Cancelled: We apologise that we will no longer be holding this event due to the risk of contagion of Coronavirus. We are intending to film Dr Berg deliver this lecture today and upload it onto our website.
Chris Berg, Senior Research Fellow and Co-Director of the RMIT Blockchain Innovation Hub, will speak about his upcoming book—The New Technologies of Freedom—in which he talks about how innovative new technologies offer us a radical opportunity to enhance human freedom and individual autonomy.
Defending and expanding individual freedom is not just a question of politics, public policy, law and the state. Too much of the liberty movement is focused on either vouchsafing ideas for the future, or hoping that governments and politicians will suddenly turn around and stand up for individual freedom. We spend too much time begging the state for our liberty back.
Human society is on the cusp of a dramatic wave of technological change, including developments in blockchain, automation, artificial intelligence and machine learning, advances in cryptography and digitisation, drones, nanotechnology, algorithmic regulation, internet-of-things, 5G, biotechnology, and genetic engineering.
These technologies offer complex regulatory challenges, but also present an entirely new domain for liberties to be gained and reclaimed. We are presented with a unique historical opportunity to reshape our institutions in a way that prioritises rights and liberties, and to gain control over our identities, our personal information, our privacy, our property and our livelihoods.
The next few decades will be a clash between governments that want to regulate and control technology, and those who want to use those technologies to reclaim those liberties. It is essential that the liberty movement engages in this debate as soon as possible.
Chris Berg is a Senior Research Fellow and Co-Director of the RMIT Blockchain Innovation Hub, the world’s first dedicated social science research centre studying blockchain technology, based at RMIT University, Melbourne.
Dr Berg is one of Australia’s most prominent voices for free markets and individual liberty, and a leading authority on regulation, technological change, and civil liberties. He is the author of nine books, including most recently Understanding the Blockchain Economy: An introduction to institutional cryptoeconomics and Cryptodemocracy: How blockchain can radically expand democratic choice.
He is also an Adjunct Fellow with the Institute of Public Affairs, an Academic Fellow with the Australian Taxpayers’ Alliance, a Research Fellow with the University College London Centre for Blockchain Technologies, a Founding Board Member of the Worldwide Blockchain Innovation Association and the International Society for the Study of Decentralised Governance, and is on the Academic Board of the Samuel Griffiths Society. The impact of his research and scholarship is widely recognised in Australia and around the world.
We open doors at 6pm and the talk itself will begin at 6.30pm, with a Q&A session taking place after the lecture at approximately 7:15pm.