Thank you, Andre. Thank you Great pleasure to be back here It's already dead and dark outside. So it's very good to think about the future. So It's the future is really an interesting topic. I think because the future is getting faster every day You know ten years ago. I talked about the future. We talked about things that are far away today We talked about the future and boom is here next week Remember we used to talk about what cars can do five or six years ago You know electric cars self-driving cars and all of a sudden today like everybody's acting like there's only self-driving cars and autonomous cars in our future in fact many companies like Toyota are now saying they will stop making cars with gas engines in 15 years and The old industry is it one of those same things? We talked about Global warming and environmental concerns for 50 years, but all of a sudden it's clear We have more oil and gas and we could ever actually use somewhere But it's going to be too expensive to use it Now we have solar energy has become 97% cheaper in 10 years This means actually if it goes on like this, which there's no reason to believe it will not Roughly in 20 years. We can get the entire planet covered with energy abundant energy from solar Renewable we're talking about 35 trillion dollars worth of loss for the oil companies that tiny problem and Also, of course the end of wars about oil, right? You know how many wars that were about oil I mean the whole purpose of the Middle East will be deflated without oil Maybe they'll have golf courses instead. I but So in many ways, I think it's a very good title good enough is dead You know in my in my own work as a futurist. I've been doing this for 15 years I've come to the conclusion also for myself that good enough is dead It's not good enough for me to actually know a lot of things All of you can know the same thing if you take two weeks off and they just do some work on Google You could figure out what the future brings the next five years. It's not that difficult Because information is a you is ubiquitous now. In fact the other day. I Talked to a very large machine At one of the leading providers of artificial intelligence I'll talk more about that shortly and I asked the machine about the future of Europe And she talked to me very nicely like a person for 12 minutes one of the most intelligent talks I've ever heard about the future of Europe. I'm not kidding you Well, in a real voice this of course a very top-end machine, you know that most of us couldn't hope to have But then I asked the machine about a concept and I'd call that concept the United States of Europe Well, you'll have a good laugh on this one, right? Anyway, it's a concept. You know what the machine answered said command not understood Why because it's not something that already exists You'd have to be a little bit creative to think about that and that's what's happening all around of I good enough Is that my work in the future is not going to be about telling you things you don't know That's me about understanding things that you may not understand. There's a difference. It's a very big difference So basically as a futurist it's really straightforward. What my job is is not prediction There are some futurists like Alvin Toffler that could do this very well and Arthur C. Clarke And people like that they were actually like Jimi Hendrix of futurism so to speak It's a good fit because I used to be a musician. I'm attempting to be like Jimmy Hendrix But in any case my main job is to listen And I think if you take a piece from this, you know, if you learn how to listen to what the future is bringing Your job will be safe in the future. In fact, if you have kids, that's what you got to tell them Listen to what is happening around you and discover the future. That's how you get to be a have a saved job If there is any such thing as a job in the future That's how you can think about What the world is offering to you You know, there are so many thousands of new jobs just mind-blowing like a drone operator Not the military but a civil drone operators thousands of jobs tens of thousands being hired to fly drones For example with blood supply in Africa jobs that didn't even exist in five years ago And one of the main observations I have on this turf is of course the convergence of man and machine The symbiosis of man and machine and so if you take this we all have these devices, right? These are already our external brains.  In fact, it has more questions and answers, but just came out three weeks ago There's a website where you can read most of it already tech versus human dot-com Tech be as human and of course my my Twitter handle. I think you saw that here's g-learn hard You can ask questions on my Twitter handle so I'll talk a little bit more about the book later, but basically what's happening around us today is That technology is enabling the most amazing revolution that we we've seen for a long time I'd like to say the next 20 years will be more different than the past 300 years and That is because we've reached a point a pivot point a takeoff point where things are actually no longer science fiction They're actually are working automatic language translation that's been tried for a long time It's finally here the computers are actually understanding human language The Google machine is roughly now a tiny point beneath human understanding It's still quite a big point But in the next two years We're going to be able to talk to computers and they talk to us like a person They will actually understand us and then They're actually going to understand images That's already happening and Then they're going to have quantum processing right so in in 10 years. We're basically talking to a machine with an IQ of 50,000 Imagine how that will change banking you need a big IQ for that So basically now if you're today financial advice asset management That's people knowing stuff that you don't allegedly Supposedly But these are just facts right I mean what financial advisor can real-time monitor all the markets 24 7 a day is impossible Machine can do that for us So we're looking at a world that is going to be so vastly dramatically different and here's all the good things that it does And I like to say it's 90% positive We look at this long list defeating diseases We can probably end cancer We can fight really serious issues like diabetes using technology We can solve the energy problem. We can have abundant fresh water Many things that we can't solve with technology, which I'll talk about like terrorism, right? Obviously, there's no app for terrorism well to fix terrorism and We can enable the disabled and today if you're quite to plead you can't walk you can't do anything You can already buy an exoskeleton suit Costs two million euros and five years of training, but you can walk again using your brain power in a few years Maybe that's possible for anybody people who can actually use their hands to communicate So all these things are very positive, but they come with a price right they come with the price of saying well What else does it do for a 10% worrisome? Total loss of privacy addiction Dependency application All the things that are kind of minor now, but they're you