Human rights through the eyes of my native land: South Africa in the world

Contributor(s): Professor Erik Hurst, Professor Chrisanthi Avgerou, Professor Noam Yuchtman | As we move deeper into the 21st century, rapid advancements in automation, robotics, and artificial intelligence continue to reshape industries, raising concerns about the potential impact on workers. Will these innovations lead to widespread job losses? Or, as history suggests, will the labour market adapt? In this insightful lecture, Erik Hurst will explore how recent developments in automation are influencing the labour market. Drawing parallels from the early 20th-century agricultural revolution, where the adoption of tractors and automated farming equipment drastically reduced agricultural employment but did not destabilize overall employment rates, Professor Hurst will examine how current automation trends may produce different effects.

Contributor(s): Dr Victor Agboga, Professor Mukulika Banerjee, Professor Sara Hobolt, Professor Peter Trubowitz | This year billions of people around the world have been to the polls. What have been the surprises and takeaways from these election results? Our panel of LSE researchers explore some of the issues that have come to the fore in this bumper year for international politics, along with the key outcomes and implications for the world in 2025.

Contributor(s): Professor Adam Oliver | In his inaugural lecture, Adam Oliver will describe how he became involved in, and has helped contribute towards the development of, the still relatively new field of behavioural public policy (BPP). He will briefly detail how the intellectual architecture of the field – i.e. its journal, Annual International Conference and Association – came into existence, and allude to his hopes for how BPP might develop in the future. Namely, that more liberal, autonomy-respecting frameworks emerge to at least co-exist on equal terms with the paternalistic frameworks that have dominated the field to date.

Contributor(s): Reid Hoffman | Artificial Intelligence is not only a generational technology, but also a general purpose technology—one that has outsized potential to transform societies and economies globally. How should we use AI to not only better understand the world, but organise, develop, and elevate it?

Contributor(s): Professor Mirca Madianou | In this talk based on her new book, Mirca Madianou will argue that digital innovations such as biometrics and chatbots engender new forms of violence and entrench power asymmetries between the global south and north. Drawing on ten years of research on the uses of digital technologies in humanitarian operations, Madianou will unearth the colonial power relations which shape ‘technology for good’ initiatives. The notion of technocolonialism captures how the convergence of digital infrastructures with humanitarian bureaucracy, state power and market forces reinvigorates and reshapes colonial legacies. Technocolonialism shifts the attention to the constitutive role that digital infrastructures, data and AI play in accentuating inequities between aid providers and people in need.