Futuremakers

By Oxford University

What's Futuremakers about?

Welcome to Futuremakers, from the University of Oxford, where our academics debate key issues for the future of society.

Season Four: Brain and Mental Health

Season Three: The History of Pandemics

Season Two: Climate Change

Season One: Artificial Intelligence

Special Episode: A brief history of Quantum Computing

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Futuremakers episodes:

09.21.2023
S4 Ep9: Evidence-based strategies for suicide and self-harm prevention with Professor Seena Fazel
Content warning: Please be aware that this episode refers to topics such as suicide, suicidal ideations, methods of suicide and overdose. In Episode 9 of the series, Professor Belinda Lennox sits down with Professor Seena Fazel, Professor of Forensic Psychiatry at...
09.14.2023
S4 Ep8: Suicide prevention and mental health advocacy with Ben West
Content warning: Please be aware that this episode refers to topics such as suicide, suicidal ideations and depression. In the eighth episode of the series, Professor Belinda Lennox speaks to Ben West, mental health campaigner, best-selling author and social media influencer....
09.08.2023
S4 Ep7: Supporting the mental health of young people with Cynthia Germanotta, Dr Claudia-Santi F. Fernandes and Professor Mina Fazel
In the seventh episode of the series, Professor Lennox is joined by Cynthia Germanotta and Dr Claudia-Santi F. Fernandes from Born This Way Foundation, and Professor Mina Fazel from Oxford’s Department of Psychiatry, to examine how to best help support the...
08.31.2023
S4 Ep6: Protecting mental health in crisis contexts with Benjamin Perks and Sabine Rakotomalala
In Episode 6 of the series, Professor Belinda Lennox is joined by Benjamin Perks, from UNICEF, Sabine Rakotomalala, from the World Health Organization, and Dr Jamie Lachman, Dr Isang Awah and Stephanie Eagling-Peche from Oxford’s Department of Social Policy and...
08.24.2023
S4 Ep5: Workplace wellbeing with Professor Jan-Emmanuel De Neve
In Episode 5 of the series Professor Lennox sits down with Professor Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, Director of the Wellbeing Research Centre, Fellow at Harris Manchester College and Professor of Economics and Behavioural Science at the Saïd Business School. During their conversation...
08.17.2023
S4 Ep4: Building resilient mental health in the workplace with Sir John Kirwan
In Episode 4 of the series Professor Lennox is joined by Sir John Kirwan (known to most as JK), a former New Zealand rugby player and co-founder of workplace wellbeing technology platform Groov. They discuss how JK’s own experiences with depression...
08.10.2023
S4 Ep3: Childhood and adolescent anxiety with Professor Cathy Creswell and Associate Professor Polly Waite
In the third episode of the series Professor Lennox sits down with Professors Cathy Creswell and Polly Waite to talk about how anxiety affects young people and the complex picture that makes up the risk factors for developing mental health...
08.03.2023
S4 Ep2: Maternal mental health with Professor Marian Knight and Professor Fiona Alderdice
In the second episode of the series Professor Lennox is joined by Professors Marian Knight and Fiona Alderdice to examine how mental illnesses impact women and families in the postnatal period, and the power of speaking out. Professor Marian Knight is...
07.27.2023
S4 Ep1: Brain injury and rehabilitation with Jenny Clarke and Professor Heidi Johansen-Berg
Episode 1: Brain injury and rehabilitation In the first episode of the new series, host Professor Belinda Lennox talks to Jenny Clarke, CEO and co-founder of the charity SameYou. SameYou’s vision is to transform the way brain injury survivors and their loved...
12.20.2020
S3 Ep11: History of Pandemics: Coronavirus and ‘Disease X’
Peter interviews the Oxford scientists working at the forefront of research into Disease X - a pathogen which the World Health Organization added to their shortlist of blueprint priority diseases in 2018 to represent the hypothetical cause of our next...
12.13.2020
S3 Ep10: History of Pandemics: Ebola
Peter begins the final episode of the series in 2014, at the onset of the Ebola outbreak in West Africa. Whilst that pandemic officially ended in 2016, this virus has caused a brutal outbreak nearly every year since. After his...
12.13.2020
S3 Ep9: History of Pandemics: HIV and AIDS
In the ninth episode of our History of Pandemics season, Peter leaves the perils of influenza behind, only to discover an entirely new virus: HIV. Many of you may remember the emerging panic that became the media narrative around HIV...
12.13.2020
S3 Ep8: History of Pandemics: The 'Spanish' Flu
Peter arrives in the twentieth century, during the last years of the Great War, to a pandemic which you may have read a lot about during the early coverage of our current COVID-19 outbreak. After the Black Death, the so-called...
12.13.2020
S3 Ep7: History of Pandemics: The 'Russian' Flu
In this episode, Peter discusses a controversial outbreak... So-called 'Russian' Flu is either the first influenza pandemic we’ll be discussing, or it wasn’t the flu at all. It was either a disease which emerged from and then devastated the country...
12.13.2020
S3 Ep6: History of Pandemics: Cholera and John Snow