know on the right here dehumanizing All kinds of things that we're looking at of course unemployment is one of those biggest factors. It is a certainty The technology will replace every single routine job in the world in the US They say basically if you can describe your work, you will be replaced by a machine Any routine that we do machines will eventually learn and there's only one cut-off point roughly in 10 years a point called the singularity Which is roughly the point when machines have the processing power than the human brain of the human brain That's roughly 40 quadrillion calculations per second is that what our measly brains can currently do Okay, and that is still vastly superior than most computers and this is just calculations. It's not actually things like emotions or Consciousness or whatever don't even go there But in 10 years we'll have machines like this very machine will have the capacity of my brain in 2050 will have one machine have the capacity of all human brains 10 billion brains There's no not a chance of we're going to get to keep those routine jobs because they are complicated like procurement for example, right or Risk compliance, you know those convoluted areas that we currently still working on That's not that's doable I mean a computer can today of say well you're going to buy a cheap ticket for me using intelligent assistant You know, that's not really rocket science, but all these things will happen in the future So unemployment is a certainty there and then we'll have to figure out what are the new jobs? What our kids have to learn do we need a social new social system? I Mean when 65 percent of people are unemployment then we don't have capitalism, right? What are they going to do to buy anything with So in this curve, this is actually good news. I'll explain to you later. Why I say it's bad news, but In this curve, right? This is the exponential curve This is something we have to get used to I Have only really been understanding this for the last three years. It's a great book called exponential organization my friend Yuri When gaste who wrote this great book talking about how this works and basically what's happening is that technology is doubling Moore's law Metcalf's law, you know what all that stuff every 18 months in power But here's an interesting part we used to be when I first got going on the internet We're at the beginning of this curve, right? We're at this place to where you know We're only here and it's zero point zero one doubles to zero point zero two is still nothing Nothing to worry about Not much change, but now we're here We're at the takeoff point. We're at four and the next point is eight sixteen. So roughly 70 years. We're going to be 128 That's 30 times as far as today So the kids of my kids will never know how to drive a car themselves. They're going to speak to the car and just does it They won't know what a CD is or a book. They may not ever learn languages They may live or it's certain they will live to be a hundred in average so Exponential changes and that impacts of course all the things that we do in business, but We have to learn how to let go of the linear thinking Because linear thinking is certain to have catastrophic results in business In other words, you're assuming what you do today will in some way or the other also work tomorrow That used to be true When I was in the music business there's some chimbos we're going to sell records units Whatever they are downloads and that's how we make money. We make money distributing those round things or downloads Turns out not true The future is not about distribution is about attention 21 million songs on Spotify for nine years a month One CD 25 years if you in the distribution business you're dead. You're just toast I mean on that now nobody will know who Sony music is in five years if they go on like this because that's all they used to do If you're a bank or insurance company if you don't follow the exponential path to a new business model Other people will come and just either do from 50 different directions Look at the car industry What is the biggest mantra of the car business today? Don't buy a car buy mobility Kids are not getting driving licenses. California is thinking about a driving license just for autonomous cars a Car can be a legal entity now very soon in California. The car can be a person and buy insurance This is all exponential stuff that we have to think about if you look at all this compilation here that If you showed this to an uninitiated person that have a heart attack is like a hundred things happening at the same time Not only is our future exponential. It's also combinatorial Which means the trends are amplifying each other and Things become possible because the trends coming together the internet of things which connects Traffic lights and sensor networks and wristwatches and stuff isn't making things possible like logistics in a completely different way a smart city smart farming all of those things So basically you put this in a blender like a cocktail blender and you hit the button and Outcomes complete reinvention And if you're in business, you sort of have to say well, it's mission critical for me to have foresight Foresight has to do with imagination as you can imagine Foresight means that you would actually be able to say what will you be in five years? Every company in the planet has to think about this Doesn't matter how big One of the biggest companies in the world that we just started working with us is Walmart, you know the the retailer two and a half million Employees and they're saying some very interesting thing about the future that does not sound like Walmart at all So you you see in this complete reset This is really mission critical to think about where this is going and how we're going to get there And so now on this exponential curve, you also have a new question You know when you talk about technology we used to say just ten years ago Is it possible that we can make the cloud secure or we can use CRM or ERP software in such a way or so? Whatever the answer is it's always yes. I Mean today. There's almost no question left with that technology can or cannot do something the answer is always yes Just why when? Can technology defeat cancer yes, that is definitely going to happen how exactly we don't know it's but it's not 50 years away It's more like 20 or 30 years away So the question is no longer how or if but why and if you are using technology for your business That is the question the question is not how we going to build the better mousetrap or be more efficient But the question is why what is the human purpose of this technology? so The news really is here that technology is not going to save us if we have a bad business idea or a bad business model In fact the opposite is true because technology is sort of an equalizer also Many people I talked to they want to use technology to be more efficient Most large companies in the world are looking for number one thing is to fire as many people as possible using technology Call centers 54 million people work in call centers These softwares that understand what we're saying They can access a database you know that is just about there 98% unemployment