65,000 participants across 49 countries found a generally negative correlation between the two.

This emerging transnational solidarity is inextricably linked to digital connectivity. Mark Zuckerberg’s promise that global networking platforms would deliver peace and understanding crashed long ago. Social media algorithms polarize, empower division, and amplify racism and nationalism.

But I have found unexpected inspiration in transnational fandom networks generating what might be called a pop cosmopolitanism on digital platforms — local political action rooted in shared global culture. Millions of young people around the world find community across ethnic and national lines through shared devotion to Korean idols, Japanese anime, and Thai drama. Queer television produced in Bangkok and Vancouver reaches a global audience demanding LGBTQ representation and marriage equality. Digital platforms, despite their destructive potential, are also forging new, boundary-defying identities that inspire social action.

One cause of the global far-right, traditionalist, patriarchal, nationalist backlash is precisely this creeping cosmopolitanism introduced by global connectivity. As social scientists Norris and Inglehart argue in Cultural Backlash: Trump, Brexit, and Authoritarian Populism, the far-right surge is an extinction burst responding to growing openness to diversity, sexual liberation, minority rights, gender and racial equality, and secularism. The World Values Survey shows that across post-industrial societies, Gen Z and Millennials hold markedly more liberal views on gender, sexuality, immigration, and internationalism than their predecessors. It is precisely these rapid transformations that have triggered nationalist reaction among traditionalists who feel they are losing their cultural moorings.

Unfortunately, the victory of cosmopolitanism is not guaranteed by generational succession. The surge of far-right support among young men is quite real. The authoritarians and nationalists are promising to restore an idealized patriarchy. The manosphere project is a response to radicalized young women’s withdrawal from dating, marriage, and childbirth, and women’s growing success in education and the labor force. As fertility drops and life expectancy lengthens, bioethicists will be drawn into debates about how we can promote reproduction while defending LGBTQ rights and reproductive choice — through subsidizing fertility technology alongside abortion and gender-affirming care, for instance. These are not peripheral to re-establishing global order and addressing existential threats. Women’s education and empowerment are inextricably tied to the spread of cosmopolitanism and to support for the solidaristic policies we need.

The Obligations of Cosmopolitan Ethics

Moreno’s challenge to bioethicists is to understand where we came from and to connect our cosmopolitan ethics to the global moment, threatened by resurgent authoritarianism. The effective altruism and existential-risk communities have been brilliant at predicting catastrophe, and poor at building the institutions necessary to prevent it — partly because they were funded by people profiting from creating those risks. Or at least, the same billionaires giving millions to study the risks of the Terminator scenario are also profiting from building drone armies, and giving hundreds of millions to maintain authoritarian war mongers in power. We bioethicists don’t have billionaires, but we have a global community built over seventy years. Bioethics has the institutional networks, the normative vocabulary, and the international legitimacy to make a substantive contribution to building a new New World Order.

The obligations of transnational universalism begin with epistemic virtue, directing our attention to the world, and refusing the tendency to parochialism. It is also a commitment to a globalized moral calculus, a cosmopolitan consequentialism that rejects special accounting for co-nationals. For instance, Singer argued in One World that a cap-and-trade carbon system should be built on an equal per-capita allocation of carbon credits to every human being, not different caps for different nations.

Bioethics-specific efforts at transnational regulation relevant to existential risks include:

Strengthening the World Health Organization and the International Bioethics Committee at UNESCO
Pushing for enforceable global biosecurity protocols for synthetic biology, and condemning vaccine nationalism
Further empowering the International Criminal Court
Strengthening the International Association of Bioethics as a voice for global health policy and transnational regulatory efforts
Solidarity with democratic activists in every country, since the legitimacy of transnational institutions is diminished by authoritarianism and inequality

But in this apocalyptic conjuncture, we should also promote genuinely utopian demands for new and stronger transnational institutions. The aging and beleaguered world federalist movement is still pushing UN reforms, calling for a UN Charter review conference, and transnational policies to address climate protection, nuclear disarmament, AI regulation, anti-corruption, and global democracy. Perhaps we need even bolder utopian proposals and projects that will capture the imagination, such as those from Thomas Piketty and the Global Justice Project, which recently proposed a global sovereign wealth fund to hold 10% of the world capital stock, a global wealth tax rising to 20% annually on billionaires, and a global income tax rising to 90% at the very top.

The United States was impossible until it wasn’t. The European Union was utopian until it wasn’t. The question is not whether world federalism is achievable this decade. The question is whether it is the correct direction of travel — and whether every incremental global institution we build should be designed for universal, egalitarian accountability to all sentient beings, rather than for the perpetuation of Great Power privilege and resignation to the intractability of escalating existential risks.

Age Gates, Surveillance, and the Politics of “Protecting Children” Online

Sarah Shahed — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 20:50:04 GMT

Last week, the UK became the latest government to announce a sweeping social media ban for users under 16, following Australia’s lead and echoing proposals moving through Canada’s Parliament. It’s a good moment to ask what these laws actually do — and who they actually serve.

The political logic is hard to argue with on its face. Nine in ten UK parents say they support stronger online protections for children. Prime Minister Starmer called the proposal a “line in the sand,” and Technology Secretary Liz Kendall said tech companies have had “countless opportunities to keep children safe, yet they have failed to act.” That’s true. But the proposed remedy — mandatory age verification enforced at the platform level — may cause harms as serious as those it claims to fix, and may not even fix them.

The surveillance problem hiding inside the child safety argument

Age verification sounds technical and neutral. It isn’t. Every workable implementation of it requires one of two things: collecting government-issued identity documents or scanning biometrics. Both create something that didn’t exist before — a de facto checkpoint at the entrance to the public internet.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has documented this clearly. About 15 million American adults lack a driver’s license entirely, and 2.6 million have no government-issued photo ID at all. Undocumented immigrants often can’t obtain state IDs. People with disabilities are disproportionately less likely to hold current identification. And AI-based age estimation systems — the facial scan alternative — perform worse on Black, Asian, Indigenous, and Southeast Asian users, often misclassifying adults as minors and blocking them from platforms they have a legal right to use.

For transgender and non-binary users, the situation is worse. Age estimation systems can’t classify non-binary genders at all, and 43% of transgender Americans lack identity documents matching their name and gender. For them, age verification is an impossible choice: provide documents that out them, or lose access entirely.

When the data does get collected, it goes somewhere. Companies like AU10TIX and platforms like Discord have already experienced significant data breaches exposing sensitive user information. Age verification doesn’t momentarily check your ID like a bouncer — it uploads it to a third-party company, where it can be stored, breached, sold, or subpoenaed.

There’s also a structural incentive worth naming: technology writer Taylor Lorenz has reported that major tech platforms including Meta and Google are actively lobbying for age verification requirements, precisely because the compliance infrastructure is expensive enough to eliminate their smaller competitors. The child safety frame is being used to build a moat.

The censorship problem hiding inside the surveillance problem

Technology writer Taylor Lorenz has been one of the most persistent critics of this legislative trend. In a March 2026 piece for The Intercept, she documented how the bipartisan push to remove anonymity from the internet would dramatically expand the collection of identity-linked browsing and speech data — endangering whistleblowers, protest organizers, and anyone whose online activity puts them at risk from government surveillance. The US government was already, at the time of writing, flooding social media platforms with subpoenas seeking to unmask anonymously run anti-ICE accounts. Age verification infrastructure makes that easier.

In her User Magazine newsletter, Lorenz argued that laws like KOSA don’t just create surveillance risks — they create direct censorship pathways, allowing organizations like the Heritage Foundation to flag LGBTQ content, reproductive health information, and feminist content as harmful to minors. The framing of child protection, she argues, is doing political work that has nothing to do with children.

The UK’s Online Safety Act, already in force, provides a preview of where this goes. Lorenz documented in The Guardian that the law has been used to deplatform marginalized groups and censor journalism. One specific example: Reddit users attempting to access subreddits covering war crimes in Gaza and Ukraine were required to submit a selfie or government ID. The content in question wasn’t pornography — it was war reporting. That’s the scope creep the EFF and Lorenz have both warned about: infrastructure built for one purpose, repurposed for another the moment it becomes politically convenient.

The systems are also not technically reliable. Lorenz noted that France’s CNIL, Australia’s eSafety Commission, and the US FTC have all found that current age verification technologies fail to accurately and equitably assess age. And they’re easily gamed: some UK users bypassed Discord’s age verification entirely by holding animated footage from the video game Death Stranding in front of their cameras to fool the liveness detection.

The surveillance infrastructure was built; the kids got around it anyway. The adults without IDs, the transgender users, and the LGBTQ+ youth, however, stayed locked out.

The technoprogressive question: is there a better way?

Child safety online is a genuine and urgent concern. Platform design that deliberately exploits adolescent psychology to boost engagement metrics is harmful and warrants regulation. But the question is whether age verification, as currently implemented, actually addresses that harm, or whether it primarily serves the political need to be seen as doing something.

The most promising alternatives don’t require collecting identity data at all. France’s “double anonymity” model — where the verifier never learns which site is being accessed and the site never learns the user’s identity — points toward what better-designed systems could look like. Zero-knowledge proofs, still in early development, could theoretically allow a cryptographic confirmation of “this person is an adult” without any underlying identity data being stored or transmitted.

The TrustArc framework for privacy-safe age assurance draws a useful distinction: age verification (identity-tied credential checks) versus age estimation (probabilistic, biometric-based) versus age assurance (the umbrella category, which can include privacy-preserving approaches). The technology sector and regulators have mostly defaulted to the first two, which are faster to implement and commercially convenient. The third — genuinely privacy-preserving age assurance — requires more investment and political will.

There’s also a structural question about where verification happens. Requiring every website to implement its own age check creates a patchwork of corporate surveillance nodes. Device-level or app store-level verification, implemented with strong privacy-by-design principles, could, in theory, provide consistent protection without requiring each platform to build its own ID collection system. The EU’s Digital Identity Wallet pilots are attempting something like this, though implementation is uneven.

What the technoprogressive tradition insists on is that these are not binary choices. “Protect children” and “protect civil liberties” are not opposites. The question is whether lawmakers are willing to do the harder work of designing systems that achieve the first without dismantling the second or whether the political appeal of a simple ban, even a largely ineffective one, is too convenient to resist.

The UK’s Parliament is expected to vote on Starmer’s proposal by the end of the year, with restrictions potentially entering force in Spring 2027. That timeline is short. The window to shape this legislation toward something that actually works — and doesn’t leave LGBTQ+ youth, undocumented users, and anyone without a smartphone and a government ID on the wrong side of a surveillance gate — is narrow.