Peter makes it to the nineteenth century to discuss the achievements of John Snow - a man who either played a central role in the history of epidemiology, or was just one of many trying to tackle that centuries’ foremost...
12.06.2020
S3: Mid-series break: a message from Professor Sir John Bell
We'll be publishing the second half of our History of Pandemics series next week; featuring episodes on Cholera, the pandemic that wasn't, the so-called Spanish Flu, HIV/AIDS, and the West African Ebola outbreak. In the meantime, here's a short message...
11.29.2020
S3 Ep5: History of Pandemics: Smallpox, and Jenner
Welcome to the eighteenth century, at a point when Europe is going through another major smallpox outbreak, a disease that by this point has been plaguing populations around the globe for centuries. Peter will discover why milkmaids may be to...
11.29.2020
S3 Ep4: History of Pandemics: The Great Plague
In the final plague episode of the series, Peter talks to his guests about the last major outbreak of this horrific disease in seventeenth-century England. Along the way they dispel some myths – for example it wasn’t the Great Fire...
11.29.2020
S3 Ep3: History of Pandemics: The Black Death
Peter arrives in the fourteenth century and meets history's most notorious plague outbreak. The Black Death is a gruesome name well-matched with a grim disease, and as you'll find out, it's not just the name which has survived to the...
11.29.2020
S3 Ep2: History of Pandemics: The Plague of Justinian
Welcome to the Eastern Roman Empire in the sixth century. This time, Peter discusses a plague that historians and medical experts agree was likely the first plague pandemic humanity experienced. You may not have heard much about the emperor Justinian...
11.29.2020
S3 Ep1: History of Pandemics: Athens: the first plague?
Join Peter in 5th century Athens, a crowded city in the midst of a siege, where a devastating disease had just erupted. Our guests discuss whether this really was plague, the breakdown in law and order that began to emerge,...
11.22.2020
S3: The Future after COVID-19
Just before our third season starts we talk with Dr Peter Drobac, a global health physician and Director of the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship, and Dr Aoife Haney, Research Lecturer in Innovation and Enterprise, about the social, economic and...
03.22.2020
S2 Ep15: Live Special: Artificial Intelligence Q&A
Originally recorded back in September 2019 at the AI@Oxford Conference held at the University of Oxford's Saïd Business School, this 'live' episode sees Prof. Millican joined by: Mitchell Baker (Chairwoman, Mozilla Foundation); Mike Wooldridge (Professor of Computer Science, University of Oxford); Safiya Omoja Noble (Associate Professor,...
03.15.2020
S2 Ep14: Will climate migration lead to conflict?
Climate migration hit the headlines in January, when the United Nations made a landmark ruling about the legal rights of those displaced by a climate crisis. The UN High Commission for Refugees has warned that millions of people could become climate...
03.08.2020
S2 Ep13: Climate change: What is the future of our food?
The world is getting hotter, drier, and more crowded. By 2050, there will be ten billion humans across the globe, while at the same time there may be far less land suitable for growing food. There's also a growing awareness that...
12.19.2019
S2 Ep12: COP 25 – what happened?
In this bonus ‘reaction’ episode, we chat to several Oxford academics who were either at, or closely following the recent events at COP 25. We ask them what (if anything) was decided at the meeting in Madrid, whether enough action was...
12.15.2019
S2 Ep11: Mark Carney on Climate Change
In this special bonus episode, originally recorded on 25th November, Professor Millican travels to the Bank of England to interview its Governor, Mark Carney. This episode was recorded before it was announced that Mark Carney will become the UN Special...
12.08.2019
S2 Ep10: Solving climate change... nature or technology?
Solving climate change can involve either mitigation – reducing the greenhouse gases we’re putting into the atmosphere – or adaptation – the process of adjusting to our changing environment. In the last episode of series two, we wanted to learn...
12.01.2019
S2 Ep9: Is climate conflict inevitable?
In 2010, Jeffrey Mazo outlined in his book ‘How global warming threatens security and what to do about it’ four ways in which climate and environmental change could produce security threats: · a general systemic weakening, · boundary disputes, · ...
11.24.2019
S2 Ep8: Climate change: Who should we sue?
To date, there have been climate change legal cases in at least 28 countries. From Greta Thunberg leading a group of young people in filing a lawsuit against five countries at the UN to the Hague Court of Appeals upholding...
11.17.2019
S2 Ep7: Can we be green and capitalist?
Many of our panellists in season two have described barriers that are standing in our way if we hope to restrict global warming to the 1.5 degrees C limit that the 2018 IPCC report outlined, and some have advocated how...
11.10.2019
S2 Ep6: Should nuclear power be part of our energy system?
Nuclear energy is still a controversial idea for many people, with dangerous accidents and destructive bombs being at the top of their minds when they hear the words, yet other renewable energy sources are not without their critics, and arguably...
11.03.2019
S2 Ep5: What did the Paris Climate Agreement change?