in call centers They'll keep a few people for the tough cases So that is a question. Why are we doing this? Where are we going with this right literally everything is connected? I live in Switzerland, so I use some cows Everything is getting connected This is phenomenal and also very scary The fact that we're connecting the cows we can tell for example how much they've walked and if they are really organic and so on and so on right That's a probably a good thing and we can connect environmental sense of network the street lights are being connected But on the other hand all the information is being collected and we have no idea who's in charge The cows don't care. They're gonna end up being a hamburger anyway, but what about us? How much controlled I mean right now 95% of the global data that we produce is controlled in Silicon Valley and It's controlled under US law, which is emergency law if you may remember after September 11th Anything can be done. We have no control over that And many of my clients are those that are doing this I kind of have an inherent discussion with them about this So we need to figure out how we can actually go forward in the world. That's never offline Some of us may be the last generation of people that know what offline actually means Right now to be fair. I mean Finland is highly connected place Offline is a mental state. It's not a technical state And in Switzerland, I like to say offline is the new luxury So I came up with a tourism campaign for Switzerland saying come to Switzerland be bored I mean Technology has made it impossible for us to be bored. That's not a good thing What do we need boredom for well guess what we need boredom for to discover other things? So we're not constantly surrounded by noise. So never offline is not such a good idea really and Then everything is connected and of course everything is being made convenient Some people talk about the singularity. I'll talk about the so far larity, which has a lot Lying on the sofa remote controlling our entire lives without moving Becomes entirely possible right becoming superhuman I mean this is actually this is the pitch of technology Use our stuff and you have superpower. You know what? I'm really tempted by this. I love technology I try out everything literally everything But the bottom line is if technology doesn't make us better humans, what do we need it for? If the technology you're going to use in your business just makes better algorithms makes it more efficient Well, congratulations. You save a few dollars, but Where is it going? What is the purpose of where you're going with this conversation as I was saying earlier? This is a Google project called g g dealt You can find out anything any job that has to do with information advantage is toast Journalism what not journalism itself, but that part of journalism research financial advice It's no longer about knowledge. It's about understanding how we use that knowledge How we use it just in case pretty much all of that is becoming a bit too predictive analytics You heard about that of course and the financial business widely used With the data intake of several hundred million data feeds a day Any organization can become pretty predictive This is already happening on the markets. I'm sure you know Roughly 47% of all transactions are done by machines When that reaches 87% we won't have a stock market machines working with machines So the whole system kind of collapses then we have to think about what that means for us Where is it going? What could be the next possible steps? Here's a great example Been a trial in the u.s. That said what if we compare judges and Machines and So the case would be that you would have a criminal He would decide that criminal can go back on the street and maybe he will come around right or not Based on facts the judge decides This trial showed the judge had worse judgment than the machine The machine made better decisions Suggested by algorithm about who should go back on the street or not Well allegedly, okay So question I have for you who do you believe man or machine? Where does this go? You know what the next proposal is? Artificial intelligent politicians Well, that's only an upgrade I suppose right I Will talk more about that but I mean in business you have to wonder about this right when you have when you do business And you're using data. How real is it and how do you decide?  You guys use trip advisor Okay, sometimes you have to say it's you know, it's pretty amazing and it's pretty accurate and sometimes just so totally Damn wrong. It's just completely nuts, right? And this is because you don't know what happened with trip advisor and what the exact Composition of that output is so and it could be heaven.  Well, all the other places are packed and it says in triple right. This is the best place you can go to but it's completely empty Right, why would you go inside? If everybody else goes somewhere else just because the machine tells you that's what we do That's called automation bias That's because that's who we are We like we like shortcuts As a musician, I spent my 10,000 hours working as a musician learning how to play an instrument Let's just shortcut that and buy an iPad with an app and I can reach the same place in 10 hours And is that the way the future going to be? I don't think so So let's talk about this IBM has some really great projects here It's one of my clients, but I'm not showing that for that reason. It's kind of entertaining check out what Sheila bear said She was the head of the FTC in the US Sheila bear former FDIC chairperson under two presidents. That's me. I have studied your writings on finance Oh, you read my book. Yes. I am learning about risk. What risk is necessary Watson? It's the only way businesses grow We just have to manage and understand it. I can analyze complex data to help people evaluate risk and make better decisions That's great. Because you know, this isn't just theory. This protects real people and real lives. That is a real good point Sheila bear Yeah, so interesting, you know that IBM is suggesting that we could use a machine to do these things in fact The CEO of IBM the other day, Jenny Rometti said in the future. It won't be experts people deciding it'll be analytics and data I think she was quite serious about this So where does this go and how we're going to? Value this in which direction will we take this? I mean, this is going to be Really really interesting discussion. Go back to the title of the come of the presentation This is sort of a Darwinistic thing that we're seeing I call this digital Darwinism What used to be good enough no longer is Airbnb now is much better than many hotels and it's providing an experience You could argue that of course, but Airbnb is liquid. It works Netflix. I mean, Netflix is you have Netflix here, right? Is exploding killing regular over the top television? You have this what's happening in New York less people taking taxis more people taking ubers and as soon as something comes up That's just really good. That's actually works It's completely over and so basically good enough is dead Look at banking Every major bank in the world has an initiative. What's called robo advisor? These are