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 the

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 numero

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.

Panel discussion on whether Globalisation can benefit the poor with Alex Gennie, Ian Goldin, Rushanara Ali MP, James Drummond and Nick Gowing. Globalisation is bound in a complex relationship with poverty. Its forces are powerful and can act to either destroy or radically improve the economic position of areas in development. Despite this, the opportunities that the phenomenon presents for development are largely underexplored and underexploited.

Dr James Martin, Founder of the Oxford Martin School and founder of the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Monterey Institute of International Studies. the largest nongovernmental organization in the world devoted exclusively to research and training to stop the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.

Distinguished Public Lecture. Globalization has created a more interconnected, interdependent and complex world than ever witnessed before. Whilst this openness and connectivity has brought enormous benefits, it has also increased our vulnerability and exposure to global shocks, such as the recent financial crisis. Balancing these dimensions brings significant challenges at the global, regional and local levels. As we face some of the biggest challenges of the 21st century, how equipped are global governance structures to coordinate and address issues such as climate change, trade tensions, food security and economic uncertainty? How do we resolve the inevitable strains that exist between global and national priorities in such debates? In this distinguished lecture, Mr Pascal Lamy, Director-General of the World Trade Organization, offers his perspectives on these critical issues from his distinguished career as a French political adviser, a businessman and as former European Commissioner for Trade.

Sachs argues that for the U.S. to regain sound fiscal health the country must also reform its politics. The lecture is immediately followed by a panel discussion with: Professor Valpy FitzGerald, Department of International Development, Professor Ian Goldin, Oxford Martin School (chair), Professor Peter Tufano, Said Business School, Professor Adrian Wood, Department of International Development, Professor Sir Adam Roberts, Centre for International Studies (Please note Prof Sir Adam Roberts is replacing Prof Ngaire Woods)

Dr Jill Tarter, Director, Center for SETI Research, SETI Institute gives a talk for the Oxford Martin School Seminar Series.

Professor Clive Hamilton delivers a critique of the consequentialist approach to the ethics of geoengineering, the approach that deploys assessment of costs and benefits in a risk framework to justify climatic intervention. Professor Hamilton argues that there is a strong case for preferring the natural, and that the unique and highly threatening character of global warming renders the standard approach to the ethics of climate change unsustainable. Moreover, the unstated metaphysical assumption of conventional ethical, economic and policy thinking - modernity's idea of the autonomous human subject analysing and acting on an inert external world - is the basis for the kind of "technological thinking" that lies at the heart of the climate crisis. Technological thinking both projects a systems framework onto the natural world and frames it as a catalogue of resources for the benefit of humans. Recent discoveries by Earth system science itself - the arrival of the Anthropocene, the prevalence of non-linearities

Mass media serve vital roles in communication processes between science, policy and the public, and often stitch together perceptions, intentions, considerations, and actions regarding climate change. This talk will touch on salient and swirling contextual factors as well as competing journalistic pressures and norms that contribute to how issues, events and information have often become climate 'news'.

Bishop and Green led a discussion based on their recent book, "The Road From Ruin: A New Capitalism for a Big Society". Together, they will take a look at what set us on the road to the recent financial crisis, whilst also highlighting the signs to guide us back to prosperity. Matthew Bishop is US Business Editor and New York Bureau Chief of The Economist. Michael Green is a leading independent economist and writer.

The recent economic rise of China and India has attracted a great deal of attention--and justifiably so. Together, the two countries account for one-fifth of the global economy and are projected to represent a full third of the world's income by 2025. Yet, many of the views regarding China and India's market reforms and high growth have been tendentious, exaggerated, or oversimplified. This talk by leading economist Professor Bardhan will explore the challenges that both countries must overcome to become true leaders in the international economy. Bardhan's latest book 'Awakening Giants, Feet of Clay' investigates China's and India's economic reforms, each nation's pattern and composition of growth, and the problems afflicting their agricultural, industrial, infrastructural, and financial sectors. His talk will consider how these factors affect poverty, inequality, and environment, how political factors shape each country's pattern of burgeoning capitalism, and how significant poverty reduction in both count

Part of the School's intergrative seminar series. Delivered by Professor Patricia Hirl Longstaff, James Martin Senior Visiting Fellow, Professor, Syracuse University, Research Associate, Harvard Program on Information Resources Policy. Climate change, economic globalization, and many new levels of communication have all made many human, biological and technical systems more unpredictable. This has been called The New Normal: a time of higher uncertainty, with fast and strong disruptions in many systems. This is affecting technical systems, biological systems, economic systems, and human organizations. This has increased interest in resilience, a strategy that is often seen in systems that must operate under high uncertainty. Professor Longstaff will discuss some of the attributes of resilience that is seen in many systems and how resilience can fail. She has received funding for her interdisciplinary work from the US National Science Foundation. She has applied these concepts to community planning, human/tech