Cocktail Event with New Dean of Harvard Kennedy School Jeremy Weinstein and Professor Rana Mitter

In no more than the blink of an eye, a naïve optimism about technology’s liberating potential has given way to a dystopian obsession with biased algorithms, surveillance capitalism, and job-displacing robots. Yet too few of us see any alternative to accepting the onward march of technology. We have simply accepted a technological future designed for us by technologists, the venture capitalists who fund them, and the politicians around the world who give them free rein.

It doesn’t need to be this way.

In this conversation, Jeremy Weinstein, Dean of Harvard Kennedy School, will discuss his book System Error, which exposes the root of our current predicament: how big tech’s relentless focus on optimization is driving a future that reinforces discrimination, erodes privacy, displaces workers, and pollutes the information we get. This optimization mindset substitutes what companies care about for the values that democratic societies might choose to prioritize. Well-intentioned optimizers fail…