robotic systems software agents That can advise customers because now remember computers can speak and they can understand what I'm saying So that makes them pretty much like a person backed up by a hundred billion data feeds IBM just bought a company in New York a thousand people who are risk and compliance Analysts and the only reason that IBM bought this company is to feed their heads into the machine Literally All those guys are going to sit down and say this is how I do my job I'm going to do if this then that you know that sort of thing and the machine will learn it make a model out of it. I Guarantee you these robot visors will do a better job than most financial advisors ever have On a on the low risk level, you know an obvious paradigms like investing 10,000 euros and you know low Environment low risk environment and then the blockchain This is a revolution. That's almost like the second internet now The possibility of a cryptographic peer-to-peer network that transacts contracts and money And all these things at 99.9 percent cheaper. I mean, this is the key topic, of course for banking B2B is next. This is not just about the consumer space So Martin McLuhan once said that with new technologies. It's the framework that changes not the picture So when you think about what you're doing in your work and what your company is doing Let's think about the framework The largest story procurement is a great example. What is the story of procurement buying stuff for your company? Most of that stuff is going to be about facts and figures and matching and you know, it's intricate But what is the feature of procurement? probably an algorithm on Some level So when we think about this all over some we're realizing or we have stuff like artificial intelligence robotics the fourth industrial evolution These things are all extremely powerful. I'm basically I'm saying is 90% opportunity But we'll have to understand where the opportunity lies especially for Finland small country Like Switzerland where I live, I think a little bit bigger than Switzerland So what does it mean? How can we use this on a global level? Where do we go from here in this millennial generation? That's never offline You know 75% of the workforce around the globe will be kids, you know who are now 25 They'll be the new CEOs You know they're going to decide stuff that that you would never think that we would decide I mean if a 25 year old kid ever moves out from from the house Most of them actually stay if they do ever move out They will not subscribe to cable television They'll get the internet They're not looking for a career job. They're looking for fulfillment completely different life So in this direction, we're basically going to see what I call the mega shifts. It's a big part of my book The 10 mega shifts are something to dive into I will not go through all of them because we'll be here tomorrow morning if I do But There's a new site and work notes called mega shifts comm you can poke around there But basically those are the trends that will change our society on a much larger level than just what is called digital transformation In fact when you hear about digital transformation just put that somewhere in a drawer. That's like social media It's like a concoction of meanings. Nobody knows what that actually means But you take on all those trends you put them together. Let's start with one datafication The other day I bought my first connected hiking boot This is a I mean I usually wouldn't do those kind of things because I think it's kind of annoying But I try that anyway and what the boot does It connects to my phone Collects all the data and it says you've walked 43 miles and I can tell you your left foot is dragging more than your right foot That's interesting information And that's why I'm not doing so well like the blister or something or it says you're going to need new shoe laces in 40 kilometers So all that data that didn't use to exist because I had to go look at the shoes to figure it out Right, that's now becoming data when your doctor 10 years ago sees you it would scribble stuff down put it in a file That never turned into data Today every single bit of information is turning into data that can be tracked put somewhere connected datafication and That is also heaven or hell like because it can create all kinds of interesting scenarios Automation, of course, that's quite clear. We'll talk more about the augmentation We're becoming augmented people The mobile phone is kind of an augmentation, but that is very trivial is outside of us But very soon augmented reality virtual reality holograms Are we going to be mainstream as I'd like what's up? So when you're a doctor or policeman you were a holographic visor and you can see the world like Tom Cruise did a minority reporting and go inside the data and take it out and create large contexts So that is going to result in a world that is dramatically different like the world of the autonomous car I mean if you put all these trends together automation Platformization virtualization robots data personalization you get these kind of products Vastly different kinds of products So these mega shifts are really important to understand because they kind of point in this direction So if you want to read about the blockchains are more which I just omitted you have to read my colleagues book Don't have Scott blockchain revolution If you can make it through the whole book, then you'll know that's really a deep piece right and I'm banking is now Impacted by all of those things that are on this list So let's talk about disrupt a little bit more. That's actually good a good relation to this If you're looking at this chart and just look at your own company or your own life and say which ones of those four things Attribute to my company And then you know what your fate is in terms of how you're going to deal with disruption Let's say your banker Complex environment tick trust issues big tick obsolete intermediaries huge tick Restricted access regulation tick Four of those things are applicable to banking. How many of those will be applicable to energy? Complex environments trust issues. Yeah a little bit Intermediaries a little bit as little bit early for that restricted access. Yes So that's a good way to analyze. So if you arrive for disruption and I like to call disruption sometimes a Tesla moment No years ago We did a seminar for a big German car company was six or seven years ago And we talked about self-driving cars autonomous cars car sharing And we had a room of 20 or 30 people and we basically got laughter We got flat-out laughter about the concept of sharing a car The idea of having a car does not have a great sound when you step on the gas The Tesla moment is when you realize that the other guys weren't full of shit All of a sudden you realize, you know, this could actually work Tesla moment in journalism We realize that people love paper, but you know, there's there's a possibility of paper not necessarily be in the future Now we realize of course an entirely new business models coming up the Tesla moment in the music business and found out they sued 258,000 people when they went to court Against 258,000 people and they realized it didn't do