With Lizzie O’Shea, Lawyer, writer and founder of Digital Rights Watch

A Research, Ethics and Society Initiative and Sara Fine Institute Lecture

Too often, technology is presented without context. It is treated as a natural phenomenon or a force of nature, inevitable and unstoppable. To make sense of our digital present, there is an instinctive sense that we need to imagine the future, and bend society around the path determined for us by tech. 

But making technology is a human activity, and the technological problems we face are human problems. An understanding of history, philosophy, sociology and the arts is invaluable to making sense of technological problems. If we want to reclaim the present as the cause of a different future, we don't just need coders and engineers, we need people from all different disciplines to collaborate and make the most of the potential of the digital revolution.

Through this collaboration, we can create a digital future in which we are not treated as nameless cohorts to be processed by machines, or raw data for analyzing, but instead understood as people with agency, dignity, curiosity and desire to shape our own destiny. The stakes could not be higher: as we face problems like the climate crisis, wealth inequality and the decay of social democracies, it is vital that we find ways to make technology work for the many, not the few.

Register here.