Oxford Martin School: Public Lectures and Seminars

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

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.

Powering the future: switching on the renewables

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.

Road to somewhere? Resilient infrastructure for sustainable development

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.

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

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

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

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.