Further reading:

EFF: 10 (Not So) Hidden Dangers of Age Verification — the most thorough civil liberties critique of age-gating as currently practiced
TrustArc: Age Verification Without Surveillance — the privacy professional’s case for better-designed alternatives
IAPP: UK Announces Social Media Ban for Under-16s — the news as it broke this week
Taylor Lorenz, “Congress Is Considering Abolishing Your Right to Be Anonymous Online,” The Intercept, March 2026
Taylor Lorenz, “We Must Fight Age Verification With All We Have,” User Magazine, August 2025
Taylor Lorenz, “None Of This is About Online Safety,” User Magazine, December 2025

Sarah Shahed is a rising junior at the University of Pennsylvania, where she studies Philosophy, Politics, and Economics with minors in Legal Studies and History, and Science, Technology, and Society. She is serving as a summer intern with the IEET.

In Other News

The Pope Weighs In — and It’s Complicated. Pope Leo XIV’s Magnifica Humanitas, released May 15, is the first papal encyclical specifically addressed to the AI era. It explicitly rejects both techno-utopianism and Luddism, condemns autonomous weapons and platform monopolies, and frames data as a common good that can’t simply be treated as private property. The encyclical names transhumanism directly and pushes back on it — but it’s more thoughtful than a simple condemnation, and anyone working in tech ethics will find it worth engaging with seriously. The IEET has its own disagreements with the Vatican on questions of cognitive liberty and morphological freedom. Still, the document’s structural critique of concentrated digital power is largely compatible with technoprogressive analysis. Read it here.

OpenAI Endorses UBI. OpenAI’s Industrial Policy for the Intelligence Age endorses a universal basic income, AI dividends, and a federal job guarantee — proposals that originated in the labor left and the technoprogressive tradition. Their arrival signals where the center of gravity is moving, even if the motivation is partly self-serving.

Automation Targets Wages Deliberately. New MIT research finds that US companies use automation specifically to suppress wages for workers earning above the median — a deliberate labor-control strategy, not just a productivity upgrade. This is the technoprogressive argument in data form: the question isn’t whether to automate, but who captures the gains.

Liberty Requires Infrastructure

Brandon King — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 10:10:56 GMT

Brandon King recently ended his campaign for the Minnesota House. But he came to our attention for proposing his distinctly technoprogressive “The Space and Time Agenda,” which he is still lobbying for. Brandon proposes 3D-printed sovereign homes, a 16-hour workweek by 2040, and an Apollo-scale public asteroid mining program that would generate the resources to establish a UN Space Commons, fund a New New Deal, and a Third Reconstruction. Listen to Bread and Robots’ interview with Brandon.

Brandon King

I use the term “Enlightenment Socialism” because I still believe in the Enlightenment’s core promise. Ordinary people are equal in dignity. That government exists to secure rights people already possess. That law should stand above rulers. That power should answer to the people, and a free society should be built for human flourishing.

But those principles cannot actually meaningfully exist unless Liberty becomes lived material reality. It has to show up as housing, energy, food, healthcare, education, transit, time, and legal structures that ordinary people can actually feel in their daily lives. A person with formal rights but no shelter, no medicine, and no time to raise their children is free only on paper.

Enlightenment Socialism is my attempt to complete the Enlightenment under twenty-first-century material conditions. The basic claim is simple. Freedom requires infrastructure.

By infrastructure, I mean the material systems that make self-government real, built through public authority and designed so that dependence on centralized authority withers over time. In one sentence, Enlightenment Socialism is small-government socialism built to end itself.

The roots of this idea are deeply American. Thomas Paine argued in Agrarian Justice that land, because no individual created it, carried a debt to the whole community once it became private property. Exclusive ownership of nature required compensation for everyone. Paine wanted that compensation to fund endowments for the young and security for the old. He called it justice.

I have always taken Paine’s argument seriously. Whenever the law turns part of our common heritage into private property, the public is owed a dividend. In Paine’s time, the obvious common heritage was land. In our century, the resource base is larger. It includes land, air, water, the biosphere, and the mineral wealth of near-Earth space. Asteroids contain water, common metals, rare earth metals, and platinum group metals that could change the economics of scarcity. If private firms are already planning to exploit that wealth, a republic can get there first and do it for everyone.

A national asteroid-mining program, run as a public utility, would be the twenty-first-century version of Paine’s ground rent. The common heritage of all humanity benefits the people.

The old tax structure leans too heavily on labor. I want the long-term revenue base of a free society to move away from wages and toward rents on common wealth, especially wealth nobody personally created. The point is to let people keep more of their time while still funding the infrastructure that freedom requires.

When I say socialism, I mean something simple. Liberty is not real when survival depends on employers, landlords, banks, insurers, or monopolies deciding whether you get to live with any security. A republic of equals cannot rest on that kind of dependence forever.

The state still matters, but it should be treated as a means, not an end. It should build systems that reduce people’s dependence on coercive institutions. As those systems become stronger, more local, and more self-governing, the role of the state should shrink accordingly.

I call those systems Liberation Infrastructure. Liberation Infrastructure is the material base of freedom. By that, I mean a self-sufficient, decentralized, interconnected infrastructure built to meet human needs without forcing people to rely on employers, landlords, banks, or other gatekeepers to survive. Homes as a right. Community-scale microgrid energy systems. Local food production. Public transit. Open-source knowledge systems. Publicly owned, local automated fabrication. Healthcare systems that do not depend on profit extraction. Over time, as technology improves, more of that infrastructure should also become increasingly self-repairing and easier for ordinary people to govern directly. These are not just public services. They are the systems that remove the conditions that make people controllable in the first place.

Police become less necessary as poverty and desperation recede. Welfare bureaucracies shrink when households have a guaranteed floor. Regulatory burdens ease when economic life is built on transparency and cooperation rather than speculation and rent-seeking. The state withers when infrastructure replaces the coercive functions that made the state historically necessary in the first place.

That also changes how I understand political transition. I do not think entrenched class power gives way once better institutions are available. People and firms that profit from dependence will resist any serious effort to dismantle it. That means there has to be a period in which public power is used consciously, openly, and under democratic constraint to break the material basis of class rule and build a different social order in its place.

That is the original Weydemeyerian sense in which I understand the old phrase “dictatorship of the proletariat.” I mean transitional public power exercised in the interest of ordinary people against entrenched class domination. In that older sense, it belongs to a broader Enlightenment and republican question about who governs, on whose behalf, and through what institutions. And this is where I part company with the twentieth century; it does not have to mean a permanent party-state, a secret police apparatus, or a centralized command structure standing above society. Those were later historical forms, and disastrous ones.

I am not interested in a centralized dictatorship of a vanguard party. I am interested in a decentralized dictatorship of infrastructure. By that I mean a transition in which working people exercise power by building and governing the systems that make ruling classes less necessary and eventually obsolete. Housing, energy, food, healthcare, fabrication, and public coordination have to be taken out of extraction and reorganized on democratic terms. If that work is done properly, class power begins to lose the material choke points it depends on.

This is also why anarchism matters here. If liberation is real, the long-term direction is toward less rule, less hierarchy, and more direct self-government. Even Marx did not really disagree about the end point. The real question has always been the transition. The transition should start building that outcome from the beginning. If the goal is a decentralized, self-governing society, then the institutions created in the meantime should already be teaching people how to live that way. The mistake of the twentieth century was building centralized systems in the name of liberation and then pretending they would somehow dissolve into freedom later. They usually did not. The working class rules in a way that actually points beyond rule when it builds and governs the material systems that make ruling classes obsolete.

That also means public power is still necessary for the time being. Housing, energy, food, and essential production are not going to be taken out of extraction by asking nicely. There has to be a period during which public authority can block those who profit from dependence. But that authority has to remain under public control at all times. If the tools of liberation cannot be audited, recalled, or dismantled by the people, then the bridge has already begun to turn into a wall.

The twenty-first century makes the issue impossible to dodge because technology is already eroding the material basis of scarcity. Rifkin called it the zero-marginal-cost society. Fuller described the same long trend as ephemeralization: doing more and more with less and less until, eventually, you are doing everything with nothing. Renewable energy, automation, digital replication, biotechnology, and advanced fabrication all push in the same direction. The cost of producing and distributing many necessities can fall dramatically.

Capitalism cannot let that process run to its conclusion. When real scarcity starts to weaken, ownership systems manufacture artificial scarcity. Instead of letting lower costs and wider access reduce dependence, private power rebuilds dependence in new forms. Ownership gives way to subscriptions. Knowledge gets fenced behind paywalls. Housing remains trapped in landlordism and speculatively inflated land values.

Technologies that could make life easier and more secure keep getting routed through patents, platforms, subscriptions, and private toll booths. The result is the same even when the mechanism changes. The gains are real, but ordinary people do not get to live freely from them. The central conflict of our time is whether technology reduces coercion or increases dependence. Automation can free people from toil or throw them into further precarity.

Enlightenment Socialism treats every gain in productive power as a political obligation. If technology lowers the real cost of survival, society has to turn that gain into freedom. Wherever abundance becomes technically possible, access should begin to take the place of price.

That raises a practical question of political form. If freedom requires infrastructure, who builds it, who governs it, and at what scale? My answer is why I call myself a small-government socialist. I do not want a distant center trying to manage every part of life. I want authority to sit at the smallest level that can actually do the job. If something really does require national coordination, such as space infrastructure or a universal basic income, it should be handled at the national level openly and constitutionally.

The general rule is simple. Keep responsibility as close as possible to the people who live with the consequences. Power should not be allowed to coagulate where it is not needed.

All of this also bears on how liberty itself has to be understood. A free society cannot defend liberty only in one register. America has always been strong on the language of negative liberty, freedom from interference. No one is kicking in your door. No one is censoring your speech. No ruler stands above the law. Those liberties are essential. Lose them, and you get tyranny.

But liberty also has a material side. People need the real capacity to act. A person who cannot refuse a bad job because they will lose housing is not fully free. A person who cannot get medical care is not fully free. A person crushed by debt before adulthood is not fully free. Enlightenment Socialism does not set negative liberty aside in the name of positive liberty. It tries to build a material floor that lets the classic liberties survive contact with ordinary life.

Freedom should not be a temporary privilege granted by hierarchy. It should be the normal condition of a life supported by just design.

What I am arguing for is a society where ordinary people can live without having to ask permission at every turn. A free republic has to be built that way on purpose. Otherwise, liberty remains fragile and easy to revoke the moment survival is put back under someone else’s control.

That is what Enlightenment Socialism means to me. A political order that makes freedom durable enough to be ordinary.

Brandon King is an entrepreneur, labor advocate and political activist, and former candidate for the Minnesota House of Representatives. Subscribe to his Substack.

IEET News – May 30, 2026

Fri, 29 May 2026 20:54:03 GMT

Thanks to our summer intern Sarah Shahed for pulling together this week’s newsletter

At IEET

Prosthetic Gods Goes Live — This Saturday evening in Boston. J. Hughes and Nir Eisikovits tape a live episode of Prosthetic Gods on “Artificial Intelligence and Existential Risks” at The Foundry in Cambridge, MA, as part of a Long Now Boston event. If you’re in the Boston area, register here. This is exactly the kind of public philosophy the technoprogressive project needs more of — taking the big questions out of the seminar room and into the city.