a thing For their business and all the money went to the lawyers and They lost 71% in revenues in 12 years So if you're facing the Tesla moment, you have to think about this I mean look at what Tesla is doing Tesla is currently selling twice as many luxury cars as Mercedes and BMW combined In most Western countries where they are I have no idea why because it's even hard to get one But so that's partly based on this title shift in computing And this title shift is really what we have to understand now computers are now going from the tabulating era To the programming era to the cognitive era This is important to understand because Program computer does a job a cognitive computer actually invents the job Well, this is IBM's headline a cognitive computing But let's talk about cognitive as a separate thing cognitive as thinking right? I mean we tried this years ago thinking machines right this was in the 50s Today the number one objective of CXOs in the banking financial services sector is cognitive computing Followed by insurance media and so on is computers that can make up rules and define the process Logistics for example Estimation is that if we had computers figure out how to do logistics that's trillions of interactions We could save between 50 and 60 percent of cost of logistics This is a mind-boggling number including of course some of them would be printed rather than shipped Now we have computers that are totally capable of that quantum computers Biggest one is in China, of course But by around 2020 estimates are saying that we will have our deficient intelligent computers that can learn markets And can learn our bodies also What will we do with this enormous power? This is like the power of nuclear energy Can be terrible most of the time it is What can be used for energy? So we're gonna need some pretty wise politicians We're gonna need some people really understand this otherwise we're in deep trouble Because this is tremendous power of technology We can reinvent how we do things or we can blow ourselves up in the process and this is a huge premise learning machines Mean simple learning machines already you use every day like Google Maps Google Maps knows who you are where you are the average Google user has 25 million records on Google 25 million You don't even want to know how many records Facebook has about you That's a lot more than that So this machine is already learning about you and and Google knows that you've been there you've been here You've stayed there longer just like Amazon knows when you read the Kindle how fast you read What time you read how many times you skip whether you've shared it What time you open how big your battery is and so on what they know all these things And they learn from it So that's a huge premise and it's basically the idea of saying that computers can do this And you've heard about the singularity the point in time roughly ten years that may be optimistic when computers have the same capacity than us and 2050 what we may be entering a post human era This is a kind of a strange conversation to have we'll go back that in a second But suffice to say this now we have to think about What I call digital ethics on how good is technology how powerful is who's in charge and What do we intend to do with it? This is a big conversation because it has to do with lots and lots of things that are really important This is a page from from Time magazine Bunch of people have proposed that the next president of the US should be an artificial intelligence. I Think that's probably a good alternative to the current choices Even though I have to say I do hope that we don't get Trump.  Sorry It's years away and I would maintain that is really 90% positive imagine all the things that we can do if we do this right When you think about man and machine don't think about Hollywood.  The rest is just all fear You cannot proceed into the future based on fear You'll never do anything. I just The biggest problem of machines is not that machines will kill us But that we become too much like machines We know what it means to become like a machine when you see a family sitting around the dinner table and everybody's working on their external brains That's we have already become machines How will we adapt what's the social contract and what is the the consequence of this right in this world data is the new oil And you see in the start of this been widely spread Ten years ago the most powerful companies on the planet were oil companies and banks Today look at the list of companies alphabet is Google, of course the most powerful companies in the world are tech companies data companies data mining companies platforms and So the question really is what will we do ultimately? Should they be regulated like we regulated oil? Probably I mean their power is tremendous They're playing on a tilted playing field technology companies don't play on the same playing field than you know, Mercedes-Benz They start from zero When YouTube started it was basically illegal to upload videos. They found an exemption under the DMCA. Okay, that's pretty clever But you know it wasn't entirely legal and they started on a playing field of saying well the worst case is we all go to jail for copyright infringement You can't do that when you have a major newspaper So these companies are starting on a playing field and it's powered by artificial intelligence by data analytics But all these things and the CEO of Google says famously Sundar we're going from mobile first to AI first I mean, this is a company that makes 2.8 billion dollars a month with advertising where we type some two-word phrases into a search engine That's like Stone Age basically Now they're going to artificial intelligence. In fact Google is building a global brain Everything we have in there in the sky connected This could be Skynet if the worst case or it could be Nirvana because it would open up all kinds of thing including research and this 8,550 oncology reports every single day and case studies on cancer Which doctor can look at all that stuff and it's impossible can we have a machine that does that that would be Fantastic the intelligence or super intelligence of that. So those are the biggest game-changers period in our lives and They will change everything to the good or the bad that we have to think about how do we actually create this? You know Muffins that can talk to us from apps to global brains to digital assistants and that do all these things It's an example. This is a very complex question. I asked the other day of an app called Viv Which is was just purchased by Samsung very complex question and this digital assistant goes out and gets my ticket in 14 seconds Imagine you can ask this assistant and say, you know, I have a slight problem with the social security system in health In Finland, can you run this 1.4 trillion records and come back to me tomorrow with a fix? That's a little bit far away today, but that's not too far away because now we have all this control speaking to machines Here's a quick example. So how much money do you have? Alexa stop Marino you definitely have to stop. How you do that? It's my Amazon Echo. I Can stream music Order things and watch this you thought about the