{"id":573,"date":"2019-02-04T04:00:49","date_gmt":"2019-02-04T04:00:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cigs-inet.org\/?page_id=573"},"modified":"2019-02-04T15:01:24","modified_gmt":"2019-02-04T15:01:24","slug":"events","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/cigs-inet.org\/index.php\/events\/","title":{"rendered":"Events"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image\"><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"525\" height=\"383\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/cigs-inet.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/02\/VODER_demonstrated_on_1939_New_York_World_Fair_-_The_VODER_fascinates_the_crowds_-_Bell_Telephone_Quarterly_January_1940.jpg?resize=525%2C383\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-586\" srcset=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/cigs-inet.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/02\/VODER_demonstrated_on_1939_New_York_World_Fair_-_The_VODER_fascinates_the_crowds_-_Bell_Telephone_Quarterly_January_1940.jpg?resize=1024%2C748&amp;ssl=1 1024w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/cigs-inet.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/02\/VODER_demonstrated_on_1939_New_York_World_Fair_-_The_VODER_fascinates_the_crowds_-_Bell_Telephone_Quarterly_January_1940.jpg?resize=300%2C219&amp;ssl=1 300w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/cigs-inet.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/02\/VODER_demonstrated_on_1939_New_York_World_Fair_-_The_VODER_fascinates_the_crowds_-_Bell_Telephone_Quarterly_January_1940.jpg?resize=768%2C561&amp;ssl=1 768w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/cigs-inet.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/02\/VODER_demonstrated_on_1939_New_York_World_Fair_-_The_VODER_fascinates_the_crowds_-_Bell_Telephone_Quarterly_January_1940.jpg?w=2002&amp;ssl=1 2002w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/cigs-inet.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/02\/VODER_demonstrated_on_1939_New_York_World_Fair_-_The_VODER_fascinates_the_crowds_-_Bell_Telephone_Quarterly_January_1940.jpg?w=1575 1575w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 767px) 89vw, (max-width: 1000px) 54vw, (max-width: 1071px) 543px, 580px\" \/><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">February 5<sup>th<\/sup>, 2019 <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Too Deep to Fail: Big\nTech and Civil Society<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Conference<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">As the world of computing is increasingly dominated by lightly regulated technological behemoths which do not conform particularly well to any previous model of a firm with which civil society has built up experience and intuition, it has been dawning on leading voices that without adequate foundations, we can neither afford to simply regulate such entities using our current limited understanding, nor allow them to amass power, unfettered as largely self-regulated entities.&nbsp; This is increasingly being seen as due to their now essential role within societal and security infrastructure, the discretion with which they curate social media backed by server farms full of sensitive personal data, and the war chests of cash on which they now sit. This conference brings together economists, legal scholars, and technologists to explore how best to comprehend and potentially regulate the new breed of Tech giants within the context of a market based civil society. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">February 4<sup>th<\/sup>, 2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>An Analog World Riding\non Corporate Digital Infrastructure: What Could Possibly Go Wrong?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">With Jaron Lanier and Eric Weinstein<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">CIGS hosts a conversation between Jaron Lanier,\nFather of Virtual Reality and author of the books&nbsp; \u201cWho Owns the Future\u201d and \u201cDawn of a New\nEverything\u201d and Eric Weinstein, Managing Director of Thiel Capital on the\nmanifold issues now being raised by digital platforms, and the need for new\neconomic thinking beyond traditional regulation and theory.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">October 29<sup>th<\/sup>, 2018<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>AI Superpowers<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">With Dr. Kai-Fu Lee, Chairman, Sinovation Ventures<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">CIGS, together with Tim O\u2019Reilly of\nO\u2019Reilly Media, hosted a discussion with Kai Fu Lee, former\npresident of Google China, current CEO of Sinovation Ventures, and author of\nthe new book,&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/aisuperpowers.com\/\"><em>AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order<\/em><\/a><em>.