Special Focus: Brain-Computer Interfaces, Neural Data, and the Technoprogressive Path Forward

Next week, IEET is co-sponsoring The Philosophy of Brain-Computer Interfaces at UMass Boston (June 5–6), so it’s a good moment to take stock of where the BCI debate stands and what a technoprogressive approach to it looks like.

The technology is moving fast. Implanted BCIs have enabled paralyzed patients to communicate, play instruments, and control robotic limbs with their minds. AI is making consumer-grade EEG headsets capable of detecting emotional states, attention, and cognitive load with increasing accuracy. And as a recent Nature feature documents, researchers can now decode preconscious thought, catching intentions before users are even aware of them. As Synchron CEO Tom Oxley put it: “The more we apply deeper learning techniques, the more we can separate out signal from noise. But it’s not actually signal from noise — it’s signal from signal.”

That’s remarkable. It’s also, from a governance perspective, an urgent call to action.

A 2024 survey by the Neurorights Foundation of 30 consumer neurotechnology companies found that 29 of 30 claimed ownership of users’ brain data and most reserved the right to sell it to third parties. Consumer EEG headsets are already on the market. Apple has patented EEG sensors for AirPods. The data collection infrastructure is being built now, before any protective framework exists in most of the world.

The neurorights movement — led by Columbia neuroscientist Rafael Yuste, the Neurorights Foundation, and legal scholars like Nita Farahany — has made real progress. Chile became the first country to constitutionally protect mental privacy in 2021 and scored a landmark Supreme Court ruling against Emotiv Inc. in 2023. Colorado, California, and Minnesota have passed neural data protection laws in the US. UNESCO issued ethics guidelines in 2023. In June, UNESCO will vote on whether its 194 member states should adopt a global set of neurotech ethics principles, including protecting users from neuromarketing manipulation and prohibiting performance monitoring of students with neural devices.

That’s all good. But the IEET’s technoprogressive take on this is more nuanced than the neurorights frame on its own.

The technoprogressive position, as IEET understands it:

Restrictions should not be so broad that they shut down beneficial innovation. People have rights over their own bodies and their own cognitive processes, including the right to decide what to do with their own brain data. Simple disclosure requirements are clearly insufficient (if 30 companies can bury neural data rights in clickwrap terms of service, consent frameworks built on disclosure aren’t working). But the answer isn’t to treat all neural data as too dangerous to touch.

There are genuine collective benefits to neural data sharing — for medical research, for understanding neurological diseases, for building the tools that help people with paralysis, ALS, and locked-in syndrome communicate. A framework centered purely on individual consent and data restriction could block research that benefits everyone. What’s needed is something like the “data solidarity” model proposed by Szoszkiewicz and Yuste: treat neural data as a shared resource, give users meaningful ongoing control, restrict commercial resale, and ensure that the benefits of research flow back to the populations whose data made it possible.

The key distinctions worth making:

Therapeutic and clinical BCIs — implanted devices operating under IRB oversight and medical device regulation — already have appropriate safeguards. The innovation objection has real merit here. We should not over-restrict research that is restoring communication and movement to people who have lost them.

Consumer neurotechnology — EEG headsets, wearables, productivity monitoring tools — operates in a near-total regulatory vacuum and is expanding fast. This is where the danger is most immediate and where the case for preemptive governance is strongest.

The inference problem is where existing law falls short. Even state neural data laws that protect raw recordings don’t necessarily cover the inferences that can be drawn from combining neural data with behavioral data — inferences about mental health, political views, emotional reactivity, identity. As Marcello Ienca put it, adding neural data to the existing data economy is “like giving steroids to it.”

Global equity matters. A 2026 technical report from Kyambogo University makes the case that Sub-Saharan Africa faces a distinctive exposure: rapidly growing mobile technology adoption, no jurisdiction-specific neural data protection, and consumer BCI companies moving toward emerging markets as Global North markets saturate. The history of digital surveillance capitalism suggests that once data extraction infrastructure is built at scale, it is very hard to dismantle. Getting ahead of this matters for Africa specifically.

The upcoming IEET conference on The Philosophy of Brain-Computer Interfaces (June 5–6, UMass Boston) will take up exactly these questions: privacy, cognitive liberty, identity, collective cognition, and what it means to govern a technology that reaches into preconscious thought.

Further reading from the articles shared with us this week:

● Szoszkiewicz & Yuste, “Mental privacy: navigating risks, rights and regulation“ — EMBO Reports (July 2025) — the strongest academic overview of the regulatory gap and what to do about it.

● Liam Drew, “The next era of mind-reading is coming“ — Nature (November 2025) — an excellent piece of science journalism on where the technology actually is.

● “Researchers draw up ethics principles for brain-reading devices“ — Nature (June 2025) — on the UNESCO process.

● “Mind-Decoding Technologies Raise Hopes (and Worries)“ — Undark (2024) — the best long-form account of Rafael Yuste and the neurorights movement.

● Ngabonzira, “Neural Data Privacy and the Emerging Surveillance Risk of Brain-Computer Interfaces“ — The Science Blueprint (March 2026) — on Sub-Saharan Africa’s specific vulnerabilities.

Affiliated Podcasts & Media

Bread and Robots (Matteo MacDermant) — AI, Workers, and the Fight for The Future: A Conversation with Jason Poulos

The Zero Hour (RJ Eskow) — France’s rebellion—and ours!

London Futurists — David Wood and Calum Chase with Ted Shelton on post-labour economics and the future of capitalism

Love Letters to the Future — The Future of Writing: How Communities Empower Creators PJ Manney and Laura Tenenbaum explore the transformative power of writing communities with Jos Linder, author of eight books and founder of Prose Playground.

Prosthetic Gods — Who Really Needs Ozempic Anyway? This week on Prosthetic Gods, Nir Eiskovits and J Hughes discuss the tradeoffs of GLP1 drugs.

Technoprogressive Hub (J Hughes) — Recent episodes on transnational queer media, and science fiction and artificial wombs. Subscribe on Substack or YouTube.

Reading

Journal of Ethics and Emerging Technologies - Vol. 36, No. 1 (January–June 2026) is out. Open access, no APCs.

Upcoming Events

May 30, 2026 — Live Taping: Prosthetic Gods at Long Now Boston The Foundry, Cambridge, MA | 8pm | “Artificial Intelligence and Existential Risks”

June 5–6, 2026 — The Philosophy of Brain-Computer Interfaces UMass Boston | Co-sponsored by IEET and the Applied Ethics Center | Keynote speakers from Mass General Hospital, the Neurorights Foundation, and UW-Madison

June 11–12, 2026 — Existential Threats and Other Disasters Paris, France | J. Hughes speaking on post-nationalism and global citizenship

June 20–August 20, 2026 — IEET Summer Course on Technoprogressive Worldbuilding Online | Instructor: Matteo MacDermant | Sign up here

September 19–20, 2026 — The Technoprogressive Opportunity London, UK | Joint conference with London Futurists | Free | RSVPs open now

IEET News - May 15, 2026

James J Hughes — Fri, 15 May 2026 16:41:29 GMT

New IEET Fellow: David Shapiro

We are excited to announce the appointment of David Shapiro as an IEET Fellow focusing on the Future of Work. David is an author and public educator focused on “Post-Labor Economics”: how AI and the Fourth Industrial Revolution will disrupt civic equilibrium, transform power, and reshape politics, society, and economies. His work explores institutional adaptation and democratic resilience beyond compulsory labor. David’s work can be found here on Substack, his popular podcast, and his Youtube channel. David’s work promoting discussion of the economics of an automated future is a model for the kind of public intellectual work the IEET was founded to support.

In recognition of his contributions to technoprogressive policy thinking, the IEET Board is also granting David a $1000 award to support the completion of his Labor/Zero book.

David Shapiro

Meet Sarah Shahed, our Summer Technoprogressive Policy Intern

We are delighted to introduce our summer intern, working with us on technoprogressive policy. Sarah Shahed is a rising junior at the University of Pennsylvania, where she studies Philosophy, Politics, and Economics with minors in Legal Studies and History, and Science, Technology, and Society. Her academic and professional interests lie at the intersection of technology policy, law, and democratic governance. She has prior experience in policy research and writing through her work in the office of Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal, as well as legal administrative experience at a law firm and academic research in economics and public policy. She is particularly interested in AI governance, platform accountability, and broader questions about how digital systems shape access, equity, and civic participation.

Sarah Shahed

IEET Expands European Collaborations

IEET is pleased to announce two new exploratory collaborations in Europe.

First, IEET has begun a cooperative relationship with the Vatican’s Pontifical University Antonianum in Rome concerning AI ethics, Digital Humanism, responsible innovation, and public value. The collaboration will focus on areas of shared interest on human-centered AI governance and the ethical and social implications of emerging technologies.

Second, IEET has signed a Memorandum of Understanding with EUDHIT — the European Digital Humanism Initiative — to strengthen cooperation on Digital Humanism and the ethics of emerging technologies. We will host joint activities including, joint seminars, webinars, policy-oriented publications, expert exchanges, and future European or international project collaborations.

Both initiatives represent important steps in expanding IEET’s European network and strengthening its role in global conversations on ethical, democratic, and human-centered technological futures.

AI, Labor, UBI & Political Economy

On London Futurists David and Calum dig into post-labour economics and the future of capitalism, with Ted Shelton.

Google DeepMind workers in UK vote to unionize and point to Iran war and Pentagon’s Anthropic feud as reasons.

On Bread and Robots Matteo discusses whether AI Data Center Moratoriums are the Wrong Fight? with Holly Jean Buck

Are Data Center Moratoriums the Wrong Fight?

Holly Buck is a professor at the University of Buffalo who thinks carefully about AI, energy, and what it would mean to build technology in the public interest. In this conversation, we talk about why data center moratoriums may be the wrong lever, what's behind the left's deep skepticism toward AI, and how a pre-distributive politics that works towards…

4 months ago · Matteo Rossi MacDermant

Also on Bread and Robots: The AI Pledge For Humanity. Matteo and Scott Santens discuss Scott’s campaign for a UBI pledge.

The AI Pledge For Humanity

Read, Sign, and Share The AI Pledge for Humanity…

4 months ago · 2 likes · Matteo Rossi MacDermant

Most Americans support Pro-Labor AI Policies More than nine out of 10 workers surveyed expressed support for policies on AI that unions may fight for.

Automation Comes for Skilled Workers First MIT economists found US companies tend to use automation to target employees earning a “wage premium,” which increases inequality. We used to think blue-collar workers would be the first to feel AI-driven precarity, and they already experience more precarity in general. But downwardly mobile college-educated workers being impacted by AI are quickly finding unity with blue collars around a social democratic agenda.

Only the Affluent are Comfortable with AI The only income bracket with hopeful views of the technology (AI) for their day-to-day lives was those making over $200,000 per year.

Last week on The Zero Hour, IEET Board member RJ Eskow chatted with regular guest Prof. Richard Wolff about “WTF is Going On?”

