Oxford Martin School: Public Lectures and Seminars

With Elon Musk, CEO and Product Architect of Tesla Motors and the CEO/CTO of Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX). Elon Musk, the Founder of Tesla Motors and SpaceX, and Chairman of SolarCity, speaks from his own experiences at the forefront of technology and innovation. This inspirational Oxford Martin School presentation at the Sheldonian Theatre covers space travel, electric vehicles and solar energy.

With Professor Paul Klenerman Principal Investigator, Institute for Emerging Infections. Paul Klenerman demonstrates the way our immune systems work and discusses the best way to boost our natural defences in an effort to fight infection from Hep C and HIV. Dr Bennett Foddy, Deputy Director, Institute for Science and Ethics, addresses the ethical dilemmas which can arise from the process of clinical trials.

With Professor Liam Dolan and Professor Jane Langdale, Co-Directors, Plants for the 21st Century Institute. As we struggle to feed the world's growing population is it ethically wrong not to use all the tools at our disposal to help increase food production? Liam Dolan and Jane Langdale explore the possibilities and benefits that could be derived from using scientific advancement to enhance agricultural production. Professor Julian Savulescu, Director of the Institute for Science and Ethics, questions the ethical issues involved.

With Professor Myles Allen, Co-Director, Oxford Martin Programme on Resource Stewardship. You can show people all the evidence in the world about climate change, but if the policy debate is framed in an intractable way, it won't make any difference. And that's the problem. As climate modelling and scientific projections improve how much will people's behaviour change over the coming decades?

Remote controlled and autonomous robotic weapons are bringing new levels of complexity to modern warfare. It's when such robots are designed as lethal weapons that the threshold for moral justification gets higher.

With Kary Kasparov, world chess champion, writer and political activist. The world we live in now is very different from the one that was imagined 50 years ago. Past decades foresaw a future of flying cars and supersonic jets, but commercial air travel is slower in 2013 than it was in 1976. For years we were assured that we would have abundant clean and cheap energy; instead we have record fossil fuel prices, oil spills, and nuclear meltdowns. From poverty rates to superbugs, one thing is certain: this is not the future we were promised. How did we get so far off course from the era of radical tech innovation and ambitious exploration? Why did our culture retreat toward risk-aversion and security? And how can we revive the spirit of innovation, and help bring about its promise of positive transformational change and far-reaching societal benefits?

Larry Brilliant, President of the Skoll Global Threats Fund, gives a talk for the Oxford Martin School. In our interconnected world the possibilities for a deadly virus to spread rapidly are frightening. According to Dr Larry Brilliant, the modernity which is creating and causing the rapid spread of viruses, through international travel and global food supply chains, could actually provide us with the solutions to their spread.

William H. Janeway CBE, Senior Advisor and Managing Director at Warburg Pincus, gives a talk for the Oxford Martin School. The innovation economy begins with discovery and culminates in speculation. Over some 250 years, economic growth has been driven by successive processes of trial and error: upstream exercises in research and invention and downstream experiments in exploiting the new economic space opened by innovation. Drawing on his professional experiences, William H. Janeway will provide an accessible pathway to appreciate the dynamics of the innovation economy. He will combine personal reflections from a career spanning forty years in venture capital, with the development of an original theory of the role of asset bubbles in financing technological innovation and of the role of the state in playing an enabling role in the innovation process. Today, with the state frozen as an economic actor and access to the public equity markets only open to a minority, the innovation economy is stalled; learning these lessons from this talk will contribute to its renewal.

Parag Khanna and Ayesha Khanna; Directors of The Hybrid Reality Institute, gives a talk for the Oxford Martin School public lecture series. With Professor Ian Goldin; Director, Oxford Martin Institute. The Information Age is giving way to the Hybrid Age, mankind's fifth major era of socio-technical relations. What distinguishes the Hybrid Age from previous periods is two-fold: the rapidly merging combinations of technologies with each other, and our increasing integration with technology. Together these trends portend decades of continuous disruption to our lives in the biological, social, economic, political, educational and other domains. In this lecture, Ayesha and Parag Khanna will discuss the main characteristics of the Hybrid Age, elaborating on the notion of human-technology co-evolution and the framework of geo-technology for interpreting historical change. Particular attention will be given to manifestations such as social robotics, the virtual economy, and smart cities. They will also present numerous scenarios for social, economic and geopolitical disruptions that might occur in the coming decades.

Professor Thomas Homer-Dixon gives a talk on Dehumanization for the Oxford Martin School Public Lectures series. Introduced by Professor Ian Goldin. Dehumanization is arguably a defining feature of the most brutal acts of human violence, such as saturation bombardment of civilian populations, terrorist attacks on urban centers, intense battlefield combat, and genocide. I propose a psychological explanation of this phenomenon that uses a catastrophe manifold to describe a set of psychological states in an individual's mind and the possible pathways of movement between these states. The manifold exists in a three-dimensional phase space defined by the variables identity, justice, and structural constraint. It specifies five hypotheses about the causes and dynamics of dehumanization. Taken together, these hypotheses represent an overarching theory of the nonlinear collapse of identification at the level of the individual.