Tech-Education

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...

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.

Businesses of all sizes are struggling with skills gaps that threaten their growth, while millions of Americans are locked out of jobs by a paper ceiling. How do we build a skilled, fair workforce that meets the needs of employers and helps people reach their economic potential?

In this new Aspen Ideas format, all attendees gather each morning to kick off the day by exploring a current issue of deep complexity. The rapid growth of generative A.I. — surpassing expectations with over 100 million users of the technology in a short span of time — is a testament to its distinct intelligence and unique approach to problem-solving. There are many upsi...

While internet connectivity, technology, and digital skills are central to every part of modern life, the unfortunate reality is that millions of Americans have been left behind. We’ll discuss how transformational investment in digital equity and inclusion is helping close the digital divide.

David Rubenstein, co-founder and co-chairman of The Carlyle Group, one of the world’s largest private investment firms, discusses his perspectives on the investing world, and the insights recently gained from interviewing a number of the country’s best investors for his new book How To Invest—Masters of the Craft.

A large, unsettling question looming among Washington regulators, lawmakers, and now state Attorney’s General across the US is whether the time has come to break up the big five: Facebook, Amazon, Google, Netflix, Apple. Have these powerful tech companies, once the darlings of the start-up community not twenty years past, become so dominant that they are stifling competiti...

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...

Every day, young people connect with peers around the world in collaborative, technology-enabled learning experiences where they learn about and with each other. This session explores how facilitated technology can empower young people from different backgrounds to share their personal narratives and explore their differences for a deeper connection and understanding. The...

The Internet, to date, has been an open system that has enabled ideas to spread across borders, has created transformative new economies, and has helped people connect, create, and distribute information, exposing us to perspectives that were previously out-of-reach. But it’s also left behind those on the wrong side of the digital divide, and raised thorny new questions a...

Within our lifetimes, AI will, by design, begin to behave unpredictably, thinking and acting in ways which defy human logic. Big tech companies may be inadvertently building and enabling vast arrays of intelligent systems that don't share our motivations, desires, or hopes for the future of humanity. Is it too late to change course and realize a human-centered future for a...

What if technology could read and respond to emotions the way humans do? It turns out that it already can, and in this session you’ll see a mind-bending live demonstration of software that recognizes our feelings based on facial cues. We’ll also explore how everyday tech like text messaging can get in the way of important social connection, but also how applications like C...

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...

It is no secret that leaders, at home and abroad, have a problem with journalists. Rants against news organizations and individuals punctuate conversations in Europe and Asia as easily as they do in the United States. How do members of the media navigate their profession in such a climate? Some of the top journalists in the country, representing National Review, CNN, MSNBC...

Harvard Professor Cass Sunstein talks to Facebook Founder & CEO Mark Zuckerberg about some of the biggest questions facing the internet — including government regulation, shifts to privacy, and innovation.

How will government survive without the skill of tech superstars among its ranks? Jen Pahlka’s Code for America was launched with the mission to use the principles and practices of the digital age to rebuild the institutions we rely on for our democracy. Kathleen Janus, whose recent book took her around the country meeting top social entrepreneurs, guides this conversation...

Bill Gates portends doomsday is coming. Stephen Hawking says we should prepare for our robot overlords to take their thrones. But is the future as glaring as Hal’s red eye? Or is it more complicated than that? What does a future powered by algorithms and big intelligence mean for our lives? What are game-changing developments made possible by AI? What promises do these tec...

Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson, coauthors of the 2014 best-seller The Second Machine Age, will preview their new book at the Aspen Ideas Festival. Machine, Platform, Crowd brings together economics, computer science, and several other fields to present a practical, action-oriented guide to the changes and disruptions brought by the amazing technological progress of to...

Artificial intelligence has rapidly and deeply permeated our lives; and for much of the public, these infiltrations were unexpected — some even remain unrecognized. As we develop machines driven by human-created algorithms, it is imperative for us to examine how our moral and ethical biases and assumptions inform our creations, which will in turn change the world. Can and...

As our society grapples with the ramifications of developments like machine learning and genetic testing, a surprising new generation of even more powerful technological advances is already brewing in labs. Researchers are teaming up with machines to create reasoning systems that reach beyond the mere correlations in data to understand the underlying causal mechanisms in e...