Oxford Martin School: Public Lectures and Seminars

Phil Howard, author of Lie Machines and Nicola Aitken, Policy Manager at Full Fact, discuss the implications of fake news and misinformation. In the age of COVID-19, the lie machine is working to undermine trust in institutions like the World Health Organization. They are pushing a narrative that scientists and experts should not be trusted. And this has worrying implications for global health. Join us online as Professor Phil Howard, author of Lie Machines: How to Save Democracy from Troll Armies, Deceitful Robots, Junk News Operations, and Political Operatives and Nicola Aitken, Policy Manager at Full Fact, discuss the implications, power and effectiveness of these lie machines and how we can utilise them or shut them down.

Paul Clarke, Ocado's Chief Technology Officer, will focus on the disruptive ingredients and recipes at the heart of Ocado's ongoing journey of self-disruption and reinvention.

For this year's James Martin Memorial Lecture, Sir Paul Nurse will consider some of the fundamental ideas of biology with the aim of identifying principles that define living organisms.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.