culture; engagement with cultural critics, artists, writers, and filmmakers in exploring the lessons to be derived from these. The institute has since shifted its research away from these programs and towards research on the policy implications of human enhancement and other emerging technologies. It has since partnered with the Applied Ethics Center at the University of Massachusetts Boston to focus on two specific programs: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Work, Democracy, and Conflict Cyborgs and Human Enhancement Conferences In late May 2006, the IEET held the Human Enhancement Technologies and Human Rights conference at the Stanford University Law School in Stanford, California. The IEET along with other progressive organizations hosted a conference in December 2013 at Yale University on giving various species "personhood" rights. Fellows of the Institute represent the Institute at various conferences and events, including the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In 2014, the IEET lead and/or co-sponsored five conferences including: Eros Evolving: The Future of Love, Sex, Marriage and Beauty conference in April in Piedmont, California, and the Global Existential Risks and Radical Futures conference in June in Piedmont, California. Reception Wesley J. Smith, an American conservative lawyer and advocate of intelligent design, wrote that the institute has one of the most active transhumanist websites, and the writers write on the "nonsense of uploading minds into computers and fashioning a post humanity." Smith also criticized the results of the institute's online poll that indicated the majority of Institute's readers are atheist or agnostic. According to Smith, this was evidence that transhumanism is a religion and a desperate attempt to find purpose in a nihilistic and materialistic world. The institute's advocacy project to raise the status of animals to the legal status of personhood also drew criticism from Smith because he claimed humans are exceptional and raising the status of animals may lower the status of humans. Katarina Felsted and Scott D. Wright wrote that although the IEET considers itself technoprogressive some of its views can be described as strong transhumanism or a "radical version of post ageing," and one particular criticism of both moderate and strong transhumanism is that moral arbitrariness undermine both forms of transhumanism. References External links Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies Journal for Evolution and Technology Ethics of science and technology Charities based in Connecticut Think tanks based in the United States Ethics