Tomorrow Night – Future Human: The Automated Nation

It’s time for the next in our Future Human series, the freshest and least reverent talk event in London. This month’s is subtitled ‘The Automated Nation’, and takes place tomorrow night (Wednesday April 14), from 7-9pm, at The Book Club in Shoreditch. Tickets can be purchased HERE, though there will probably be a handful to buy on the door – if you’re planning on doing the latter, get down early to ensure you get in.

If you haven’t been before, Future Human is a reinvention of the intellectual salon for the 21st century. Rather than a dry lecture series, we discuss the game-changing ideas of the day with you the audience (plus some expert guests), over a bottle of wine with a straw in it. This time round we’re looking at ‘The Automated Nation’: how software is making highly skilled, middle class jobs redundant. Can any of us sleep easy?

In the Industrial Revolution of the 18th and 19th centuries, it was the British working class who fell victim to the mechanisation of industry. But in the Information Revolution of the 21st century, industrial productivity is increasingly driven by software algorithms and the exponential rise of computer processing power.

Accountancy, publishing, finance, travel and leisure, marketing, property, stockbroking and finance, insurance, medicine, and retail… these industries and others are being transformed by powerful technologies that improve economic efficiency tenfold while eradicating the need for human labour.

How is this great transition reshaping British industry and our economy? Who will benefit, who will lose out, and who is responsible? And what will the human consequences be?   Joining us to explore these questions (and your own) are Peter Kirwan, Wired magazine’s chief media futurist; Victor Henning, founder of Mendeley, which uses algorithm technology to organise academic research from all over the world; Carsten Sorensen, an expert in business automation working at the London School of Economics; and also from LSE, Jannis Kallinikos, who specialises in the cultural and behavioural effects of ubiquitous information and software. Popular author and sci-fi expert Sam Jordison will be your guide for the evening.

Here’s what the press have had to say about our first couple of events:

‘A blend of intimacy, anarchy and intellectual nourishment… the salon has arrived in the 21st century’ – The Sunday Times

‘Hurrah! We get to pretend to be sophisticated members of the intelligentsia’ – Grazia

One of London’s Five Best Talk Events – The Evening Standard

Tickets are available HERE. Thereafter, the evening turns into a networking event for guests, who are invited to stay for cocktails and DJs. On April 14 we will reconvene for ‘Tweet Justice’ – more details to come at the end of this week.

Posted by The Bad Idea Team in Events | April 13, 2010 10:21AM |