Public Lecture to Launch MINT: Jamie Susskind

We held a special public lecture on April 26, in the Shine Dome of the Australian Academy of Science, to launch the MINT lab. Jamie Susskind, author of Future Politics, presented the main arguments of his forthcoming book, The Digital Republic.

The event was co-sponsored by MINT, HMI, and the Australian Academy of Science.

Abstract: Susskind’s latest book, The Digital Republic, tackles one of the biggest political questions of our time: how freedom and democracy can survive - and flourish - in a world transformed by digital technology. Not long ago, the tech industry was widely admired and the internet was regarded as a tonic for freedom and democracy. Not anymore. Every day, the headlines blaze with reports of racist algorithms, data leaks, and social media platforms festering with falsehood and hate. Susskind argues that these problems are not the fault of a few bad apples at the top of the industry. They are the result of our failure to govern technology properly. This talk will sketch out a blueprint for the digital age - new legal standards, new public bodies and institutions, new duties on platforms, new rights and regulators, new codes of conduct for people in the tech industry. It will outline a new philosophy for governing technology, and a vision for a different type of society: a digital republic in which human and technological flourishing go hand in hand.

Bio: Jamie Susskind is author of The Digital Republic (2022) and the award-winning bestseller Future Politics (2018), which received the Estoril Global Issues Distinguished Book Prize. A practising barrister, he is a graduate of the University of Oxford and has held fellowships at Harvard and Cambridge. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Times, the New Statesman, Wired, and elsewhere. The Evening Standard has said “Susskind could be one of the great public intellectual rock stars of our time.”