How to Be Human in the Age of the Machine


Track: Keynote | K1 |
Wednesday, June 9, 2021, 9:15am – 10:00am
Held in: Remo
Presenter:
Hannah Fry - University College London
SPONSORED BY: Language I/O

We like to think of ourselves as master decision makers; as perfectly rational creatures, grounded in reason and logic. In truth, humans are a mess of competing incentives, of bad memories and of blind, impulsive biases. Meanwhile, the modern world of data analytics is built from logical machines that struggle to understand context and nuance and are servile to numerical proxies. Humans are flawed, machines are flawed, so how best to create a partnership when the only language in common is numbers? In this session we aim to uncover some of the hidden complexities in our own decision making, as well as those of the systems we’ve built to automate us. We will explore some of the greatest ironies of automation, and put into perspective some of the hardest challenges facing the future.