Abstract: We live in a world where the risks from a changing climate are clear. New research highlights the magnitude of the risks and the benefits of rapid, ambitious action. We also live in a world where the technologies for addressing climate change, for limiting the amount of climate change that occurs and for dealing as effectively as possible with the changes that cannot be avoided, are increasingly mature, affordable, and rich with co-benefits. In many ways and in many places, progress in deploying solutions is dramatic. But worldwide, progress is much slower than it needs to be, if we are to avoid the worst impacts. We need to find a global accelerator pedal for climate solutions. Key enablers include steps to level the economic playing field, government investments to drive down the costs and risks of technology solutions, and novel mechanisms to spur international collaboration.

Speaker Bio: Chris Field is the Perry L. McCarty Director of the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment and Melvin and Joan Lane Professor for Interdisciplinary Environmental Studies. His research focuses on climate change, ranging from work on improving climate models, to prospects for renewable energy systems, to community organizations that can minimize the risk of a tragedy of the commons. Field was the founding director of the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Ecology, a position he held from 2002 to 2016. He was co-chair of Working Group II of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change from 2008-2015, where he led the effort on the IPCC Special Report on “Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation”  (2012) and the Working Group II contribution to the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report (2014) on Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability. His widely cited work has earned many recognitions, including election to the US National Academy of Sciences, the Max Planck Research Award, and the Roger Revelle Medal.

The conference is brought to you by the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center Japan Program's Stanford Silicon Valley-New Japan Project and Mistletoe, Inc.

This event is at full capacity. Please contact Amanda Stoeckicht at amst@stanford.edu if you have any questions.

As we enter the coming age of universal automation, this conference seeks to spark a discussion among thought leaders, technologists, and social entrepreneurs about the replacement of human labor by artificial intelligence and robotics and what that might mean for the future of human welfare and labor opportunities. There is increasing debate regarding the possibility of a new underclass of 'zero economic citizens.' How shall we address these challenges? Does the answer lie in lowering the cost of living? Is it the Universal Basic Income? Or something else? What might be the role of technologies for geographic mobility, sustainability, and community platforms.

Along with keynote presentations and panel discussions, the conference will also feature a startup showcase and participatory world-building exercise.

*The below program is subject to change.

Conference Program

8:30-9:00                  Registration and Breakfast

9:00-9:05                  Welcome

9:05-10:45                Keynote Presentations

Taizo Son (Mistletoe)

Marina Gorbis (Institute for the future)

Sam Altman (Y Combinator)

10:45-11:00              Coffee Break

11:00-12:15                Startup Showcase

Afero

Alesca Life

AstroScale

Binded

Cocoa Motors

Homma

Leomo

ModuleQ

Vivita

Wota

12:15-12:30              Break

12:30-13:00              Mistletoe Fellows Program Announcement

13:00-14:00              Lunch

14:00-15:15              Panel & Debate Sessions: Technology and Social Change in 2045                          

Panel 1: 

Cities of the Future: Removing Barriers to New Ideas with Innovation Districts and Regulatory Sandboxes

Moderator: Ashkan Soltani

Panelists:   Neal Gorenflo (Sheareable)

Taizo Son (Mistletoe)

           Joe Quirk (Seasteading Institute)

           Kaidi Ruusalepp (Funderbeam)           

Panel 2:

The Autonomous Lifestyle: Can Tech-Enabled Mobility Improve Welfare and Opportunity?

Moderator: Kenji Kushida (Stanford University)

Panelists:   Frances Colon (Cenadores Puerto Rico)

Steve Cousins (Savioke)

            Toshi Hoo (IFTF)        

Panel 3:

Reimagining Social Entrepreneurship: Designing Collaboration and Community

                                       Moderator:     Ernestine Fu (Alsop Louie Partners)

Panelists:    Anh Bui (Benetech)

  Chuck Eesley (Stanford University)   

  Daniel Goldman (Ignition Angels)

             Luan Niu (Enviu)

15:15-15:30             Break

15:30-17:30             Zero Economic Citizen in 2045: A World Building Exercise                  

Joshua McVeigh-Schultz (University of Southern California)

Karl Baumann (Univeristy of Southern California)

Elena Marquez Segura (UC Santa Cruz)                         

17:30-17:35             Closing Remarks

17:35-18:35             Cocktail Reception

Abstract: As a potential measure of mitigating the contribution of fossil fuel emissions to global warming, carbon dioxide (CO2) capture and storage (CCS) entails capturing CO2 from from large industrial sources, compressing it to a dense supercritical form (scCO2), injecting it deep into suitable reservoirs, and storing it permanently. After 20+ years of research on CCS, including various applied studies involving pilot and demonstration projects, many stakeholders believe that the world is now ready to move from demonstration to industrial-scale implementation. Yet many hurdles remain, ranging from mostly technical nature to economic and public perception issues. This talk provides a broad overview of the decades of research on CO2 and discusses what has been learned versus what challenges remain. The presentation also elaborates on California as an interesting example for the complicated road to deployment at scale, as ambitious climate goals and generous carbon credits should provide for project economics to work, yet no California CCS project has materialized to date.

