Aspen Ideas to Go

Cybersecurity gaps in the technological systems that run our lives are becoming more and more apparent. Hardly a day goes by that we don’t hear about another major institution hit with an attack. Many hospitals and healthcare organizations have suffered interruptions of service because of cyber hacks and ransomware, and the consequences for patients can literally be life or death. But could these kinds of threats go even deeper? What happens when we implant internet-connected devices into our bodies, like pacemakers and defibrillators? Electrical engineer and professor Kevin Fu researches medical device cybersecurity, and uses threat modeling to game out and catch every possible weak spot before the unthinkable happens to a patient. Jessica Wilkerson works on the regulation and enforcement side, developing policy at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for safe and effective medical devices. Vivian Schiller, the executive director of Aspen Digital, moderates a conversation between the two about what it takes to ensure safety against increasingly sophisticated bad actors when the stakes couldn’t be higher, and the exact methods and scenarios are unknown.

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The pandemic amplified political polarization. As doctors learned more about COVID-19, protocols changed and people started to question the guidance. Science itself, came under scrutiny. CPR Audio Innovations producer Emily Williams shares a conversation with Dr. Ashish Jha, a White House COVID-19 response coordinator.

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Looking around and experiencing the suffering and injustice in the world can make it difficult to believe that happiness exists. But the Judeo-Christian tradition teaches that it’s sinful to succumb to despair, and we have a responsibility to ourselves and others to try and find our way through dark times. On the other hand, when you avoid suffering, you avoid meaning, and therefore, you avoid happiness, says professor and author Arthur Brooks. One of the great secrets of happiness, he says, is unhappiness. Emerging from the pandemic, spiritual and intellectual leaders may have a lot to offer us about rebuilding our lives into something better and more meaningful, and Brooks joins writer Pico Iyer for this on-stage conversation about navigating the complex waters of making healthy life choices. Drawing on the teachings of the Dalai Lama and many other religious practitioners, Brooks and Iyer wind through loss and emptiness, opportunity and purpose, and biology and psychology. Each thread brings them back to the ongoing challenge of taking control of one’s mental state and landing at a destination full of life and intention.

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Robots as caregivers? Meet “Pepper,” a robot that can tell a joke, recognize emotions and help people remember special times in their lives. Rebekah Romberg, of Colorado Public Radio, guides us through this fascinating talk with Professor Arshia Khan of the University of Minnesota Duluth. She spoke at Aspen Ideas: Health.

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Right when women feel like they have it all figured out, many of them enter a stage of life in our society where they feel dismissed, ignored and cast out. The pressure is strong to try and hold onto youth as long as possible via whatever means necessary, and shame tends to accompany all of the available options. How can we learn to embrace the inevitability of aging a little more, and push society to come along with us? Former models Paulina Porizkova, Yasmin Warsame, and Christie Brinkley are publicly changing the conversation about what it means to be a woman in her 50s and 60s, and raising questions about beauty standards, norms, and media representation. Editor-in-chief of Allure magazine, Jessica Cruel, moderates the lively on-stage conversation and poses provocative questions about how we see ourselves and each other.

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We try our whole lives to avoid pain and suffering and when it does show up, we try to solve it. In her new book, No Cure for Being Human, religious scholar Kate Bowler says we try to out-eat, out-learn, and out-perform our humanness. Truth is, bad things do happen to good people and if we're going to tell the truth, we need one another. As someone who lives with cancer, Bowler knows first-hand about the everything-works-out fantasy common in American culture. She speaks with Adelle Banks, national reporter at Religion News Service, about her personal experiences with pain and grief and the role religion plays in dealing with suffering.

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Though it can sometimes feel like conflict and discord is human nature, our brains are actually predisposed to forming groups and working together. In our individualistic society, we may think our minds stop at our skulls, but when people come together and connect effectively, they actually think in different ways, and they all become smarter and healthier together. Science writer Annie Murphy Paul, the author of “The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain,” joins NYU psychology professor Jay Van Bavel for a participatory conversation about uniting people to solve problems and work towards common goals. Again and again, research demonstrates the power of groups, and the panelists help us translate these findings into practical tips for encouraging people to collaborate functionally. New Yorker writer Charles Duhigg moderates the conversation and takes questions from the audience.

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As the world’s nations face the realities of climate change negotiation in Egypt this week at CoP27, the United Nations Climate Change Conference, we take a closer look at what it means to care for wild places. For some indigenous groups, just the concept of “wild” land is foreign, but many of these groups do recognize when land is out of balance. The extreme floods and fires we’ve been seeing around the U.S. and the world are a telltale sign that something is off, and as humans, we need to pay a little more attention to what’s happening on our land. Chuck Sams is the first Native American director of the U.S. National Park Service, and he explains in this talk how his background impacts the way he approaches his job and thinks about managing protected places. Kristine Tompkins spent a lot of time outside and in U.S. national parks growing up, and now runs Tompkins Conservation. The philanthropic organization buys up land in Chile and Argentina to restore and return to the countries as part of their national park systems. NBC Correspondent Gadi Schwartz moderates the conversation and shares some outdoor memories of his upbringing in Albuquerque, New Mexico. 

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Americans across the country will go to the polls and cast their ballots next week, but they won’t all do it in exactly the same way. The U.S. has 8,800 voting jurisdictions, which allows for local adaptation, but presents a challenge when it comes to standardizing elections. That variability might be part of what’s fueling a wave of mistrust about voting integrity, and a heightened interest in how elections work. Despite experts assuring us that 2020 was the most secure election in the country’s history, fears about voting fraud or voter suppression make it into the news almost daily, and social media complicates the information ecosystem. Election administrators have a new role to play as communicators, laying bare the inner workings of their operations. A panel of election experts at the Aspen Ideas Festival break it all down and share their insider perspectives. Kim Wyman used to run elections in Washington state, and now works on election security at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency (CISA). Stephen Richer is the Maricopa County, Arizona recorder, managing elections for the nation’s second largest voting jurisdiction. Election law expert and UCLA professor Rick Hasen provides an academic view of our current context. Former CISA director Chris Krebs moderates the conversation.

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Does it feel like the quality of our national discourse has gone down in the last several years? You’re not the only one who’s noticed. It’s not individuals who have gotten stupider, says NYU social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, but it’s our collective intelligence that’s suffering. Institutions aren’t getting as much done, and leaders are making rash decisions under the pressure of mobs on social media. Everyone on earth now has a “little dart gun,” says Haidt, and the sting of those darts add up to a messy, disorganized form of power. In his conversation onstage with the editor in chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, at the Aspen Ideas Festival, Haidt explains the nuanced cumulative impact that social media has had on our discourse, and offers some ideas for how to raise our societal IQ back to functional levels.

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