Amazon Echo. This is a box that sits in your living room four and a half million Americans have it That listens to you the entire time You just say Alexa, please switch on the light in the bedroom play rock and roll in the bathroom order some more sticky notes Speaking like a friend This is already happening today and the future is quite clear that intelligent machines are here and My good friend Paul Saffo a future viz says that we should be careful not to confuse a clear view with a short distance For this to really work perfectly. It's quite a bit away Alexa can order my sticky pads But more complicated things. I think it would need more information for that to actually work I'll skip this because I want to get to the summary and get some questions. Okay, so First I get this all the time. Are we becoming useless humans? This is a serious question You could argue that we're useless because technology will do everything for us Including having babies by the way, that's another project. That's being looked at called exogenesis in an external womb This is not science fiction Even though I think it should be But so I'll be becoming useless. So the question really is what do we do in the future if if they can do all that stuff? Well, the answer really is as this guy Albert Hubbard said years ago One machine can do the work of 50 ordinary men women. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man or woman and How do we become or how do we remain extraordinary by being human? The exact same skills that weren't allowed in companies in the past which is emotion compassion intuition imagination Other ones that are going to be our future Because all the other hard skills, you know implementing a plan figuring stuff out that's machine work That is robotic work that we used to do work like a robot So that is going to be our future is to combine those two things You know figure out where we're going with us what I call the andro rhythms You know the human rhythms that we have in ourselves that are enabling us to do these things So the bottom line is whatever can't be digitized and automated will be and That's a certainty Just like music is in the cloud. It's not on plastic And the future of the car does not contain fumes coming out the back But it's also true that everything that cannot be automated will become very valuable and That happens to be 95% of what we do When you're working with customers, you're not basing your relationship on algorithms. This is about trust meaning purpose service Not zeros and ones and this is a whole different thing that we're doing that computers can't currently do So the key question really is in your in your business. What should be automated and what should not be automated. I Mean clearly driving a car is not a human thing that we must have I'm driving a car out in the country. Maybe but driving a car for transportation in the city That's not a human requirement and we could we can live with automating that. I think you'd agree very on German thing to say but still What should we not automate while clearly finding a partner deciding life and death Having people killed with automatic drones There's a couple trivial things that we should keep to ourselves to our own decision-making process That we should actually keep because technology has no ethics That's a fact and I think that's fine There are some technology companies that have recently come around to thinking about ethics and that's good news If we use lots of technology then we have to figure out how we put the human inside, right? That's the bottom line The more technology you use the more you have to put humans inside. Otherwise you end up with a machine So the more we amp up technology the more we have to put the human side because machines don't think like humans think Humans think with the body not the brain. That's Daniel Kahneman the famous Nobel Prize-winning psychologist who said cognition is embodied. We think to the body not the brain If I meet you in the hallway it takes us one second to figure out if we're gonna go to connect if we're part of the Same tribe or whatever you want to call it one second Without actually saying anything So that's basically the big difference I did the danger is really that we would say that machines can do all the things while they really can't So our future in business to say let's use those machines. Let's replace all the routines. Let them do what has to be done That's just monkey work fine They don't have to think like we think they should not have ethics. They should not have emotions. They should remain a tool And I can guarantee you if you don't use these tools you will be dead your company will be dead in a short time Because that is the nature of business and that's what's happening all around us So let me come to a summary to see how Walmart says something very interesting as The world becomes more digital It will be the humanity of Walmart now That's kind of an irony right there. It will be the humanity of Walmart that Differentiates us and wins with customers That's an interesting statement right as the world becomes more technology. It's the man here makes a difference I think that's something we can learn something from so I would Recommend you look in this direction right as much as you may believe in technology Hence the chain, right? It's really about experiences About purpose about putting the human inside and you can clearly see what this is happening in work. You see this chart here totally clear non-routine cognitive work on the way up Routine manual work carpenters plumbers electricians artists on the way up everything else down Don't let your kids learn a routine job Whether it's a programmer or a banker on the low level Whatever it is accountant bookkeepers. Oh my god, just So let me summarize okay Exponential change is certain this is a positive force in our life that we have to embrace We have to understand think the best way to prove that your future ready is to understand this Thinking machines and artificial intelligence is a certainty. That's as certain as Spotify music moving into the cloud cars going electric the mega shifts the end of routine I Made a list the other day saying these are all my routine jobs and Now I'm ticking one after the other awful list and trying to automate use a machine for that Because that's gonna happen routine jobs will be going that direction developing four sites a Four-side a week. That's all I ask Just one idea about your future and finally digital ethics What are the guidelines for our life in a machine age in a digital age? If a single politician official CEO any leader has to answer that question all the time how we do this in the future so I want to leave you with the bottom line realization that I Have a lot when I'm speaking to people is the less we assume about what we are and what we can do the more we can discover So assume less discover more is a very good way of looking at this and saying well, what if what if Let's imagine this would be different Alvin Toffler said in dealing with the future. It is far more important to be imaginative than to be right Also very ungerman thing to say This is our future. Let's imagine what it looks like and then we'll get it right. Thanks very much for listening


