[VIRTUAL] A Lecture with Viktor Mayer-Schoenberger, LLM ‘89
The Harvard Club of Boston, in partnership with the the Harvard Clubs of Austria & Denmark, presents a lecture with Viktor Mayer-Schoenberger, LLM ‘89
Many think that humanity's power rests on our ability to make decisions - and are disappointed to learn that our decision-making is biased and worried machines may increasingly make decisions for us. But this misses the most important point: the power of human cognition lies in our ability to imagine actionable options beyond the obvious. It's the secret of great innovators in business, science and the arts. But this quality is not limited to them. In fact, we have long known that humans think in mental models - we are all "framers". But as we argue in our book "framers", this capacity is not just a fact of life, but a cognitive muscle we can train to see more valuable alternatives and successfully meet the challenges we face - as individuals and as society. What's required is to dream in a carefully constrained manner. Fortunately, as recent research has shown we are quite good at it - because we have been training this ability since early childhood. Using countless real world examples, this talk will explain not only how mental framing works, but also show how everyone can get better at it.
Viktor Mayer-Schonberger is Professor of Internet Governance and Regulation at the University of Oxford. He is also a faculty affiliate of the Belfer Center of Science and International Affairs at Harvard University. He has published a dozen books, including most recently "framers" (with Kenneth Cukier and Francis de Vericourt), the international bestseller “Big Data” (HMH, co-authored with Kenneth Cukier) and the awards-winning “Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age” with Princeton University Press. He is the author of over a hundred articles and book chapters on the governance of information. He is on the boards of foundations, think tanks and organizations focused on studying the information economy, and advises governments, businesses and NGOs on new economy and information society issues.
Date: Wednesday, July 21, 2021 at 12:00 PM ET / 18:00 CET
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