CFP for Inclusive Abundance Policy Proposals - June 5 deadline

Matteo MacDermant on Left Municipalism: In a moment of renewed municipal progressivism, the democratization of urban technology is one of the most overlooked tools.

Climate & energy

On podcast Love Letters to the Future, IEET Board member PJ Manney and co-producer Laura Tenenbaum spoke to Emily Strasser on “The Power of Speaking the Truth: Secrets and the History of Oak Ridge, TN.”

PostGender

Technoprogressive Hub: Thailand has become a global hub of queer media production. But the commercializing of fans’ parasocial relationships with the actors/couples in an era of 24/7 social media compounds issues with toxic fan behavior. Listen to Dr. J dig into the politics of “boys love” (BL) and “girls love” (GL) media with scholar of BL, Thomas Baudinette.

Transnational Queer Media

Thomas Baudinette is Senior Lecturer in Global Cultures at Macquarie University in Australia, a cultural anthropologist whose work maps the role popular culture plays in shaping gender and sexuality across East and Southeast Asia. His first book, Regimes of Desire: Young Gay Men, Media, and Masculinity in Tokyo…

4 months ago · James J Hughes

Disgust: This week on Prosthetic Gods, Nir and J discuss the role of disgust in morality. Neuroscience suggests that feelings of disgust underlie many moral judgments, especially in the treatment of sexuality. Conservatives have long defended disgust as a source of moral intuition, while liberals seek to minimize it. Can we suppress disgust? Should we?

Upcoming Events

May 21 - 22, 2026
Governance of Emerging Technologies and Science (GETS) Conference
Phoenix, AZ USA

Matteo MacDermant will be speaking on “The Technoprogressive City: Municipal Strategies for Building Digital Democracy” as part of GETS 2026. https://events.asucollegeoflaw.com/gets/schedule/

May 30, 2026 8pm
Live Taping of an episode of Prosthetic Gods at Long Now Boston
The Foundry, Cambridge, MA USA

J. Hughes and Nir Eisikovits will tape another live session of Prosthetic Gods on the topic of “Artificial Intelligence and Existential Risks” as part of a Long Now Boston event. Register here: https://www.longnowboston.org/events/eisikovits-hughes-2026

June 5-6, 2026
The Philosophy of Brain-Computer Interfaces
Campus Center, UMass Boston, Boston, MA USA

Co-sponsored by the IEET and the Applied Ethics Center, UMass Boston. Panelists and keynote speakers will present their work on medical applications of BCIs, the military uses of neurotechnology, and proper governance of this emerging technology. As BCIs connect brains to computers, and allow direct communication between brains, they raise fascinating philosophical questions about consciousness, cognition, and selfhood. Can consciousness be distributed across different brains? Is collective cognition possible? What implications would distributed consciousness and collective cognition have for one’s sense of self and personal identity? BCIs also raise deep ethical questions. Might BCIs raise novel privacy concerns through the direct access of information in an individual’s brain? Would BCI neuroenhancements that relieve an individual of some cognitive function prevent them developing certain moral and intellectual virtues? Join us at The Philosophy of Brain-Computer Interfaces for discussion of these and other critical issues arising from the rapidly developing area of neurotechnology. Register here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/the-philosophy-of-brain-computer-interfaces-tickets-1983422685645

June 11-12, 2026
Existential Threats and Other Disasters: Novel (Bio)ethical Solutions for Novel Challenges
Paris, France

J. Hughes will be speaking on “Global Citizenship: New World DisOrder and the Moral Case for Post-Nationalism” at this conference organized by The Center for the Study of Bioethics, The Hastings Center for Bioethics, The Chinese University of Hong Kong Centre for Bioethics, and The Master of Bioethics Program of Columbia University. Register here: https://www.thehastingscenter.org/hastings-center-event/existential-threats-and-other-disasters-novel-bioethical-solutions-for-novel-challenges/

June 20-August 20, 2026
IEET Summer Course on Technoprogressive Worldbuilding
Online

Syllabus – Sign up
Instructor: Matteo MacDermant, TA: James Hughes
Format: Weekly 90–120 minute seminar + 60 minute cohort studio

September 19-20, 2026
The Technoprogressive Opportunity
London, UK

Join us in London in September to chart a global technoprogressive policy agenda. Jointly hosted by the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies and the London Futurists. Free to attend. Speakers will be announced shortly, but RSVPs are already open at https://www.meetup.com/london-futurists/events/314148857/

IEET News - MAY DAY! 2026

James J Hughes — Fri, 01 May 2026 20:53:01 GMT

Emerging Technoprogressive Politicians. In their weekly chat for Technoprogressive Hub, J. Hughes and Matteo McDermant also spoke about the technoprogressive policy proposals from California Congressman and US Presidential aspirant Ro Khanna, Congressional candidate Alex Bores, and Massachusetts state legislature candidate Jason Poulos, e.g. universal basic income and services, progressive taxes, AI democratization and sovereign wealth funds. We also discussed how OpenAI is also now pushing for UBI and technoprogressive policies, while Palantir has fully embraced a techno-libertarian/authoritarian policy agenda.

Prosthetic Gods on The Curiosity Desk. J. Hughes and Nir Eisikovits appeared on WGBH's Curiosity Desk this week. Their segment starts at 2hr03m. They talked about automation job loss, OpenAI’s struggles, and the ethics of longevity research.

Platform Socialism. This week on Matteo McDermant’s IEET-supported Bread and Robots, he had a chat with James Muldoon on “Democratizing Digital Life.” They cover the core ideas behind Platform Socialism, the hidden labor that powers AI, how cities and communities are already experimenting with data sovereignty (including some surprising examples close to home in New Mexico), and why the question of platform governance is less about capital R Revolution than about the molecular, everyday politics of how our tools are designed and who they serve.

Building a Technoprogressive Social Democracy. J. Hughes spoke this week for Science, Technology and the Future on “Tech Oligarchs, AI Fascism, and the Prospect of a Technoprogressive Social Democracy.” The same technologies that enable digital authoritarianism also open pathways to a more participatory, transparent, and legitimate democracy. Drawing on experiments from Taiwan's deliberative digital platforms to liquid democracy in European pirate and populist parties, and on proposals for digital citizenship agents, automated sousveillance, and AI as a public utility, this talk argues for a technoprogressive social-democratic agenda: one that embraces algorithmic governance as more fixable than biased human institutions, democratizes access to AI through universal basic compute, and redistributes wealth to prevent plutocratic capture of these tools. The question is not whether algorithms will govern, but whether we will govern the algorithms—and that is a question of political power, not technological destiny.

Universal Abundance, Not Technofeudalism. In his Substack this week, friend of the IEET, David Shapiro, discusses the dark truth that capitalism (and previous social systems) are prone to create “permanent underclasses,” and that we have to fight now to ensure universal abundance and not AI-driven technofeudalism.

Apocalyptic Insecurity for White Collar Workers. Last week on IEET Board member RJ Eskow’s show The Zero Hour he spoke with Lynn Parramore and Alissa Quart about their article for The New Republic on “For White-Collar Workers, AI Also Stands for Apocalyptic Insecurity’”

Preparing for the Economic Singularity. IEET Board member David Wood and futurist Calum Chase are co-hosts of the London Futurists podcast. This week they spoke to Adrian Brown about “Windfall Trust and the Economic Singularity.”

How to Communicate X-Risks. London Futurists also hosted a discussion this week with John Sherman, President of the AI Risk Network, Anthony Bailey, of Pause AI Global, and Hannah Betts on “Talking about catastrophic and existential risks: Dos and Don’ts.”

Speaking of communicating AI x-risks… watch the forum that Senator Bernie Sanders convened this week in Washington D.C. on “The Existential Threat of AI and the Need for International Cooperation”

What Does Machine Consciousness Require? Calum Chase is also co-host of the podcast Exploring Machine Consciousness. This week’s episode is an interview with philosopher Henry Shevlin discussing how our understanding of consciousness is evolving in the age of advanced AI. From philosophy and neuroscience to the rapid progress of modern language models, Henry examines whether intelligence alone is enough, or whether something deeper (like continuous experience) is required for consciousness.

Is a Data Center Moratorium Technoprogressive? Check out Holly Buck’s essay in Jacobin, “Democratic Governance of AI Is the Real Solution,” on why the Left should focus on democratizing AI instead of fighting AI data center buildouts. It provides a nice complement to our discussion on Technoprogressive Hub of the need to redirect the AI data center fight to focus on the need for a Green and modernized energy infrastructure.

Metamodernism. IEET Board member PJ Manney is co-host with Laura Faye Tenenbaum of the podcast Love Letters to the Future. This week they spoke with Greg Dember about “metamodernism” and its relationship to modernism and postmodernism.

The Coming Re-Set. For the Singularity Weblog, friend of the IEET Nikola Danaylov just interviewed futurist Peter Leyden about his forthcoming book The Great Progression. Civilization is in the midst of a reset driven by AI, clean energy, and bioengineering.

AI and Postcapitalism. Check out Paul Mason’s new paper “Postcapitalism and Agentic Artificial Intelligence.” Generative AI makes the transition to a post-capitalist economic system easier and likely sooner. Following any financial market crash produced by the mismatch of hyperscaler revenue and valuations, civil society should reshape the technology and use it to progress towards a system characterized by low hours of necessary work, high leisure time and large-scale mutual ownership of goods, beginning with information goods. .

Upcoming Events

May 21 - 22, 2026
Governance of Emerging Technologies and Science (GETS) Conference
Phoenix, AZ USA

Matteo McDermant will be speaking on “The Technoprogressive City: Municipal Strategies for Building Digital Democracy” as part of GETS 2026. https://events.asucollegeoflaw.com/gets/schedule/

May 30, 2026 8pm
Live Taping of an episode of Prosthetic Gods at Long Now Boston
The Foundry, Cambridge, MA USA

June 5-6, 2026
The Philosophy of Brain-Computer Interfaces
Campus Center, UMass Boston, Boston, MA USA

June 11-12, 2026
Existential Threats and Other Disasters: Novel (Bio)ethical Solutions for Novel Challenges
Paris, France

June 20-August 20, 2026
IEET Summer Course on Technoprogressive Worldbuilding
Online

Live from Portsmouth: Artificial Intelligence and Human Values

Instructor: Matteo MacDermant, TA: James Hughes
Format: Weekly 90–120 minute seminar + 60 minute cohort studio

September 19-20, 2026
The Technoprogressive Opportunity
London, UK

IEET News - April 24, 2026

James J Hughes — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 09:03:13 GMT

J. Hughes’ Remarks at the Inauguration of HEET

I come to praise Steve Umbrello.

But to understand how important Steve has been to me and to the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, you need to know where we came from. And that story starts with Anders Sandberg, who is one of our speakers today.

