Eighty years after Alan Turing launched the digital age, the revolutionary consequences continue to unfold. The changes are so relentless and powerful that they have given rise to competing utopian and dystopian narratives. According to one view, smart machines will usher in unparalleled productivity, prosperity, longevity, and leisure time; on the competing view, smart machines will crush workers, drive wealth to top 0.0001% and end privacy.

About the speaker

Professor Jeffrey Sachs will argue that both of these visions are coherent and theoretically possible, and that the outcome will depend not on the technology itself but on how we govern it. Rapid advances in AI and related technologies will replace workers, drive up the wages for some groups while driving down wages for others, and tend to increase inequalities of market earnings. Yet the benefits of the digital revolution can be broadly shared if we act with foresight, ethics, and appropriate strategies regarding taxation, intellectual property, education, and governance.

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About the Turing

The Alan Turing Institute, headquartered in the British Library, London, was created as the national institute for data science in 2015. In 2017, as a result of a government recommendation, we added artificial intelligence to our remit.

The Institute is named in honour of Alan Turing (23 June 1912 – 7 June 1954), whose pioneering work in theoretical and applied mathematics, engineering and computing are considered to be the key disciplines comprising the fields of data science and artificial intelligence.

To learn more about what we do, watch our new video on 'What is The Alan Turing Institute'

   • What is The Alan Turing Institute?