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">In his book Dr. Lee\ncompares developments in AI and computing technology in the US and China, and\nthe ways in which China is catching up. The conversation focused on the\ndifferent comparative advantages that each country brings to the table and also\nthe need, as the competition heats up, to keep track of the social and economic\nimplications of improved AI. As automation increasingly displaces workers the\nneed to elevate the most human of qualities, compassion and empathy becomes\nincreasingly important and we discussed what this might mean in terms of long\nterm economic policy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">September\n13<sup>th<\/sup>, 2018<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Capitalism in the Age of Robots<\/strong><strong><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">With Lord Adair Turner<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The rapid, unstoppable, and limitless progress of\nautomation has potentially profound implications for the nature of and need for\nwork, and for the distribution of income and wealth. But it also has profound\nimplications for the very meaning of some concepts and measures that play a\nfundamental role in economic analysis \u2013 in particular productivity growth and\nGDP per capita. At the limit, one can question whether the very concept of \u201can\neconomy\u201d or of \u201ceconomics\u201d \u2013 if defined as the study of production and\nconsumption choices amid conditions of inherent scarcity \u2013 will have any\nmeaning in a world where, eventually, all human work activities can be\nautomated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Lord Adair Turner, former Chair of the UK Financial\nServices Authority and the International Financial Stability Board\u2019s major\npolicy committee, led this CIGS gathering in a discussion of some of the issues\nanalyzed in his recent <a href=\"https:\/\/www.ineteconomics.org\/research\/research-papers\/capitalism-in-the-age-of-robots-work-income-and-wealth-in-the-21st-century\">&nbsp;paper<\/a>, <strong>Capitalism\nin the Age of Robots<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">April 12<sup>th<\/sup>,\n2018<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Is Tech Tearing Apart the Work\nand Life Cycles?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Co-hosted\nWith Sam Altman, President, Y Combinator <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">It has been approximately 50 years\nsince industrialized society has had a stable model tying together the cycle of\nwork with the cycle of life. Consider the following stark and stylized facts: <\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><li>Fewer than 1 in 10 children born before\nWWII, would not out-earn his\/her parents. For children born in 1980, that\nnumber had jumped to 5 in 10. <\/li><li>A child born in 2014 is unlikely to be\nborn to a married couple in their first marriage. In 1960 the odds were 73%. <\/li><li>Measured in 2016 dollars, the 1973\nmedian male income was just over 54K. It has been lower in all 45 years since\nthen. In 1970 fewer than 10% of adult males aged 25-34 lived with their\nparents. In 2017 that number was 20%. <\/li><li>Originations for conventional home\nloans recently fell more than 50%, from over 4 million in 2004 to under 2\nmillion in 2015.<\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Simply put, our markets have been\nrewriting our lives as we continue to reference ourselves to a past that will\nlikely never return and which fewer Americans have ever experienced first-hand.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">CIGS co-hosted a discussion with Sam\nAltman, President of Y Combinator, to explore a narrow question: \u201cAre our lives\nnow driven around a crisis in the lifecycle of the modern American Family that,\nmore than 50 years on, still has no name or generally agreed upon unifying\ndescription?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Economists, technologists and policy-makers sometimes approach this issue much like the Blind Men and the Elephant, where each person focuses on the area they see the most clearly, be it income inequality, education, UBI, longevity or growth, and loses track of the bigger picture.&nbsp; The goal of this discussion was to step out of pre-existing frameworks and address the question more holistically to try and understand what form any unifying solution might need to take.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">April 3<sup>rd<\/sup>\n2018<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Free\nSpeech in the Era of Social Media: Market Failure\nin The Attention Economy<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Co-hosted\nWith Tristan Harris, Center for Humane Technology<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The Cambridge\nAnalytica story brought to fore questions about a new species of speech \u2013&nbsp;machine-automated, A\/B tested,\nmicro-targeted speech \u2013 precisely matched to 2 billion people\u2019s minds. Familiar\nmaxims like \u201cthe solution to bad speech is more speech\u201d or \u201ctransparency is the\nbest disinfectant\u201d are insufficient to a world of finite attention and\nexponential automation. How can platforms marry the benefits (breaking through\npolitically correct, institutional narratives controlled by the few) while not\nbeing intrinsically designed in a way that enables exponential damage to the\npublic sphere?