Speaker Bio: Jens Birkholzer is an internationally recognized expert in subsurface energy applications and environmental impact assessment. He is a Senior Scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL, Berkeley Lab) in Berkeley, California, and currently serves as the Director for the Energy Geosciences Division (EGD) at LBNL. He received his Ph.D. in water resources, hydrology, and soil science from Aachen University of Technology in Germany in 1994. Jens joined LBNL in 1994, left for a management position in his native Germany in 1999, and eventually returned to LBNL in 2001. He has over 400 scientific publications, about 125 of which are in peer-reviewed journals, in addition to numerous research reports. He serves as the Associate Editor of the International Journal of Greenhouse Gas Control (IJGGC) and is also on the Board of Editorial Policy Advisors for the Journal of Geomechanics for Energy and Environment (GETE). Jens leads the international DECOVALEX Project as its Chairman, is a Fellow of the Geological Society of America, and serves as a Senior Fellow of the California Council on Science and Technology.

Abstract: Artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly improving. The opportunities are tremendous, but so are the risks. Existing and soon-to-exist capabilities pose several plausible extreme governance challenges. These include massive labor displacement, extreme inequality, an oligopolistic global market structure, reinforced authoritarianism, shifts and volatility in national power, and strategic instability. Further, there is no apparent ceiling to AI capabilities, experts envision that superhuman capabilities in strategic domains will be achieved in the coming four decades, and radical surprise breakthroughs are possible. Such achievements would likely transform wealth, power, and world order, though global politics will in turn crucially shape how AI is developed and deployed. The consequences are plausibly of a magnitude and on a timescale to dwarf other global concerns, leaders of governments and firms are asking for policy guidance, and yet scholarly attention to the AI revolution remains negligible. Research is thus urgently needed on the AI governance problem: the problem of devising global norms, policies, and institutions to best ensure the beneficial development and use of advanced AI.

This problem can be broken into three complementary research clusters:

1. The technical landscape: What are the trends and possibilities in AI capabilities? What are their likely consequences? What are the externalities from AI, and how can they best be addressed?
2. AI politics: Who are the relevant actors, what are their interests, and what can they do? What is the nature of the conflict and cooperation challenges that they are likely to face? How can they overcome dangerous conflictual dynamics, in particular an international arms race?
3. AI governance: Given our understanding of the technical landscape and AI politics, what options are available to us for global governance of AI and what should we work towards?

Work on the AI governance problem must draw on the full body of social science and policy expertise. Solutions are needed by an unknown, but plausibly impending, deadline.

Speaker Bio: Allan Dafoe is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Yale University and a Research Associate at the Future of Humanity Institute, University of Oxford. His research seeks to understand the causes of world peace and stability. Specifically, his research has examined the causes of the liberal peace, and the role of reputation and honor as motives for war. He develops methodological tools and approaches to enable more transparent, credible causal inference. Allan is beginning research on the international politics of transformative artificial intelligence.

When the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant experienced a meltdown after the Great East Japan Earthquake in March 2011, people scrambled to get accurate data on radiation. Geiger counters were suddenly a hot commodity. In that moment of crisis, a group of global citizens rose to the occasion to launch Safecast, an open data platform to track, monitor and share data on the radiation levels in Fukushima and throughout Japan. Safecast, a Japan Earthquake Relief Fund grantee, enlisted the help of volunteers who collected the data from all over Japan, and even built its own DIY Geiger counter kit. The Japan Society of Northern California and the Stanford Silicon Valley-New Japan Project are proud to present a program with Pieter Franken, the Co-Founder of Safecast, will look back at Safecast’s evolution—a prime example of citizen science embracing open data and open source—over the last six years and their plans to expand their data gathering efforts to take on new environmental challenges. 

Bio

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Pieter currently is Senior Advisor at Monex Group (a leading online securities and financial services company in Japan) where he focuses on the Future of Financial Services, Group IT Strategy, Fintech, and Blockchain. 

He is also a member of Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) International Technology Advisory Panel (ITAP) where he contributes in the transformation of Singapore as a leading Fintech Hub. In 2011 Pieter co-founded Safecast.org - a global volunteer initiative to collect citizen sourced environmental data. Pieter also advises startups, such as ModuleQ, an AI startup based in Silicon Valley. Pieter holds a MSc in Computer Science from Delft University (The Netherlands) and currently is a researcher with MIT Media Lab (US) and Keio University (Japan) where he contributes to the advancement in IoT, Digital Currencies, Block-chain technologies and Citizen Science. Pieter is based in Japan and frequently travels across Asia, North America and Europe.

Agenda

4:15pm: Doors open
4:30pm-5:30pm: Talk and Discussion
5:30pm-6:00pm: Networking

RSVP Required