and I will go through, I'm going to pop my slides up so you can see them as well. So this is a session called, provocatively called, High Gender Studies as well, great to hear. Okay, so this is provocatively called, Viral Feminisms, Studying Gender, Sexuality and Law in Times of Crisis. And what I'm hoping to do is bridge both the programs within the School of Law and the School of Interdisciplinary Studies that cross between gender and law in particular, probably with a slightly kind of broader focus on the gender components of that, rather than necessarily the legal bits, but that will come up and I will talk to my courses which include a legal component as we go through and which can also talk to who's one of my current students, who's here with us today. So why Viral Feminisms? Well, first of all, I have to admit that I stole my, from my colleague, Yasmin Gunnatananam, who is a colleague at Goldsmiths University and came up in a discussion we were having and I, I thought it was just a really kind of neat capture of the potential for existing feminist literature to perhaps be framed as a response to some of the kind of current crisis modes that we find ourselves in. Yasmin's work on feminist methods, race, migrants, care, debility and frailty, and is just a massive inspiration on my own work and there'll be some links to some of her writing as we go through. But in framing the lecture Viral Feminisms, I also wanted to reflect on, I guess, two interrelated aspects of what I think we might all be experiencing at the moment. And that is this kind of very prominent calling of, for a kind of reimagining of the world through, through the idea of care and community. I've sat with human rights scholars and colleagues that saw us talking about how they see the end of the pandemic as a moment when we might rethink how we build our communities and how we might centre care. I have to say I was a little bit shocked when they said this because I was like, oh, have you not read any feminist literature? You don't need to rethink the world to centre care and community. There are plenty of blueprints for doing this already. And I think this is most particularly in the histories of black feminist writing. So my colleague at Queen Mary University, Aziza Johnson, writes in response to COVID-19 and again, I've got a link coming up on a slide. And this is Aziza's words. And as I feel my rage bubbling over at this superficial and delayed concern with health and well-being, I know that rage is the last emotion they want to process from a disabled black Muslim woman. And this is in a blog post that she wrote about her own kind of struggles at the moment dealing with simultaneously with cancer and COVID-19, but also the politics of race, politics of care, politics of voice. And it really brought home to me that so many feminist writings have long kind of considered many of the themes that are being pushed to the forefront at the moment. And this element is in kind of theorising care, vulnerability, and different ways of living. I guess we could pick up on the viral aspect of viralizing something that is kind of spread in a more of a horizontal, you know, this is what's kind of challenging our politicians and political structures, which are so used to kind of a top-down and imposed structure. And instead, we have knowledge about care, knowledge about the disease that's kind of travelling in these horizontal ways that, again, already exists in the framing of feminist, queer, trans, critical race scholarship. So perhaps what we need to do, and this is, I guess, the theme of what I'm talking about, look to the peripheries of our dominant knowledge frames if we want to imagine the world anew. So rather than this is a starting point, perhaps this is a looking back point for many feminist scholars. So in terms of who I am, just a quick kind of brief picking up on that. I'm a reader in gender studies and international law at service. So welcome to all of you just joining the session. We've only just begun. And I hold a peculiar place at SIRS in the sense that I work across two different departments. I was originally employed in the School of Law, but I'm also now employed in the Centre for Gender Studies. I have a very close working relationship with both departments, and part of the work that I've done is being set up for MA in gender studies and law, as well as an LLM in law and gender. So nearly all of my courses have some students from the law school, some students from gender studies. I'm sure some students from other departments as well certainly join us on some of our classes, but I'm sure you've already looked and seen that we also have a kind of much broader range of gender studies modules that many of you might be interested in. My own research focuses on predominantly collective security and feminist methodologies within international law, and at different moments I might come up with some of that as we go forward. So I just, for those of you that have just kind of arrived, I also want to just introduce Chandi again. Do you want to say a quick hi? I think your microphone should be working and just tell us a bit about your degree and your modules. Oh maybe she's just up to play. Oh yeah. Oh you're there. Can you hear me? Yeah we can hear you. Okay. Hi everyone. I'm Chandini, I'm one of Gina's students. I'm doing the LLM in Human Rights Conflict and Justice, and this, well it's only a one-year program, so this is my last term. And if anyone has any kind of student related questions they want to ask me to let me know. I think you can message in the chat. To me individually, I'm not sure, or I don't know if Gina, we can work out a way that I can answer questions offline after the things finished. Yes, so we can have a question section at the end, or if you want to throw questions as we go forward through the chat, that's absolutely fine. And I guess also you're taking the gender piece and international law course at the moment. So how do you find it being in the interdisciplinary classroom? Because I think that's one of the very specific things about interdisciplinary modules is that we do have very interdisciplinary classrooms, students from across the school. I think it's probably my favorite thing about doing the gender modules is the interdisciplinary nature of the learning, especially at the beginning of the term, you know, when everyone kind of goes around and says the name where they're from and what their kind of background and study is and what they're studying now. It kind of creates this little microcosm where you get so many different views from so many different places and you're all still talking about the same topic, and I really think that's the beauty of interdisciplinary classrooms. And I also think just generally that it's almost a shame that disciplines are so separate because so much magic comes from where disciplines combine and it's just such an act of looking at most topics. So I think it's really valuable. Yeah, I think it's also, I really like that last point. I think it in particular stops, I guess, as someone that kind of went through a lot of disciplinary background with kind of constraints of that thinking because