On the 12th December 2015, at the 21st COP in Paris, representatives of 196 states reached an agreement to combat climate change that was celebrated around the world. With the long-term goal of keeping global temperature to below two degrees...
10.27.2019
S2 Ep4: Climate change: do individual actions matter?
With a lot of Government work relying on geo-political understanding between nation states and large multinational corporations, is there still potential for actions on an individual level to shape the future of the planet? Do actions such as changing our...
10.20.2019
S2 Ep3: How do you build a greener country?
What does the current infrastructure in the UK look like, and how far is it from where we need to be to meet our international commitments, or even our own challenge to be Net Zero by 2050? How much do our...
10.13.2019
S2 Ep2: Climate change and politics - why haven’t we done more?
With the IPCC warning that policymakers have limited time to keep global warming to a maximum of 1.5° C, beyond which the climate-related risks to humans and natural systems rise quickly, it’s clear that we need to act sooner rather...
10.06.2019
S2 Ep1: Twelve years to climate disaster?
The IPCC’s 2018 Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C broke into the public consciousness through media reporting that we only had twelve years to limit climate change catastrophe. But was this really the conclusion of the report? If it was,...
09.22.2019
S2: Trailer: Futuremakers season two coming soon...
Rising sea levels? Burning forests? 12 years to act? These are the issues that will come to define our time. Join us as we bring together leading experts from Oxford and beyond to discuss the existential threats from climate change, and...
04.07.2019
Could quantum computing change the world?
Once we believed that the world around us behaved according to the laws of classical mechanics, and it took us hundreds of years to work out that actually something else was going on. Quantum computing offers what we believe to...
12.23.2018
S1 Ep10: Season Finale: AI selection box
In the final episode of our series, we’re looking back at the themes we’ve discussed so far, and forward into the likely development of AI. Professor Peter Millican will be joined by Professor Gil McVean, to further investigate how big...
12.16.2018
S1 Ep9: Is China leading the way in AI?
In the penultimate episode of series one, we’re looking at the development of AI across the globe. China has set itself the challenge of being the world’s primary innovation centre by 2030, a move forecast to generate a 26% boost...
12.09.2018
S1 Ep8: What does AI mean for the future of humanity?
So far in the series we’ve heard that artificial intelligence is becoming ubiquitous and is already changing our lives in many ways, from how we search for and receive information, to how it is used to improve our health and...
12.02.2018
S1 Ep7: Has AI changed the way we find the truth?
Around the world, automated bot accounts have enabled some government agencies and political parties to exploit online platforms in dispersing messages, using keywords to game algorithms, and discrediting legitimate information on a mass scale. Through this they can spread junk...
11.18.2018
S1 Ep6: From Ada Lovelace to Alan Turing – the birth of AI?
Many developments in science are achieved through people being able to ‘stand on the shoulders of giants’ and in the history of AI two giants in particular stand out. Ada Lovelace, who inspired visions of computer creativity, and Alan Turing,...
11.11.2018
S1 Ep5: Should AI have gender?
As chatbots and virtual assistants become an ever-present part of our world, and algorithms increasingly support decision-making, people working in this field are asking questions about the bias and balance of power in AI. With the make-up of teams designing...
11.04.2018
S1 Ep4: Is AI good for our health?
With AI algorithms now able to mine enormous databases and assimilate information far quicker than humans can, we’re able to spot subtle effects in health data that could otherwise have been easily overlooked. So how are these tools being developed...
10.28.2018
S1 Ep3: Is the banking sector about to change for ever?
AI is already playing a role in the finance sector, from fraud detection, to algorithmic trading, to customer service, and many within the industry believe this role will develop rapidly within the next few years. So what does this mean...
10.21.2018
S1 Ep2: Are all algorithms biased?
Our lives are increasingly shaped by automated decision-making algorithms, but do those have in-built biases? If so, do we need to tackle these, and what could happen if we don’t? Join our host, philosopher Peter Millican, as he explores this topic...
10.21.2018
S1 Ep1: How will the automation of jobs progress?
In 2013 two Oxford academics published a paper entitled “The Future of Employment: How Susceptible Are Jobs to Computerisation?”, estimating that 47% of U.S. jobs were at risk of automation. Since then, numerous studies have emerged, arriving at very different...
10.12.2018
Trailer: season one launching 22nd October!
Down winding streets, beyond the dreaming spires, inside the college walls, debates are happening - in every study room and lecture theatre - about the future of society. Futuremakers, from the University of Oxford, invites you to that debate. Join your...

