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At a moment when decades of academic achievement have been lost, can we amplify the benefits of A.I. equally across society, or will we allow a deeper digital divide to leave out even more students? Khan Academy founder and CEO Sal Khan talks about the potential for this nascent technology to transform education, activating and engaging an entire generation to create chang...
Virtual exchange is online education that brings young people together in virtual classrooms with their peers around the world. These low-cost programs are uniquely capable of reaching those who do not have access to international education. Virtual exchange combines technology and curriculum to give young people cross-cultural competency and 21st century skills—language,...
In this series of short talks, leaders of energy start-ups pitch their big ideas: using A.I. to find critical minerals under the Earth’s surface, installing geothermal systems in your home, ensuring the safety of clean tech, and storing clean energy in the grid when the wind isn’t blowing and the sun isn’t shining.
This session considers the importance of trust, and a healthy distrust, in the well-being of a democracy and the role of the press in this equation drawing on the report of the Knight Commission on Trust, Media and Democracy released Feb. 5, 2019 titled, “Crisis in Democracy: Renewing Trust in America.” What measures should local journalism, social media, and the public ta...
Far too many students in the United States and around the world face challenges when seeking a quality education; this untapped potential is a waste of societal and economic resources. In this session, education and civil society leaders will talk about their efforts to engage underserved and refugee youth, and their successes and failures in helping those youth overcome b...
Two-thirds of American workers do not have a four-year college degree. In an increasingly tech-driven economy, how can we ensure that a lack of higher education isn’t a roadblock for this huge part of the population and, likewise, that talent shortages aren’t barriers to business and economic growth? What are the most innovative ways to upskill, reskill, or next-skill work...
Digital skills open doors to jobs in tech, media, and across all industries. Connecting diverse students and workers with the education and training needed for the 92% of today’s jobs that require digital skills creates a pipeline of talent, critical to driving economic opportunity and mobility.
For decades, diet and exercise fads have promised to shrink waistlines, build muscle, detoxify, and so on. But evidence is mounting that there’s no one diet or routine that works for everyone. Researchers are experimenting with AI to determine personalized nutrition algorithms based on an individual’s health, lifestyle, physiology, and immune system. Christie Aschwanden, a...
We are increasingly living in different realities of news, politics, and information — a trend that’s undermining the shared foundation of “truth” necessary for proper functioning of society. At risk are public health, elections, and democracy itself. But America’s “fake news” problem actually runs much deeper. What are the roots of our broken information ecosystems, who i...
Work, play, privacy, communication, finance, war, and dating: algorithms and the machines that run them have upended them all. Will artificial intelligence become as ubiquitous as electricity? Is there any industry AI won't touch? Will AI tend to steal jobs and exacerbate income inequalities, or create new jobs and amplify human abilities at work -- or, both? How can the g...
Determining what people must have to survive and thrive is a moving target in our increasingly connected world. Many would argue that we have reached an inflection point where access to the Internet is absolutely essential. With the Internet’s role in ensuring communication and freedom of expression, not to mention access to education and the work force, who should pay for...
Featured Ideas Festival Scholar includes Liz Plank. A robust fourth estate is central to the education of an engaged citizenry and healthy democracy. It informs us, shapes our thinking, and holds our leaders and institutions accountable. But if Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump agree on one thing this election season, it’s that political media is malfunctioning. On televisio...
As educators, parents, policymakers, and psychologists wrestle with the question of what we gain and what we give up as our reliance on technology grows by the day, digital natives often find the question quaint. For them, it’s not black and white — which makes it all the more important to focus our public conversation on the nuances of technology and how we can harness it...
What is trust? “A firm belief in the reliability, truth, ability, or strength of someone or something.” (We googled it). How much, not to mention who, we should trust is more complex now, given the technological tools we have at our disposal and the crafty creatives who might push the world’s next great product, or the next fake story, or — far worse — the hackers who can...
As technology drives economic change, the discussion of the future of work seems to be binary: either dystopian or rose colored. The public policy debate has congealed around a set of silver bullet solutions — from universal basic income to coding for all — that reflect Silicon Valley’s strategy for addressing economic inequality. But what if the best strategy isn’t a sing...