In 1991, as a graduate student at the University of Chicago, I got my first email address and began participating in online life. I was teaching in the clinical ethics program and had written a defense of human genetic engineering called “Embracing Change With All Four Arms.” Needless to say, my fellow ethicists were appalled. But I discovered a transhumanist mailing list — the Extropians — where people were debating ideas far more radical than genetic engineering. One participant I would eventually come to know much better was Anders. When I revealed my socialist politics, I was, as we would say now, flamed off the list. Though not by Anders, who remains the happiest and kindest man in futurism.

I persisted in searching for my futurist, science-fiction-adjacent, politically progressive, transhumanist comrades. That search eventually led me to Anders’ friend and fellow Swede Nick Bostrom, who had planted a flag online for the World Transhumanist Association. I had been an American delegate to the Socialist International, hobnobbing with the leaders of the French Socialists, British Labour, and the German SDP. I believed that radical futurist internationalism could play the same transformative role that socialist internationalism had — if not in our lifetimes, then eventually. I propositioned Bostrom: I would take his embryonic organizational concept and transhumanist declaration and build a futurist international modeled on socialist internationalism. He agreed.

That’s roughly when I met George Dvorsky (also here in the audience), who now serves as Chair of the IEET Board. George had just gotten interested in these ideas, reached out to me, and — as any good socialist organizer would — I connected him with another comrade in Toronto, and they formed a cell. Together, George, Bostrom, and I, and a growing cast of characters from Moscow to Paris to Rome to Nairobi to Oxford to San Francisco, built the World Transhumanist Association.

We quickly discovered, however, that the belief in people’s right to enhance themselves was not the basis of a stable organization or a coherent politics. George, a good Canadian, and I — and even Bostrom, a libertarian for a Swede but still a socialist by most of the world’s standards — believed in democracy and universal healthcare, not some Ayn Randian paradise for the few. The global transhumanist movement was mostly politically progressive, but it also included people with anti-statist capitalist views and a tiny fraction with far-right sympathies. In retrospect, it included future far right oligarchs like Peter Thiel, the patron of the current Vice President of the United States. With their philanthropy these Silicon Valley billionaires eventually overwhelmed us poor humanistic transhumanists. So we left, and started the IEET. We didn’t have billions, but we were committed to technology that was democratically accountable and universally accessible.

The ideological orientation of the IEET has been, since its founding in 2005, what we called technoprogressive. We believed in the possibility of technological innovation — human enhancement, artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, and more — to improve the human condition, but only if democratically governed and guided by the liberatory principles of the Enlightenment: liberté, fraternité, égalité. We were happy warriors for our doctrine, separated from the increasingly right-wing tilt of Silicon Valley futurism. By 2014, we issued a Technoprogressive Declaration in Paris and thought we were swinging the future our way.

We were wrong. The election of Trump, and the global rise of fascism and “illiberal democracy",” brought our naïve narrative of progress crashing to the ground. We had entered the stupid timeline.

Which is precisely when an astonishing undergraduate entered our picture, again from Toronto, offering to help us step up our game. Steve Umbrello has never fully shared our all science-fictional transhumanism, nor my democratic socialism, but he wanted to work on the same questions we were — and because he is a superman and more productive than 99% of scholars, how could we say no?

In my darkest hours, I asked Steve how we could work on the ethical and regulatory challenges of the 21st century when we were being dragged back to the 1930s, or perhaps the 1890s. I felt I had been wasting my time on intellectual frippery. It was friends like Steve, and George, and the irrepressible Anders, who convinced me that we still had a role in shaping a better future. Eventually we found the resources — without ever accepting a dime from oligarchs — and we are now cooking on all four burners: a policy program, an educational program, three podcasts, and this growing, serious publishing program with a book series and journal, which exists entirely because of the hard work of Steve Umbrello.

Steve took our amateurish attempt at an academic journal and turned it into a real one — the kind that real philosophers actually want to publish in. He and Cristiano established our book series with De Gruyter, now working on its fourth volume. And Steve built HEET, the program we are inaugurating today, of which we are immensely proud.

I credit him with helping me through those dark days — patiently reminding my perpetually distracted, ADD-addled brain, consumed by the responsibilities of university administration and the U.S.’ accelerating descent into fascist insanity: James, what we need to do this week is publish the next issue, and fix the website, and by the way, this is your fifth reminder. Fittingly for a futurist operation, by the way, Steve and I have worked closely together since 2015. And this is the first time we have met face-to-face. That, I would argue, is a data point in favor of the proposition that the terminally online life can support eudaemonia.

When I was talking to Claude about Steve, it noted what an odd pairing we make — the ADD and the hyperfocused. He has his own worldview, more indebted to Father Lonergan than to the Marquis de Condorcet, the Buddha and Marx. But we share a solidarity forged from a common commitment to asking serious questions about the future. We both agree that someday people will try to have babies in space, and that we should start thinking about that now. We come to different conclusions, but the liberal future we both want to build welcomes the debate.

So I am here to warmly welcome HEET as part of the IEET family of projects, a development of which we are enormously proud. I am also here to thank Steve for taking us seriously enough to invest in us, and to help us build an academic NGO that is increasingly respected as an interlocutor in the intellectual and policy debates shaping the future.

Here’s to you, Steve. We are so proud of everything you have built.

Graziano Lingua, Prof of Moral Philosophy and Director of Philosophy and Educational Sciences, welcoming HEET as part of the University of Turin

Communications

Technoprogressive Hub

An IEET-sponsored technoprogressive podcast/vlog produced by J. Hughes

Latest: A chat with Aleksandra Przegalińska, Vice-Rector of Kozminski University and Research Associate at Harvard University, on the Future of Work. Dr. Przegalińska works on the future of work, humanoid and social robots, and wearable technologies. She is co-author of the book Collaborative Society and Debating Universal Basic Income.

Bread and Robots

An IEET-sponsored technoprogressive podcast/vlog produced by Matteo McDermant

Latest: A Roadmap to Abundant Futures. A Conversation with David Wood

David Wood is Chair of London Futurists, a member of the IEET Board of Directors, and is the author or lead editor of twelve books, including The Singularity Principles, Vital Foresight, The Abolition of Aging, Smartphones and Beyond, and Sustainable Superabundance. David hosts the London Futurists podcast with Calum Chace.

Prosthetic Gods

A podcast/vlog produced by J. Hughes, IEET Executive Director, and Nir Eisikovits, director of the Applied Ethics Center at UMass Boston

Latest: Technology and Contagion

A chat with Nicholas Christakis, Director of the Human Nature Lab at Yale University. His groundbreaking work on “social contagion,” demonstrates how everything from obesity and smoking to happiness and cooperative behavior spreads through human networks. Most recently, his work has focused on the emergence of “hybrid systems” of humans and machines, examining both the Burkean risks of how AI might degrade our interpersonal social graces and the technoprogressive potential of using “dumb bots” to optimize human coordination.

A special live episode of Prosthetic Gods taped at the University of New Hampshire, featuring talks by Kay Mathieson (Northeastern University), Henry Shevlin (Cambridge University), and Harvey Lederman (UT Austin)

Books from the IEET Community

Steve’s new book is available for order.

How do we preserve human dignity in a world increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence? Far from being anti-technology, O’Hara and Umbrello affirm the value of AI as a tool that emulates a Turing machine, although constrained by Gödel’s theorem, while rejecting the illusion that it can replace human beings.

Upcoming Events

May 21 - 22, 2026
Governance of Emerging Technologies and Science (GETS) Conference
Phoenix, AZ USA

Matteo McDermant will be speaking on “The Technoprogressive City: Municipal Strategies for Building Digital Democracy” as part of GETS 2026. https://events.asucollegeoflaw.com/gets/schedule/

May 30, 2026 8pm
Live Taping of an episode of Prosthetic Gods at Long Now Boston
The Foundry, Cambridge, MA USA

June 5-6, 2026
The Philosophy of Brain-Computer Interfaces
Campus Center, UMass Boston, Boston, MA USA

June 11-12, 2026
Existential Threats and Other Disasters: Novel (Bio)ethical Solutions for Novel Challenges
Paris, France

June 20-August 20, 2026
IEET Summer Course on Technoprogressive Worldbuilding
Online

Registration: https://hostyurl.com/0Y6unz

Instructor: Matteo MacDermant, TA: James Hughes
Format: Weekly 90–120 minute seminar + 60 minute cohort studio

September 19-20, 2026
The Technoprogressive Opportunity
London, UK

Join us in London in September to chart a global technoprogressive policy agenda. Jointly hosted by Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies and London Futurists. Free to attend. Speakers will be announced shortly, but RSVPs are already open at https://www.meetup.com/london-futurists/events/314148857/

Live from Portsmouth: Artificial Intelligence and Human Values

James J Hughes — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 15:54:24 GMT

Apparently finding a Burkean Luddite - Nir Eisikovits - and a socialist transhumanist - J. Hughes - who are friends, and conversant with philosophy is a rare thing. At the University of New Hampshire a group of philosophy professors and students listened to episodes of Prosthetic Gods and then hosted us as the MCs of a public discussion of “Artificial Intelligence and Human Values” on April 2nd at the Music Hall in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

The evening opens with short, TED-style talks from Kay Mathieson (Northeastern University), Henry Shevlin (Cambridge University), and Harvey Lederman (UT Austin), each offering a distinct lens on the philosophical, ethical, and cognitive stakes of AI. Nir and J then take the stage to lead a wide-ranging live discussion with all three speakers and with questions and reflections from the Portsmouth audience.

As always, listeners can contact us at prostheticgods@gmail.com with questions, comments, and suggestions for future topics.

Listen on: Apple Podcasts - Youtube - Spotify - Podbean

Hosted by James Hughes, Executive Director of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, and Nir Eisikovits, director of the Applied Ethics Center at the University of Massachusetts Boston.

Music & Production by Jake Burley.

The Philosophy of Brain-Computer Interfaces

James J Hughes — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 09:02:31 GMT

On June 5–6, the UMass Boston Applied Ethics Center, in partnership with the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, is convening The Philosophy of Brain-Computer Interfaces: A Neurotechnology and Society Conference — two days of rigorous, cross-disciplinary conversation about the technology that may fundamentally change the experience of being human.

The Technology Is Here. The Ethics Are Not.

Neuralink has implanted its first human subjects. Synchron is threading electrodes through jugular veins. At Massachusetts General Hospital, researchers are already using neural interfaces to restore communication for people with ALS and paralysis. What was speculative fifteen years ago is now clinical. What is clinical today will be consumer-grade by the early 2030s.

And yet the ethical infrastructure — the governance frameworks, the rights protections, the philosophical clarity about what neural data even is — lags badly. One of the victims of the 3500 people Neuralink-owner Musk fired last year was the regulator investigating Neuralink. We regulate financial data more rigorously than we regulate thought. That’s not hyperbole; it’s current law. Our keynote speaker Stephen Damianos, legal counsel at the Neurorights Foundation, will lay out exactly what’s at stake in that gap, and what governance responses are actually on the table.