What's Futuremakers about?

Download our free app to listen on your phone

Futuremakers episodes:

S4 Ep9: Evidence-based strategies for suicide and self-harm prevention with Professor Seena Fazel

S4 Ep8: Suicide prevention and mental health advocacy with Ben West

S4 Ep7: Supporting the mental health of young people with Cynthia Germanotta, Dr Claudia-Santi F. Fernandes and Professor Mina Fazel

S4 Ep6: Protecting mental health in crisis contexts with Benjamin Perks and Sabine Rakotomalala

S4 Ep5: Workplace wellbeing with Professor Jan-Emmanuel De Neve

S4 Ep4: Building resilient mental health in the workplace with Sir John Kirwan

S4 Ep3: Childhood and adolescent anxiety with Professor Cathy Creswell and Associate Professor Polly Waite

S4 Ep2: Maternal mental health with Professor Marian Knight and Professor Fiona Alderdice

S4 Ep1: Brain injury and rehabilitation with Jenny Clarke and Professor Heidi Johansen-Berg

S3 Ep11: History of Pandemics: Coronavirus and ‘Disease X’

S3 Ep10: History of Pandemics: Ebola

S3 Ep9: History of Pandemics: HIV and AIDS

S3 Ep8: History of Pandemics: The 'Spanish' Flu

S3 Ep7: History of Pandemics: The 'Russian' Flu

S3 Ep6: History of Pandemics: Cholera and John Snow

S3: Mid-series break: a message from Professor Sir John Bell

S3 Ep5: History of Pandemics: Smallpox, and Jenner

S3 Ep4: History of Pandemics: The Great Plague

S3 Ep3: History of Pandemics: The Black Death

S3 Ep2: History of Pandemics: The Plague of Justinian

S3 Ep1: History of Pandemics: Athens: the first plague?

S3: The Future after COVID-19

S2 Ep15: Live Special: Artificial Intelligence Q&A

S2 Ep14: Will climate migration lead to conflict?

S2 Ep13: Climate change: What is the future of our food?

S2 Ep12: COP 25 – what happened?

S2 Ep11: Mark Carney on Climate Change

S2 Ep10: Solving climate change... nature or technology?

S2 Ep9: Is climate conflict inevitable?

S2 Ep8: Climate change: Who should we sue?

S2 Ep7: Can we be green and capitalist?

S2 Ep6: Should nuclear power be part of our energy system?

S2 Ep5: What did the Paris Climate Agreement change?

S2 Ep4: Climate change: do individual actions matter?

S2 Ep3: How do you build a greener country?

S2 Ep2: Climate change and politics - why haven’t we done more?

S2 Ep1: Twelve years to climate disaster?

S2: Trailer: Futuremakers season two coming soon...

Could quantum computing change the world?

S1 Ep10: Season Finale: AI selection box

S1 Ep9: Is China leading the way in AI?

S1 Ep8: What does AI mean for the future of humanity?

S1 Ep7: Has AI changed the way we find the truth?

S1 Ep6: From Ada Lovelace to Alan Turing – the birth of AI?

S1 Ep5: Should AI have gender?

S1 Ep4: Is AI good for our health?

S1 Ep3: Is the banking sector about to change for ever?

S1 Ep2: Are all algorithms biased?

S1 Ep1: How will the automation of jobs progress?

Trailer: season one launching 22nd October!