Can every doctor understand health statistics? Gerd Gigerenzer will describe the efforts towards this goal, a few successes, but also the steadfast forces that undermine doctors’ ability to understand and act on evidence.

Oxford Martin School: Public Lectures and Seminars

Better doctors, better patients, better decisions: Risk literacy in health

Globally, renewable energy has a foot in the door. But significant challenges remain. Will we be able to execute on the rapid deployment of zero carbon energy required to meet a 1.5C future? This presentation highlights the major challenges and provides some early insights on how we might tackle these significant societal issues.

Powering the future: switching on the renewables

Professor Hall will share experiences of establishing long-term plans for sustainable infrastructure in many countries around the world. One estimate suggests that $2.3trillion was invested in infrastructure worldwide last year. That vast investment has provided roads, power plants, mobile phone networks, dams and recycling plants. Whether those investments have been sustainable is questionable. As well as providing essential services that people need, infrastructure too often locks in carbon emissions, fragments habitats and opens them up for exploitation, appropriates land and exacerbates inequalities. In many respects, choices about infrastructure investment are a remarkable point of leverage, when the future course of development is set, literally, in concrete.Too often these decisions are subject to political patronage, rent seeking and worse. This lecture will examine the many impacts that infrastructure can have on sustainable development, for better or for worse.

Road to somewhere? Resilient infrastructure for sustainable development

Lord Sumption will discuss the impact on our constitution and political system of the referendum of 2016 and its aftermath.

British politics after Brexit: reflections on the last three years and the next fifty

Daniel Susskind discusses ideas from his new book 'A World Without Work' New technologies have always provoked panic about workers being replaced by machines.In the past, such fears have been misplaced, and many economists maintain that they remain so today. Yet in A World Without Work, Daniel Susskind shows why this time really is different. Advances in artificial intelligence mean that all kinds of jobs are increasingly at risk. Susskind will argue that machines no longer need to reason like us in order to outperform us. Increasingly, tasks that used to be beyond the capability of computers - from diagnosing illnesses to drafting legal contracts - are now within their reach. The threat of technological unemployment is real. So how can we all thrive in a world with less work? Susskind will remind us that technological progress could bring about unprecedented prosperity, solving one of mankind's oldest problems: making sure that everyone has enough to live on. The challenge will be to distribute this prosperity fairly, constrain the burgeoning power of Big Tech, and provide meaning in a world where work is no longer the centre of our lives.

A world without work: technology, automation and how we should respond

Tapio Schneider discusses the influence of clouds on climate, and how advances in the modelling of clouds can help us predict our climate future more accurately.

Clouds and climate

n this book talk, Professor Sonia Contera will talk about how Nanotechnology is transforming medicine and the future of biology.

Nano comes to life: how nanotechnology is transforming medicine and the future of biology

William bird discusses how healthcare focused on communities and acitve lifestyles can lead to greater wellbeing. We are entering the fourth revolution of healthcare. The first revolution was Public Health with sanitation, cleaner air and better housing. The second is medical healthcare with the advancement of diagnostics and treatment with a focus on disease cure. The third is personalised health, through individual knowledge, technology, behaviour change and precision medicine. However, these revolutions have left three major problems unresolved; unsustainable healthcare, rising health inequalities and climate change driven by unsustainable living. So, we enter the fourth revolution in healthcare which builds on the previous three. This is based on communities rather than individuals, supporting a sustainable active lifestyle, eating local produce and using culture, art and contact with nature to create purpose and connections to each other, leading to greater resilience and wellbeing. It is a revolution when Smart Cities become central to the delivery of health and when advanced technology becomes almost invisible encouraging a lifestyle closer rather than further from nature. In this talk Dr Bird will explain how we are already delivering this future and how biological changes such as chronic inflammation, epigenetics, mitochondrial dysfunction and telomere shortening can provide the scientific link between wellbeing and disease.

Why we need a fourth revolution in healthcare

Data-driven micro-targeted campaigns have become a key part of political strategy. As personal and societal data becomes more accessible, we need to understand how it can be used and whether it is relevant to regulate political candidates' access to data.

Psychologically informed micro-targeted political campaigns: the use and abuse of data

Carl Frey discusses his book 'The Technology Trap' In this book talk the Author, Carl Benedikt Frey, will discuss how the Industrial Revolution was a defining moment in history, but how few grasped its enormous consequences at the time. Now that we are in the midst of another technological revolution, how can the lessons of the past can help us to more effectively face the present?