&nbsp; <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Center for\nInnovation Growth and Society co-hosted a discussion with Tristan Harris,\nfounder of the Center for Humane Technology and the inspiration of the Time\nWell Spent movement on how to understand and push back against the frequently\nopaque algorithms that may be negatively altering our economic and political\ndiscourse. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">January\n31<sup>st<\/sup> 2018<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Bubbles in Technology<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">With\nBill Janeway, INET cofounder and former Warburg Pincus Vice Chairman <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">As current debates around Bitcoin swirl, mirroring\nother ongoing debates about bubbles in Tech markets, CIGS held a meeting led by\nINET cofounder and\nformer Warburg Pincus Vice Chairman Bill Janeway that\nfocused on trying to understand some of their driving causes and economic\nimplications. &nbsp;Here are some of the\nissues that were discussed:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">It is critical, firstly, to distinguish structural bubbles, which facilitate the growth of innovation,\nfrom more simply destructive bubbles whose chief effects are redistributive.\nSuch bubbles, like the 2005-2008\nhousing bubble are often fueled by credit and may\nhave as their focus assets such as real estate, which have little to do with\ntrue innovation. The\n1998-2000 tech bubble, by contrast, fueled mostly by capital markets, can be\nseen a productivity enhancing bubble. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Both psychology and structural factors are\nimportant in understanding bubbles. Psychological factors often make market participants willing to\naccept negative expected value as with a lottery ticket. However this is\nexacerbated by the structure of investment markets, where in periods of rising\nreturns investors, who are investing other people\u2019s money, do not always have\nthe freedom to opt out of the bubble as there is an expectation that their\nreturns would be comparable to the rising market. There is a principle-agent\nproblem, as investment companies are removed from the consequences of their\ninvestment choices causing a misalignment of prices. Missing types investment\nvehicles could potentially ameliorate the issue.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">One of\nthe takeaways from the discussion is that we can begin to see bubbles as an\nemergent phenomena, something to be understood\nnon-normatively as natural consequences of the rules we put in place to\nconstitute a market.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The\ndiscussion suggested the beginnings of a research program that could explore:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ol class=\"wp-block-list\"><li>A taxonomy of meaningful bubble types so that we do not conflate\nstructural bubbles from uncompensated redistribution.<\/li><li>An explication of the transmission mechanism from the\nparameterized rules of markets to the types and frequency of bubbles that are\nlikely to form within them.<\/li><li>The search for a prescriptive strategy as to how one might\nredesign the three player game between government backed research, technologist\nbacked enterprise and financial speculation, to allow more broad and survivable\nparticipation leading, to an increase in innovation investment. <\/li><\/ol>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>February 5th, 2019 Too Deep to Fail: Big Tech and Civil Society Conference As the world of computing is increasingly dominated by lightly regulated technological behemoths which do not conform particularly well to any previous model of a firm with which civil society has built up experience and intuition, it has been dawning on leading &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/cigs-inet.org\/index.php\/events\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Events&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_bbp_topic_count":0,"_bbp_reply_count":0,"_bbp_total_topic_count":0,"_bbp_total_reply_count":0,"_bbp_voice_count":0,"_bbp_anonymous_reply_count":0,"_bbp_forum_subforum_count":0,"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-573","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cigs-inet.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/573","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cigs-inet.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cigs-inet.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cigs-inet.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cigs-inet.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=573"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/cigs-inet.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/573\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":594,"href":"https:\/\/cigs-inet.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/573\/revisions\/594"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cigs-inet.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=573"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}