How essential is the internet? What’s going to change? Georgina Godwin and Julia Hobsbawm speak with; Professor Sandy Pentland – Director of Connection Science & Human Dynamics Labs, MIT; Professor César Hidalgo – Director, Collective Learning Group at MIT Media Lab; William Newton – President & EMEA Managing Director, WiredScore; and Tom Redmayne – Director of Business Development UK, WiredScore.

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‘In the modern world, you can work without air conditioning, and you can work without sewage, but you literally cannot work without the internet’

‘We could build a system in which you can sign up, you can create an avatar, you can train that avatar, and that avatar can start voting on the things that the Congress in your country is voting on’

‘Unfortunately, it’s sort of flattering to be called rational and in charge of yourself, and so it’s really taken off and it’s the way policy makers, business people, everybody thinks about humans – but of course humans are really elements of a network, it’s the social fabric that matters.’

Are humans going to be usurped by machines in the world of work? Georgina Godwin and Julia Hobsbawm speak with; Herminia Ibarra – the Charles Handy Professor of Organizational Behavior at the London Business School; Dana Denis-Smith – Founder and CEO of Obelisk Support and the Founder of First 100 Years; John Grant – a Marketing & Innovation Consultant and author of books including ‘Better’; and Cilia C. Kanellopoulos – the Head of Social Innovation at the Vodafone Institute in Berlin.

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‘38% of millennials are self-classified as freelance’

‘Technology is bringing a sense of overwhelm. People are describing email as like caffeine, people don’t want to look at email after 8 o’clock or you won’t sleep well.’

‘People change jobs more and more often. The tenure in-job for a mid-career person goes down every year: it’s under 5 years now – at least with regard to the US statistics.’

‘Out of all the German start-ups that were created or funded in 2016, only 14% of start-ups were funded by women, and there are similar numbers in the States and the UK. It’s always less than 20% of start-ups that are created by women, and at the same time when you look at how much funding – whether it’s private money or venture capital that goes into female-led start-ups it’s even less….in 2017, only 2% of venture money was invested into female-led teams.’

Are the millennials and generation Z completely different to baby-boomers and generation Xers in the way we approach tech? Georgina Godwin and Julia Hobsbawm speak with; Dolly Alderton – journalist and author of Everything I Know About Love, co-host of The High Low Show podcast; Eliza Filby – historian of contemporary values, millennials expert and fellow at Kings College London; Timandra Harkness – presenter of the BBC Radio 4 series FutureProofing, author of Big Data and stand up comedian; Parag Khanna – leading global strategist and Senior Research Fellow at the Centre on Asia and Globalisation at the National University of Singapore; and Nathan Myhrvold – Founder and CEO of Intellectual Ventures, author of ‘Modernist Cuisine’.

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“The average teenager today gets their first smartphone when they are 13 and they spend 7 hours a day connected to it. As a generational cohort, they are having less sex, they are going out less, they are not learning to drive at the same pace and speed as their parents, they are taking less drugs… What are they doing instead? They are connected, constantly, on their phones and connecting via social media.”

“The fears that AI will destroy us all are quite absurd. AI doesn’t work well enough for that to happen, nor is there any particular reason to think that AI, when it gets more powerful, will want to destroy us.”

“I have witnessed many arguments between people who are friends on Slack because they’ve misconstrued something someone has said. So, I hate it when people don’t use emojis and gifs.”

Julia Hobsbawm and Georgina Godwin discuss how science fiction contributes to the age of the human and the machine. What is probable, what is improbable and what is impossible? They also look at the humble app.

They are joined by Hana Sutch – Co-Founder and CEO of nature and walking app GoJauntly, Co-Owner and Managing Partner of Furthermore design consultancy; Charles Arthur – freelance technology journalist, ex-Guardian Technology editor, blogger, The Overspill; and Jorge Vega Matos – social architect, researcher and community activator.

Finally, Alice Thwaite, founder of the Echo Chamber Club, speaks of her techno-heaven and her techno-hell.

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“Rather than the desktop programme that does lots of things you have an app that only does one thing, and it focussed on doing that one thing very well. So in that sense, our lives have more focus, we’re more concentrated on a particular thing by an app. And then once you’ve done that, then you move onto another app.”

“Science fiction as a piece of art maybe along with poetry, are two types of writing that really capture the zeitgeist of our time. If you look at media, and you look at science fiction of late, it presents very bleak, very dystopian futures; we fear technology. And if we fear technology, we don’t learn about it, and if we don’t learn about it, then we don’t take ownership of it, and then we can’t control it.”

I feel like there are so many fears and desires about what the internet is and what it could be in the future. But anything that could be potentially hellish, I thought ‘that’s a potential, that might not necessarily happen.'”

Follow updates on Twitter @technoshabbat #humanandmachine

Co-presenters Julia Hobsbawm and Georgina Godwin talk to Geoff Mulgan, the Chief Executive of Nesta, and author of Big Mind.

A panel comprised of Tom Adeyoola CEO and Founder of Metail, Carl Miller,  the Research Director of the Centre for the Analysis of Social Media and Tracey Groves, the Founder and Director of Intelligent Ethics Limited consider how we survive and thrive in a digital world.

And film maker Lord David Puttnam – who sits on the House of Lords Select Committee on AI gives us his take on the best and worst in the digital world in our techno heaven and techno hell section. Plus – we all need to switch off sometimes – we’ll be talking about techno Shabbat.

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Recorded on the 1st February 2018 in Spiritland Studio in London.

The theme we’re looking at is the topic of AI: how will machine learning affect everything?

“The big question of now is how we reap and harvest the full potential of an extraordinary flood of technologies from AI, sensors and blockchain, and so on, in ways that actually make our lives better.”

“Everything and anything that involves an algorithm of some type, which is self-propagated by a machine is called AI, but it’s very difficult to call it artificial intelligence.” 

“For me, the humanity element is about the ability to apply wisdom, apply judgment and that sense of innovation and imagination that cannot be replicated by a machine.”

Follow updates on Twitter @technoshabbat #humanandmachine