The technology trap - capital, labour and power in the age of automation

Robin Cohen discusses migration throughout history and in the present day. Migration is present at the dawn of human history - the phenomena of hunting and gathering, seeking seasonal pasture and nomadism being as old as human social organisation itself. The flight from natural disasters, adverse climatic changes, famine, and territorial aggression by other communities or other species were also common occurrences. But if migration is as old as the hills, why is it now so politically sensitive? Why do migrants leave? Where do they go, in what numbers and for what reasons? Do migrants represent a threat to the social and political order? Are they none-the-less necessary to provide labour, develop their home countries, increase consumer demand and generate wealth? Can migration be stopped? One of Britain's leading migration scholars, Robin Cohen, will probe these issues in this talk.

Migration: the movement of humankind from prehistory to the present

The President of the Rockefeller Foundation discusses the need for new solutions for energy transformation and economic development. We cannot end poverty without ending energy poverty. Ever since the world’s first power plants whirred to life in 1882, we have seen how electricity is the lynchpin for development in all of its forms. Manufacturing and industrial productivity, agriculture and food security, nutrition, hygiene, water, public health, education, even community engagement, in other words, daily life in a modern economy, demand access to reliable energy. And yet despite significant progress over nearly 140 years, more than 800 million people around the world live without access to electricity, and hundreds of millions more struggle with unreliable or unaffordable service. Families are deprived of the means to labour productively and their quality of life and status in extreme poverty goes unchanged. We need urgently to fast-track sustainable power solutions, investments, and partnerships across the globe to catalyze an energy transformation and accelerate sustainable, reliable and modern electrification for economic development.

Ending energy poverty: reframing the poverty discourse

Prof Beinhocker will argue that by changing the ideologies, narratives, and memes that govern our economic system, we can create the political space required to rapidly transform to a sustainable and just economic system. The biosphere and econosphere are deeply interlinked and both are in crisis. Industrial, fossil-fuel based capitalism delivered major increases in living standards from the mid-18th through late-20th centuries, but at the cost of widespread ecosystem destruction, planetary climate change, and a variety of economic injustices. Furthermore, over the past 40 years, the gains of growth have flowed almost exclusively to the top 10%, fuelling populist anger across many countries, endangering both democracy and global action on climate change. This talk will argue that underlying the current dominant model of capitalism are a set of theories and ideologies that are outdated, unscientific, and morally unsound. New foundations can be built from modern understandings of human behaviour, complex systems science, and broad moral principles. By changing the ideologies, narratives, and memes that govern our economic system, we can create the political space required for the policies and actions required to rapidly transform to a sustainable and just economic system.

New economic and moral foundations for the Anthropocene

Barbara Finamore discusses whether China will take the lead in saving our planet from environmental catastrophe. Now that Trump has turned the United States into a global climate outcast, will China take the lead in saving our planet from environmental catastrophe? Many signs point to yes. China, the world's largest carbon emitter, is leading a global clean energy revolution, phasing out coal consumption and leading the development of a global system of green finance. But as leading China environmental expert and author of Will China Save the Planet? Barbara Finamore will explain in this talk, it is anything but easy. The fundamental economic and political challenges that China faces in addressing its domestic environmental crisis threaten to derail its low-carbon energy transition. Yet there is reason for hope. China's leaders understand that transforming the world's second largest economy from one dependent on highly polluting heavy industry to one focused on clean energy, services and innovation is essential, not only to the future of the planet, but to China's own prosperity. We will also hear from respondent Radhika Khosla, Research Director at the Oxford India Centre for Sustainable Development, Somerville College.

From pollution to solution: will China save the planet?

Professor Sir Paul Collier and Professor Colin Mayer CBE will share the latest thinking and research into the future of capitalism and the corporation to understand how business might be changed to make it work better for society. The speakers will bring together their new books, The Future of Capitalism: Facing The New Anxieties and Prosperity: Better Business Makes the Greater Good, alongside the British Academy's Future of the Corporation programme research to pose serious questions of our economic system.

The future of the corporation, economy and society

Public Lectures and Seminars from the Oxford Martin School, University of Oxford. The Oxford Martin School brings together the best minds from different fields to tackle the most pressing issues of the 21st century.

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Oxford Martin School: Public Lectures and Seminars

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