A Group Raising Awareness on Human Achievement
Our Purpose
The Good News
Exponential technologies in information, nanotech, biotech, robotics, and AI promise a future of unimaginable prosperity with longer, healthier, even living-to-200 transhuman lives for all.
These technologies will radically transform and drive in synergy the economy, public policy, social institutions, and culture in coming decades.
The Challenges
But people on both left and right fear these technologies will bring job loss, haves-and-have-nots dystopias ruled by callous elites, and dehumanization, and they call for restrictions on the free market that allows innovators to create such tech. Worse, these fears are in a culture in which the Enlightenment value of reason is being replaced by dogma, an open inquiry by censorship, individualism by “identity politics” and the joy of purposeful, productive achievement by nihilism, frustration, and anger.
The Opportunities
The good news is most folks, especially the youth, still love technology. Further, entrepreneurs creating this tech are individualists who love their work and want to prosper personally while creating a better world.
A Human Achievement Alliance can help to ensure the flourishing of exponential technology and re-establish the cultural foundations of a prosperous, inclusive, civil society by exploiting the synergy between those who value technology, entrepreneurial achievers, and friends of freedom. It offers an optimistic, exciting, empowering vision of the world as it can be and should be.
In operation, it seeks to:
“We are all achievers, whether nurturing a child to maturity or business to profitability, writing a song, poem, business plan or dissertation, laying the bricks to a building or designing it.”
To help ensure this bright future, visit www.humanachievementalliance.org or contact Edward Hudgins at [email protected].
OUR PEOPLE
Edward Hudgins, Ph.D., Founder
Edward Hudgins is founder of the Human Achievement Alliance. He’d been developing this project idea some years ago, finally bringing it to fruition in 2020. He has been fascinated by science and technology since working as a high school intern at NASA-Goddard during the Apollo 11 moonshot.
He recognizes the potential of exponential technology in information, biotech, nanotech, AI and robotics to usher in an era of undreamed of prosperity with long, healthy lives. But he also sees the need to revolutionize our antiquated education and to remove government barriers and disincentives that block innovation and entrepreneurship ship. As important, he sees the need to replace the pessimism, nihilism, anger and malevolence that dominates our culture with optimism, purpose, joy in achievement and vision of a benevolent future.
Hudgins has served as research director at the Heartland Institute, commissioning, fact-checking and editing policy papers on energy and environment, healthcare, education, and taxes and regulations. His own research, podcasts, speeches and media work focused especially on the need to revamp the current government certification process for new medical treatments, labor regulations, and current failing schooling system.
Before Heartland, he served in various roles at The Atlas Society, director of advocacy, executive director, and senior scholar, promoting open Objectivism, the philosophy of reason, achievement, individualism, and freedom. He examined the intersection of politics, values, and culture, with a special emphasis on the need for a human achievement culture. In his book, The Republican Party Civil War: Will Freedom Win?, he criticized the GOP’s drift away from advocating individual liberty and free markets.
Before joining TAS, Hudgins was director of regulatory studies and editor of Regulation magazine at the Cato Institute. There the books Hudgins produced included Freedom to Trade: Refuting the New Protectionism, The Last Monopoly: Privatizing the Postal Service for the Information Age, Mail @ the Millennium: Will the Postal Service Go Private?, and Space: The Free-Market Frontier.
Prior to Cato, Hudgins worked as a senior economist at the Joint Economic Committee of the U.S. Congress, specializing in trade and regulatory issues. He also contributed to the Contract With America, the GOP game plan in the 1994 elections.
Hudgins also worked at The Heritage Foundation as policy analyst, specializing in trade and international development, as deputy director for domestic policy studies, and as director of the Center for International Economic Growth, where he pioneered the concept of an Index of Economic Freedom.
Hudgins has been active in Maryland politics and was elected three times as a commission in the town of Cottage City.
Over the past three decades Hudgins has appeared on most major TV networks, and his op-eds have been featured in papers like the Washington Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Boston Global, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and the Houston Chronicle.
Hudgins has a BA in government and politics from the University of Maryland, an MA in political theory and history from American University, and Ph.D. in political philosophy and international political economy from Catholic University of America. He has taught at universities both in the United States and Germany. He can be reached at [email protected].