Festival of Dangerous Ideas

Today the human race faces existential challenges. Our prosperity has been built on unsustainable economic and environmental practices — but our social and political processes seem incapable of fixing anything. Why are we unable to even acknowledge the truth of our predicament? Chaired by Rebecca Huntley. Satyajit Das is a former financier. He anticipated the 2008 financial crisis and has been prescient in outlining subsequent developments. In September 2014, Bloomberg included him as one of the 50 most influential people in international finance.

When you're on a bicycle at a red light with no car or pedestrian in sight, do you still wait for the green? Do you obey every single law? Surely fearful compliance with every niggling regulation defies the much-vaunted "freedom" that is the premise of democracy. Maybe that's what drives our fascination with film and fiction criminality: we envy renegades. Is breaking a rule a day better than an apple for your health? Lionel Shriver is an American author and journalist, living in the United Kingdom. Her novel We Need to Talk About Kevin won the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2005. She writes frequently for the Wall Street Journal, The Guardian and The Independent.

If you've been enjoying our deep dive festival sessions you might want to check out bite sized conundrums in Little Bad Thing, the new podcast from The Ethics Centre. True stories about the things we wish we hadn't done. Smart, dark, wry, and surprising, this is a show for anyone who's made a big decision or regretted a small one. Search for Little Bad thing and subscribe.

What does the future hold? A reign of world peace with stunning medical breakthroughs conquering death, illness and disease? Or a world where human beings have destroyed the web of living things and put our own existence at risk by playing with science we don't fully understand? Must we think in terms of these extremes to create a positive future or prevent disaster? Join a panel of brilliant optimists and pessimists to understand some of the amazing risks and opportunities that lie before us. Tim Flannery is an Australian scientist, activist, author and editor of over twenty books, former Chief Scientist at the federal Climate Commission, and currently leader of the independent Climate Council. Elizabeth Kolbert is an American environmental journalist and author. She is a staff writer at the New Yorker and the author of several books, including Field Notes from a Catastrophe and The Sixth Extinction: An unnatural history. Steven Pinker is an experimental psychologist and one of the world's foremost writers on language, mind, and human nature. He is currently Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard University and his most recent book is The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why violence has declined. Jaan Tallinn is a founding engineer of Skype and Kazaa, a co-founder of personalised medicine company MetaMed, and a co-founder of the Centre for Study of Existential Risk at Cambridge.

Why is the right to doctor-assisted dying supported by so many and legal for so few? Helen Joyce became international editor of The Economist in January 2014 having previously served as International Education Editor and Sao Paulo bureau chief. Before joining The Economist she worked as editor of Plus, an online magazine about maths published by the University of Cambridge, and was founding editor for The Royal Statistical Society's quarterly magazine, Significance.

Edward Snowden has been condemned as a traitor and celebrated as a patriot. In his mind, he is simply a man of good conscience who has followed in the footsteps of family members who have faithfully served the people and Constitution of the USA since the War of Independence. This was the motivation behind his revelation of US secrets. Governments are now armed with technology that enables them to pry into every aspect of our lives…all in the name of security. Snowden asks us to consider the possibility that we may have more to fear from our own governments than from any external threat – and that our liberties have already been lost.

No one has a monopoly on truth when it comes to the past and present lives of Australia's Indigenous peoples. Conservatives tend to deny that Indigenous peoples should have special status in the Constitution. Progressives tend to turn a blind eye to the profound dysfunction that plagues so many Indigenous communities – and refuse to accept that Indigenous people want and deserve all of the benefits of the modern world. Marcia Langton is a fearless truth-teller who challenges the dangerous orthodoxies of a society that seems incapable of making peace with the truth of its own past.

Why has humanity still not worked out how to make nuclear weapons safe? As an investigative journalist, Eric Schlosser continues to explore subjects ignored by the mainstream media and gives a voice to people at the margins of society. He's followed the harvest with migrant farm workers in California, spent time with meatpacking workers in Texas and Colorado, told the stories of marijuana growers and pornographers and victims of violent crime, gone on duty with the NYPD Bomb Squad, and visited prisons throughout the US. His most recent book, Command and Control (2013), examines the efforts of the military, since the atomic era began during World War II, to prevent nuclear weapons from being stolen, sabotaged, or detonated by accident. Command and Control was a New York Times Notable Book, a Time Magazine Top 10 Nonfiction Book, was a finalist for the 2014 Pulitzer Prize (History) and also received the Gold Medal Award (Nonfiction) from the 2013 California Book Awards.

In the West, slavery is often seen as a dark part of the colonial past. Although it's illegal in all countries, it remains alive and well—and is growing dramatically. Impervious to recession, it forms a thriving part of the globalised sex industry run by organised crime. International trafficking of women and children for sex is a multi-billion dollar business that won't be anywhere near 'abolition' until those who make money from its operations and buy its services think again about what being complicit in slavery means. Lydia Cacho is an award-winning investigative journalist, writer and activist. Her reporting focuses on violence against women in her home country of Mexico. Her latest book is Slavery Inc.: The untold story of international sex trafficking.

Is innovation overvalued? It is the dominant ideology of our era. But what if building, maintenance and repair prove much more important to our daily lives than the vast majority of technological innovations? Co-founder of The Maintainers, a research group focused on maintenance, repair, infrastructure and mundane labor, Lee Vinsel is an Assistant Professor of Science and Technology Studies at Stevens Institute of Technology. His research focuses on science and technology policy, and his first book examines the history of government regulation of the automobile in the United States, from the birth of the internal combustion engine to the Google Car. His work has been featured in The Atlantic, The Guardian, Le Monde, Fortune and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.