Consciousness, Moral Status, and the Hard Problems

Brain-computer interfaces don’t just raise practical policy questions. They crack open some of the oldest puzzles in philosophy — and give them new, urgent stakes. If a neural interface reads your intentions before you’re consciously aware of them, what does that do to agency and responsibility? If a device blurs the boundary between your nervous system and an AI system, what does that do to personhood?

The opening panel will bring together Luke Roelofs (UT Arlington), Brian Edlow (Harvard), and Michael Hegarty to wrestle with neurotechnology and consciousness. These are not abstract seminar questions. They bear directly on informed consent, legal liability, and what it means to say someone “voluntarily” agreed to something their augmented brain processed before their deliberate self weighed in.

Former member of the National Bioethics Advisory Commission, and prominent American bioethicist, Alta Charo, closes the conference on Saturday with a keynote on the philosophy and future of neurotechnology — brings a lifetime of bioethics and law to the bigger frame: what is philosophy’s actual job when a technology moves this fast, and this deep into what we are?

The military panel — featuring Bill Casebeer (Riverside Research) and Nick Evans (UMass Lowell) — explores what happens when you put a neural interface on a soldier? Enhanced situational awareness, accelerated decision-making, drone control through thought alone — these are active research programs, not thought experiments. The ethics of neural enhancement in combat contexts are neither simple nor solved, and this session won’t pretend otherwise.

The religion panel, on which I have the privilege of joining Daniel Munro from Boston University, explores the spiritual implications of modifying the organ through which most humans experience meaning, selfhood, and the sacred. You don’t have to be a believer to find these frameworks analytically useful. They’ve been thinking about mind-body dualism, the soul, and the continuity of the self across time for millennia. That’s relevant now in ways it hasn’t been since Descartes met the pineal gland.

Come Be In the Room

The conference is in-person at UMass Boston on June 5–6, which matters. The best conversations at events like this happen in the margins — over coffee, at Friday evening’s reception, in the corridor after a panel when someone says the thing they didn’t say at the microphone.

Registration is open. Two days, four panels, three keynotes, one evening reception, and a question that will not resolve itself: when the boundary between mind and machine dissolves, who holds the rights?

Register here →

The Philosophy of Brain-Computer Interfaces is a joint conference of the UMass Boston Applied Ethics Center and the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, June 5–6, 2026, UMass Boston. Free and open registration.

IEET NEWS - April 13, 2026

James J Hughes — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 09:02:44 GMT

HEET Inauguration in Turin

We’re gathering this week in Turin Italy to inaugurate the Hub for Ethics and Emerging Technologies at the University of Turin. Stay tuned for photos and reports.

📍 Venue: Collegio Carlo Alberto, Turin

📅 Date: April 16, 2026

🕘 Time: 9:00 – 17:30 CEST

🎥 The event will be recorded and made available online after the conference.

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/biglietti-horizons-in-ethics-emerging-technologies-heet-2026-1982164044014

Sign Up for Our Summer Course on Technoprogressive Worldbuilding

This summer Matteo and J. will be leading a ten week course discussing the historical roots of technoprogressivism, and its application to today’s tech policy debates.

Instructors: Matteo MacDermant and James Hughes

Dates: June 20 to August 20 (Times TBD)

Format: Weekly 90–120 minute seminar + 60 minute cohort studio

Cost: Free

Join Us to Build Technoprogressivism in London in September

Just announced, Sat 19th and Sun 20th Sept: “The Technoprogressive Opportunity: The future of ethics and emerging technologies”. Jointly hosted by @IEET and @LondonFuturists

Free to attend. Speakers will be announced shortly, but RSVPs are already open at https://meetup.com/london-futurists/events/314148857/

IEET Communications

On Extrapolate Dr J. spoke with Rob Hof about “The Techno-Progressive Future: UBI, AI, and and the Left.”

On Bread and Robots, Matteo spoke with Scott Santens about “UBI as a Path to Post-Scarcity”

UBI as a Path to Post-Scarcity

Check out Scott’s personal page here: https://www.scottsantens.com…

5 months ago · 5 likes · Matteo Rossi MacDermant

On Technoprogressive Hub, Eli, Matteo and J discussed the legislation proposed by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders to restrict the building of AI data centers.

How Technoprogressive is Bernie/AOC's AI Data Center Proposal?

This week on Technoprogressive Hub, Eli, Matteo and J discuss the legislation proposed by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders to restrict the building of AI data centers. “Opposing AI’ is Luddite, not technoprogressive, but the sentiment against oligarchs, AI and data centers is so strong now that we may need to accept some Luddite positioning t…

5 months ago · 2 likes · James J Hughes

Also on Technoprogressive Hub, Dr. J spoke with Aleksandra Przegalińska on the Future of Work.

On Prosthetic Gods, Dr. J. and Nir Eisikovits spoke to Sven Nyholm about his new book The Ethics of Artificial Intelligence. If our thinking relies on external media, where do we stop and the AIs start? What is the moral status of LLMs? Are they sentient? Are AI relationships any good? And should we raise robots like children?

Technoprogressive Policy News

Rep. Ro Khanna - a Democratic aspirant for President in 2028 - issues a technoprogressive manifesto and agenda “AI for the People. A manifesto for an AI revolution that works for the many, not just the billionaires.”
“AI could help cure cancer, slash housing costs, make it easier to start businesses and address our energy needs, and lower medical and ed costs. But billionaires’ priority will be to eliminate jobs, extract profits, and addict us to outrageous content.”

Embattled Sam Altman publishes his own technoprogressive policy agenda - higher capital gains and corporate income taxes, expanded social safety nets, a public wealth fund, a four-day workweek, and transition programs for workers displaced by AI - as he tries to rescue his reputation from the scathing New Yorker expose and the perception that he is a craven MAGA sycophant.

Kyle Chayka reviewed “Techno-Negative” by Thomas Dekeyser, a deep history of resisting and destroying technology across millennia.

Technoprogressive Initiative News

James J Hughes — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 19:16:12 GMT

I’ve been lax in getting out our newsletter, but it was for a good reason. The IEET’s Technoprogressive Initiative is cooking with solar. We have launched a podcast/vlog, we’ll be teaching a course on technoprogressivism this summer, and we’re organizing a technoprogressive movement building conference in London September 19-20.

The latest contribution to the Technoprogressive Policy Project is Scott Santens’ recent, Universal Basic Income: The Dividend We Should Have Started in 1975.

Technoprogressive Hub Podcast

Eli, Matteo and J have launched the Technoprogressive Hub podcast and vlog. We are recording interviews about technoprogressive topics, and weekly conversations about technopolitics.

You can subscribe here: Substack – Spotify – Youtube – Podcast RSS

Shows we’ve shared so far:

ProWorker AI? – Matteo, Eli and J

The Pro-Human AI Declaration - Matteo McDermant

Post-Labor Economics - David Shapiro

Toward a Technoprogressive Future - David Wood.

From The End of History to the Age of AI - George Dvorsky.

From Enshittification to Technofascism - Matteo McDermant.

RJ Eskow on Reclaiming Technology for the People

Mark Walker: Philosopher for the Future

Launching the Technoprogressive Hub Podcast

Technoprogressive Summer Course

This summer Matteo and J. will be leading a ten week course discussing the historical roots of technoprogressivism, and its application to today’s tech policy debates.

An Introduction to Technoprogressive Worldbuilding

Instructors: Matteo MacDermant and James Hughes

Dates: June 20 to August 20 (Times TBD)

Format: Weekly 90–120 minute seminar + 60 minute cohort studio

Cost: Free

Technologies do not emerge in a vacuum. They are shaped by political values, economic interests, cultural imaginaries, labor relations, and design choices—and in turn, they shape society at every level. This course introduces technoprogressivism as a framework for understanding and actively shaping technological change in democratic, inclusive, and future-oriented ways.

Rather than treating technology as neutral or inevitable, the course emphasizes praxis, feedback loops, and collective agency. We function as an organizing tool: a space to develop collective capacity and expand technoprogressivism across domains of social life to address pressing challenges like authoritarianism and crises in housing, healthcare, and governance.

Technoprogressive Conference - London – Sept 19-20

We are also organizing an international conference on technoprogressivism, to be held in London.

Stay tuned for details. For more information contact director@ieet.org or David Wood davidw at deltawisdom.com

Episode 38 – Humanoid Robots

IEET — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 09:34:34 GMT

This week on Prosthetic Gods, Nir and turn to one of the most striking developments in contemporary AI: the emergence of humanoid robots designed to operate in homes, workplaces, and care settings.

Unlike chatbots or software agents, these systems are embodied—and often intentionally designed to resemble human beings. That design choice is not neutral. It has profound ethical implications.

Humanoid robots don’t just perform tasks. They shape perception.

They can:

evoke empathy where none is warranted,
influence trust and consent through appearance,
and blur the distinction between tool and social actor.

In this episode, we explore three central concerns.

First, the manipulation of empathy. A robot that looks human can generate emotional responses that are disproportionate to its actual capacities. This raises questions about informed consent, especially in vulnerable populations.

Second, robot caregiving. While robotic assistance may extend independence for elderly populations, it also risks becoming a justification for dismantling human-centered care systems and broader social support structures.

Third, artificial relationships. As humanoid robots become more sophisticated, they may deepen patterns of isolation rather than alleviate them—offering a simulation of connection in place of genuine interpersonal relationships.

We also situate these concerns within broader philosophical and technological frameworks, including Moravec’s paradox, and cultural reflections from Humans and Battlestar Galactica.

At stake is not just what robots can do—but how their presence reshapes our expectations of care, intimacy, and responsibility.

🎧 Listen here:
https://prostheticgods.podbean.com/e/humanoid-robots/

📩 As always, we welcome your thoughts: prostheticgods@gmail.com

Universal Basic Income: The Dividend We Should Have Started in 1975

Scott Santens — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 18:32:40 GMT

Technoprogressive Policy Project

Photo by RJ Baculo on Unsplash

In an alternate universe in 1975, as a result of the arrival of the first personal computer, the United States followed up the passage of President Richard Nixon’s guaranteed income for families act signed into law in 1971 with a fully universal GDP dividend. The logic behind its passage was that the personal computer revolution would greatly increase productivity, and also lower the cost of computing in general, enabling robots to replace manufacturing workers, and that everyone in America should benefit equally from all that tech-driven productivity growth instead of letting that productivity growth greatly increase inequality.

The GDP dividend started small at only $100 per person per month, but over the ensuing five decades of productivity growth, in 2023 it was distributing $1,352 per month to every American over 18. Instead of $79 trillion flowing to the top 1% over the course of fifty years, that massive wealth generated from rising productivity flowed to everyone as their due dividend, just as mature corporations distribute dividends to their shareholders.

We do not live in that universe. We live in the one where we let it all flow upward. But the logic of that alternate history is not speculative. It is derived from the RAND Corporation’s 2025 analysis of the income gap between 1975 and 2023, which estimated that the bottom 90 percent of American workers earned $3.9 trillion less in 2023 than they would have under the income distribution that prevailed in 1975. Every cent of that gap went somewhere. It went to the top.

We could have prevented this. We still can correct it. And we should do so regardless of whether AI eliminates millions of jobs or none at all.

UBI Is Not a Response to Mass Unemployment. It’s a Response to How the Economy Already Works.

One of the most persistent misconceptions about universal basic income is that it is a policy designed to respond to a specific future crisis — mass technological unemployment. Andrew Yang’s 2020 presidential campaign brought UBI into mainstream American political discourse by framing it this way, and his intervention was enormously valuable. Yang made millions of Americans aware of UBI for the first time. He shifted the Overton window. He demonstrated that a candidacy built around unconditional cash could generate a passionate grassroots movement that transcended traditional left-right divisions, and his influence echoed beyond the US. Social democratic parties worldwide that once dismissed UBI as fringe are now running pilot programs and commissioning feasibility studies.

But Yang’s framing also left a kind of residue that continues to distort the conversation. It suggested that UBI is necessary because robots are coming for our jobs, such that if the robots don’t come fast enough, the case for UBI weakens, but the case for UBI is already overwhelming based on what has already happened over the past fifty years of productivity growth that was not shared with the people who generated it. The robots do not need to take a single additional job for UBI to be the right policy. They already suppressed wages across sectors for decades, while enriching those at the top.

If rapid technological unemployment does arrive, UBI is the correct preparation. Phase it in now and it functions as automatic stabilization against whatever displacement occurs. No scramble for emergency legislation. No waiting months for checks that never arrive. No means-testing bureaucracies that exclude millions. The floor is already there. If AI eliminates ten million jobs in three years, every one of those people is already still receiving income. If AI eliminates zero jobs but continues to suppress wages and concentrate gains upward, then the dividend is still correcting the most important economic injustice of the last half century.

Why Progressives Should Embrace UBI Even If They Prefer Full Employment

Some progressives resist UBI because they see it as a concession — an admission that full employment is no longer achievable, or a replacement for the fight for better jobs. This is a misunderstanding of what UBI does.

UBI creates jobs. This is not theoretical. A study by researchers at the University of Chicago and the University of Pennsylvania examined Alaska’s Permanent Fund Dividend — a real UBI operating in the United States for over forty years — and found that the annual cash payments had no negative effect on overall employment and increased part-time work by 17 percent. The mechanism is straightforward: when the bottom 60 percent of the income distribution receives cash, they don’t hoard it, they spend it. In economist speak, they have a high marginal propensity to consume. That consumer spending flows into local businesses. Those businesses hire more people. The increased labor demand enables job seekers to find employment. The net effect on employment is neutral to positive.

UBI also increases bargaining power, strengthening unions and better enabling general strikes, and it is a powerful vehicle for redistribution. It takes revenue raised progressively and distributes it universally. After taxes, the net transfer flows downward. That is redistribution operating cleanly, without the perverse incentives of the current system.

And those perverse incentives are real. Existing means-tested welfare programs create high effective marginal tax rates on recipients. As a person on SNAP, Medicaid, housing assistance, and TANF earns additional income, benefits phase out simultaneously. The combined effect can approach or exceed 100 percent, leaving someone barely better off — or actually worse off — for working more. This is a system designed to trap people. Replacing a significant portion of that architecture with UBI (plus universal healthcare to replace Medicaid) eliminates the trap. With UBI, every additional dollar you earn is a dollar you keep (minus your normal tax rate). Everyone is always better off financially by increasing their income through work.

Replacing some welfare programs with UBI is not an attack on the safety net. It is an upgrade to it. The current net is full of holes. A floor has none.

The Unknown Is Itself the Problem

Part of what makes AI different from prior waves of automation is the sheer breadth of uncertainty. We do not know which jobs will be affected, how many, or over what timeframe. That uncertainty is not a reason to wait. It is the reason to act.

The stress of not knowing whether your job will exist in two years has its own costs. It creates anxiety, depression, and chronic health impacts. It destabilizes communities. It erodes trust in institutions. It drives political radicalization. The fact that any significant portion of the population is afraid of losing their livelihood to AI is itself a policy failure. Building a floor that no one can fall beneath addresses that failure directly. No one falls into poverty as a result of AI if everyone already has income that keeps them above poverty.

If we implement UBI in advance of major AI displacement, what is the worst case scenario? We decreased poverty and insecurity “unnecessarily.” We improved health outcomes and reduced crime when we didn’t “need” to. We gave parents more time with their children and workers more bargaining power, all “for nothing” because AI turned out to be less disruptive than feared.

The logic is identical to the climate case. What if we transitioned to clean energy and it turned out we didn’t need to? Cleaner air, energy independence, new industries. The downside of acting is that we solved problems we already have. The downside of not acting is catastrophe.

According to Columbia University’s Center on Poverty and Social Policy, using updated benefit-cost methods, a child allowance sufficient to eliminate child poverty would generate over $1.5 trillion annually in net social benefits through improved health, increased future earnings, and reduced crime and child welfare costs. That means child poverty alone is costing us over $1.5 trillion a year. Eliminating those costs by eliminating child poverty is a smart investment regardless of what AI does to the labor market. UBI does that. No other single policy does.

The Dividend We Owe Ourselves

Andrew Yang’s lasting contribution was a permission structure. He made it acceptable for mainstream politicians to talk about giving people money. Since his 2017-2020 run, almost 200 guaranteed income pilots have launched across the United States. South Korea is running large rural basic income pilots. The Marshall Islands passed a permanent nationwide UBI. The UK Green Party made UBI a central platform plank. Ireland funded a basic income pilot for artists and made it permanent after it resoundingly succeeded. The momentum is global and accelerating.

But pilots and experiments are not the dividend. The dividend is what we owe ourselves for fifty years of productivity growth that was not shared. It is what we owe ourselves for the public investment that created the technologies now enriching a handful of people beyond comprehension.

We don’t need to wait for mass unemployment to justify UBI. We don’t need to wait for AI to be smarter. The automation justification has existed since the 1970s. Every year we delay is another year the dividend flows upward instead of to all of us.

Start it now. Phase it in. Set it at the poverty line and grow it with productivity. Pay the dividend.

Scott Santens is the founder and CEO of the Income To Support All (ITSA) Foundation, the host of The Basic Income Show, and serves on the board of directors of the Gerald Huff Fund for Humanity and as editor of Basic Income Today — a daily UBI news hub. His debut book about UBI and how to pay for it is titled Let There Be Money. You can follow his work here on Substack, and at scottsantens.com, Twitter, Bluesky, and Facebook.

How Do Technoprogressives Understand Social Change?

James J Hughes — Sun, 15 Feb 2026 19:27:21 GMT

Photo by Iain Feeney on Unsplash

In graduate school, I had an epiphany in a class about social theory. One broad set of theories, “functionalism,” argued that social practices could be explained by the functions necessary for society to reproduce itself. The welfare state fills gaps in social needs, allowing workers to stay healthy and children to get educated. The other broad set of theories explained things in terms of power and exploitation: “conflict theories” such as Marxism, feminism, and anti-racism. For conflict theory, the welfare state is achieved through social struggle, while it also serves to suppress more militant demands for change, and its policies reflect patriarchy and racism.

The epiphany was the realization that this was a false dichotomy. There are separate systems that are necessary for social reproduction, and each social system has its own characteristic forms of power. Like a body with multiple systems, each can tip from healthy functioning to pathology. Military power or religious authority is used to accumulate wealth and dominate the media. Excess inequality and exploitation are like cancers in each system. The democratization of society requires understanding the dynamics and functions of these systems, and then determining how far we can democratize power within each system. How do we maximize equality and freedom in every domain, and still get all the necessary stuff we all want done?

One Ring Doesn’t Rule Them All

Around the same time, I read Liberating Theory, a short 1986 book written by a committee for a specific political project: proposing a way of seeing race, class, gender, and the state as separate but interlocked social systems. Each domain had forms of power specific to it, and its subalterns’ political demands were “relatively autonomous.” The New Left authors were arguing against the various hegemonic leftisms on offer, from Marxist class reductionism to bioessentialist feminism, racial nationalism, and anarchism.

The 19th-century Marxist-anarchist debate was a prelude to the Liberating Theory argument. Was state power – politicians backed by soldiers – as important a source of oppression as wealth? Bakunin said, “If there is a state, then there is unavoidably domination.” The Soviet experience handed the win to the anarchists. However, most radicals still conclude that we need government, laws, and law enforcement – governance is an essential function, even if we rename it “people’s committees.” The goal is as democratic, transparent, and accountable a government as possible, i.e., liberal democracy. The struggle for civil liberties and liberal democracy against authoritarianism is a precondition for economic and social democracy. The social democratic project over the last century has been to extend a rich conception of democracy to all spheres.

The socialist-feminist debates of the 1970s were the immediate prelude to Liberating Theory’s four-way debate. Patriarchy predates class, property, or labor-based exploitation by thousands to millions of years. The Marxists had tried for 150 years to understand the dynamics of sex, gender, and reproduction through the lens of labor, with only partial success. If you study the circulatory system, you will find it deeply embedded in the nervous and immune systems. Diseases that originate in one system affect the others, but they are still best understood as separate. All the systems are necessary, and there is no reason to ignore the peculiar dynamics in one and pretend they can be explained best as a derivative of the mechanics of another.

The key observation of socialist-feminism was that women and sexual minorities are not automatically liberated by socialism or a planned economy. However, the state control of the economy certainly can accelerate women’s incorporation in occupations, and the welfare state can facilitate their freedom from sex/gender constraints. Feminist and LGBT rights, with their own distinct material interests, require separate politics from the workers’ movement.

The authors of Liberating Theory called their approach “complementary holism,” but it never took off in sociology or as a political project. Instead, the Left adopted the language of “intersectionality,” which often amounted to a simple affirmation that all forms of power are interwoven and mutually reinforcing. While this is often the case, there are also circumstances and dynamics in which one system or system of power can interfere with others. When capitalist industrialization moved most of the population from farms to factories, it radically disrupted extended families. When capitalists finally supported the abolition of slavery or offered women independence through wage labor, they undermined white supremacy and patriarchy. Capitalists usually see it as more profitable to accede to racist or patriarchal practices… until it’s not; profit-maximizing comes before conservation of heteronormativity or white supremacy. Bad Bunny was still at the Super Bowl, even in this fascist moment.

Intersectionality discourse stripped away much of the complexity of a sociological multi-systems perspective. It also under-theorized the dynamics of social change, in particular the role of technology. Marxism proposed that technological innovation would change the structure of society, concentrating wealth and power, and uniting an immiserated transnational working class around the expropriation of the transnational owning class. Technology driven by a particular political economy - capitalist industrialization - creates the parties - workers v owners - and conflicts – class struggle - that drive change. Surely technological innovations are also catalytic in changing the power relations in other parts of society?

Are Technoprogressives Technological Determinists?

The role of technology in driving social change is another broad axis in social theory. Technological theory ranges from techno-determinists who believe that all important social change is driven by technological innovation and that technological progress has its own inescapable logic, to those who see big ideas or cultural forces as the determinants of change and technological innovation as something that can be steered or reversed. The Marxian tradition is largely in the technological-determinist camp, although empirically, Marxists acknowledge that every example has cultural and political specificity and is open to historical counterfactuals. A more sophisticated approach, suggested by Stephen J. Gould’s punctuated equilibrium model of natural selection, is to view technological innovation as an abrupt perturbation of the ecological terrain that stochastically enables rapid political and economic change. Technology opens the possibility, and our struggles determine the outcome.

This is the lesson of Graeber and Wengrow’s analysis of prehistoric civilization in The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. At every level of technology humans had a wide array of choices about how equal or oppressive they could be. Just because slavery and feudalism were common does not mean slavery was inevitable for that level of technology. Technological innovation changes the terrain of struggle and redistributes the weapons, but it doesn’t fix the game. Technologies have clearly allowed us to ratchet societies in freer and more egalitarian directions, even if progress is not guaranteed.

This is a central idea in a technoprogressive social theory: in general, technological innovation expands human freedom by freeing us from the burdens of social reproduction, and giving us a better deal at work, in the family, as citizens, and in the culture. Advances in the means of production are freeing us from drudgery, although we still have to struggle against the wealth inequalities it produces because of property relations. Industrialization and knowledge work gave women economic independence, and encouraged women’s education, while birth control and abortion gave women more choices over childbearing. Technology opened radical new freedoms from oppressive sex/gender norms and patriarchal power. This is why transgender therapies, the use of technologies to push back the oppressiveness of biology, have become the bête noire of the “anti-gender” patriarchal restorationists.

Plural Systems and Coalitional Politics

This stochastic view of technology’s role in social change is implicitly technoprogressive, a synthesis of the determinist and idealist approaches. However the argument for why a neo-functionalist, post-Marxist, multi-systems view is technoprogressive is more tenuous. There are certainly technoprogressives without a theory of social power or social change, and some who believe there is one dominant form of social power. I’ll just footnote that social change theories that adopt biological, evolutionary or cybernetic heuristics, heuristics that incorporate multi-systemic dynamics, are more illuminating than, for instance, Hegelian dialectics, which has at most one hegemonic system and its reaction.

The relevance of the “dual system” and then multi-system debates to the practical politics of the 1980s seemed obvious amidst post-New Left coalition efforts like Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition. If progressive politics was no longer just rich versus poor, but a collection of a dozen justice movements, how do we even explain what we have in common? The answer in my social democratic political organization, the Democratic Socialists of America, was “democracy”: we want to democratize every corner of society. The voice of the organized working class may need more amplification than other voices, but they are all part of the choir. A multi-systems view of power implied not only that no one form of power could be reduced to being derivative of another, but that no one organization could represent all the forms of liberal and egalitarian struggle within each domain. Social democratic parties could represent these diverse movements with a common moral language and vision, but not by setting one movement above the others. The result of this “identity politics” turn however was the fragmenting of a unifying identity, and the sacrifice of economic populism – fighting the 1% - for the expansion of liberal rights.

Looking back on the last forty years, the changes to the sex/gender system came astonishingly fast. Women’s empowerment and sex/gender freedom proceeded quickly in the developing and developed world alike, driving down marriage and fertility. Meanwhile, labor unions rooted in industry were being decimated by trade and technological innovation, and social democratic parties were finding a new base in the educated middle class, within which educated women were a powerful constituency. Poor and blue-collar men bled to the far right as they displaced their anxieties about economic precarity onto immigrants, and their anxieties about eroding patriarchy onto misogyny and transphobia. As the far right, fascist, and illiberal forces grew around the world, they have almost universally promised to roll back “gender” while adopting a wide variety of economic policies, libertarian to statist, albeit always preserving the wealth of kleptocratic elites.

The centrality of patriarchal restoration to the fascist project, and the growing gender gap in political ideology and partisan preferences, is empirical evidence that “class de-alignment” reflects the multipolar nature of social power and the coalitional nature of the progressive project. Class dealignment is not just the replacement of real material interests with fake culture war division. It is also the recognition of different material interests, with equal legitimacy as progressive political projects. Just as workers have common interests across national borders, so do people who want to be free from sex/gender oppression.

The Epstein Power Elite

Which brings me to the Epstein files. The kinds of violence against women and girls enacted by the Epstein conspirators happens at every level of social class. What is uniquely visible in the Epstein files is the impunity that the oligarch elites enjoy for their misogyny and trafficking. The US center Left realized the tragic consequences of having tribally defending Bill Clinton in the 1990s, despite evidence of his character. Yet, the tribal nature of the Epstein conspiracy again led many American progressives to ignore the scandal. Now it has become the largest data dump of elite influence peddling, backroom diplomacy, and financial backscratching ever made available for social science and citizen sleuthing, all tied together by horrific crimes against women and girls.

The global rise of fascism is a demonstration of the multipolar nature of power and the need for a coalition of relatively autonomous organizations fighting for sex/gender freedom alongside workers’ rights, the rights for cultural minorities, and civil liberties. The Epstein saga is a case study of how important patriarchal violence and power are for the global ruling class. The Epstein class isn’t just a financial cabal, but a biopolitical one that uses patriarchal violence (trafficking) as a glue for elite cohesion.

The Epstein case also illustrates what C. Wright Mills called The Power Elite, which is another multipolar theory of power. Mills argued against Marxist reductionism, focusing solely on the owners of capital. Like the functionalists and complementary holists, C. Wright Mills assumed that there are multiple castles of social power: politics, the military, entertainment, religion, and the academy, in addition to business and wealth, each with its own elite. Elites in different castles mix it up through social activities, performing the informal work of elite coordination at country clubs and private islands. For the Epstein class, his island was one such “room where it happens.” His email archive shows the web of alliances connecting the Kremlin, Mossad, Saudi, British, and European royals, the tech oligarchs, and the MAGA fascist White House. Unfortunately, C. Wright Mills was blind to the pervasive patriarchy in all those castles and their country clubs. The Epstein files brings that patriarchy to center stage.

A related technoprogressive point about the Epstein files is that, compared to previous scandals, they reveal the profound difference information and communication technologies make for the transparency and accountability of elites. This case dumped millions of records into the hands of eight billion forensic detectives. While Palantir is building the database for repression, we are also liberating data for bottom-up accountability. It may take years for democratic forces in the United States to hold our criminals accountable, but elites around the world are already being held to account.

A Multi-system View of Technopolitics

So the technoprogressive question is how technological innovation opens more liberal and egalitarian ways to accomplish the core needs of social reproduction. If AI erodes work, and we adopt a universal basic income, we are expanding human freedom at the expense of capitalist wage slavery. We have to be clear about whether there are trade-offs between equality and efficiency; progressives have to demonstrate that they can make the trains run on time even if they are free. We still want sustainable economic growth, and for economic dislocation from automation and UBI to occur at a managed pace. Technoprogressives are not, for the most part, accelerationists who want innovation to cause a collapse of the economy and state.

Technoprogressives, like the New Left theorists before, also need to decide how much attention to give to technopolitical issues “outside” of the economic, such as sex/gender liberation, anti-racism and anti-authoritarianism. If, as Shulamith Firestone proposed, we extend access to reproductive technology to artificial wombs, then we can more easily reproduce without forcing disproportionate burdens on women. Artificial wombs could enable greater sex/gender freedom, just as contraception and abortion have. The patriarchs and sex/gender traditionalists will try to commandeer artificial wombs for repression, using them as an argument for forced “fetal rescue” from women wanting to end pregnancies. Whether artificial wombs are liberatory depends on the outcome of social struggle.

In the current debate over rebuilding blue-collar, male, and centrist support for progressive policies, transgender rights are often framed as the step too far for ordinary people. This misunderstands the centrality of the trans cause to sex/gender freedom. As we continue to perfect our technological control of secondary sex characteristics, we chip away at the remaining constraints of the two-billion-year-old sex bifurcation accident, toward full postgender morphological freedom.

The relative autonomy of social systems and their different forms of power underlie the need for a coalitional progressivism that unites disparate causes through shared values, rather than a single hegemonic ideology and organization. The technoprogressive project is also coalitional. In the Technoprogressive Declaration, we framed the project as reaching out to a coalition encompassing all projects of Enlightenment social reform, while pointing them toward the liberatory potentials of emerging technologies.

Partisans of the promises of the Enlightenment, we have many cousins in other movements for freedom and social justice. We must build solidarity with these movements, even as we intervene to point to the radical possibilities of technologies that they often ignore.

The technoprogressive political tendency has no necessary social theory. But a multi-system view of power informs the technoprogressive project better than reductionist views. We must recognize that the struggle against the “Epstein class” is not merely a fight against concentrated wealth, but also patriarchal violence, state capture and the global promotion of racist parties, converging to shield an unaccountable elite. The technoprogressive task is to suggest how we can use emerging technologies to liberate ourselves from not only natural and social necessity, but unnecessary inequalities. By democratizing the “separate castles” of power and ensuring that innovation serves as a scaffold for bodily and economic autonomy, we find the Good Fight in every battle. In the words of Nemik, “The frontier of the Rebellion is everywhere. And even the smallest act of insurrection pushes our lines forward.” The future is not a predetermined output of our machines, but a stochastic terrain where our small acts of insurrection determine the final outcome.

Events

AI + work: Building pro-worker AI. Wednesday, February 25, 2026, 2:00 - 3:00 p.m. EST. What is pro-worker artificial intelligence (AI), and how can we build it? On February 25, The Hamilton Project at the Brookings Institution will host a virtual event to discuss pro-worker AI.
Online only: https://www.hamiltonproject.org/event/building-pro-worker-ai/

Nir and J host Prosthetic Gods event - Sidore Memorial lecture – April 2, 2026 – Portsmouth, NH We will be taping an episode with a live studio audience, and then participating in debates with students about some of the topics we have discussed. A good time will be had by all.
https://www.themusichall.org/events/sipsofscience2604/

Horizons in Ethics and Emerging Technologies – April 16, 2026 – Turin, Italy

The inaugural conference of the Hub for Ethics and Emerging Technologies (HEET), a new research hub affiliated with the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies (IEET), is based at the University of Turin. This full-day event will bring together leading experts and early-career researchers to explore the ethical dimensions of emerging technologies, including human enhancement, artificial intelligence, and quantum technology.
https://ieet.org/heet-2026/

Technoprogressivism Course – June 15-August 21 - online

This summer Matteo McDermant and I will be teaching a course on technoprogressivism. Email director@ieet.org if you would like be added to the course mailing list.

News Roundup

IEET Technoprogressive Project

Bread and Robots talks to Maren Costa about Amazon Employees For Climate Justice.

Amazon Employees For Climate Justice

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Technoprog Transhumanism: A Conversation with Marc Roux.

Technoprog Transhumanism

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