the colleagues from different departments sort of will challenge the language or challenge the assumptions within another discipline. I think that's really, really powerful. But also our methodologies. Sophie, are you all right? I know you've dropped in and out. I've got mine. I wonder if it connects. It's not good. Send us a message in the chat if you need some support in the background, and I've probably got someone that can help you, Sophie. I know you just see now on your third attempt at entering the room. Thanks, Chandi. So I want to move on. This is what I might outline for what I'm going to go through now. So I just have a very short slide on the multiple side of COVID-19 and sort of contingency plans and what we're hoping will happen and what will happen if what we hope happens can't happen before I talk a little bit about the kind of gender sexuality law study that you can do at SARS and then a kind of much more in-depth digging into the kind of feminism and gender studies that we do at SARS as well. Okay. So just quickly, first of all, just so you all know, obviously it's probably at the forefront of your mind and you probably or may or may not know that term three at SARS for this current year. So we run on a three-term program. We've just finished term two. The last week of that was online and all of term three is going to be online, including our assessments, any lectures, any outstanding tutorials or student meetings, including around dissipation. So in that sense, it's been a bit rushed, but we've certainly managed to kind of, I hope, kind of move the programs online. Our hope is and our expectation is that we'll be on campus in October for the new academic year, although of course, students come for welcome week in the last week of December and you'll see the aspect there. I'm sorry, it's off the slide. Actually for anyone taking the MA and gender studies in law or an MA in law, so if you don't have a law degree already, but taking a law program, you would be expected to come earlier in September for the pre-tensional law course. But for all of those programs at this moment, we're working to be on campus with backup kind of processes around, you know, some of our cohort aren't there mechanisms for people to keep up to date with the learning through recorded lectures such as this or, you know, if heaven forbid, we're not on campus at all an alternative online learning practice. We're running our summer schools and our English language learning over the summer also this year. If you're super, super anxious, you might want to look at the MA in Gender, Sexuality and Global Politics, which is our first so as gender studies full MA that will be online and the first intake is due to commence and join us in October 2020 and does include a new module on gender sexuality and law, which we're currently finessing and should have it up online soon. If you want some information on that, I think the best thing is just email me directly. Great. So there are different ways that you might be coming and for example, I know some of you are looking to come on to other programs that take some of our gender studies modules, which is absolutely fine. As we were just talking about, one of the things that makes many of our courses so rich and we have many students across different disciplines that join us. If you are enrolling in the Centre for Gender Studies, we run three different programs, the MA in Gender Studies and Law, which is the one that I convene. The MA in Gender Studies, which is our biggest program and I know some of you have talked to me mentioned that this is what you're coming to study anyway and our new MA in Transnational Queer Feminist Politics, which is a kind of a revised version of what was previously called the MA in Gender and Sexuality. If you're in the School of Law, you might be in Gender Studies modules through any of our LLM or MA in Law programs, but we do have a specific LLM in Gender and Law, although it's a little bit more constrained than the Gender Studies modules. In relation to gender and law in particular, I've got a list of the modules there that you might be taking, Gender Sexuality Law, Theories and Methodologies, Gender Sexuality Law, Topics, which comes off the page, Gender, Peace and International Law, Gender Uncontrollable and International Law, but I think our broader modules, Gendering, Migration and Diaspora for example, Gender and Security and Africa module, all also speak often to kind of legal and political arrangements and there is a certain amount of crossover and kind of broader discussion. Great, so I wanted to start by thinking in terms of content about how we approach gender and feminism in, so as, I don't think it's always self-evident and what point of feminist history is histories of gender that we think about and the notes I've got written here are, How We Understand Gender It's So Us and I've written Intersectional, Post-Colonial, Knowledge, Frames and Epistemologies and I guess if we were in a class at the moment, they would be the bits that I wanted you to write down, Intersectional, Post-Colonial, Knowledge, Frames and Epistemologies. So I'm sorry for the kind of size of the text, I didn't want to leave anything out, but in particular I guess and certainly when I think about gender sexuality and law, but I think more broadly in the approach to gender access is a commitment to intersectionality and there's a quote there from Yasmin who I spoke about before in relation to the pandemic and COVID-19 in particular where she says the pandemic is also surfacing long-standing feminist concerns and I guess this is in part my response to the pandemic as well. These are long-standing feminist concerns around care and community that are perhaps being voiced more widespread, more widely at the moment and she says and disillusionment with the constraints of heteromasculinist and ableist approaches to bodies and subjectivity as well as the enduring colonial and racial legacies of method and knowledge economies. It's a great quote but it needs a little bit of unpecking and what does it have to do with it intersectional feminism? Well I think it pushes us to think about intersectionality as not a kind of list of identities or kind of means to identity politics so it's not about blaming a particular label and owning a label it's more about looking at how power privileges certain identities and reproduces the kind of privilege of certain identities over time with an enduring kind of legacy of both colonial and racial histories and an intersectional feminist approach therefore is interested in the methods and the knowledges that ground power intersectionality of course as I'm sure you're aware emerges from critical race writing in the U.S. particularly the work or the the Talamitz office framed and phrased by Kimberley Crenshaw in the early 1990s but critical race feminism in the U.S. extends well beyond Kimberley Crenshaw's work and of course what told us as critical race feminists do more broadly is that gender doesn't operate in isolation it operates action tandem with other power structures in our communities and Kimberley Crenshaw was particularly interested in the intersection of race and gender and looked at how that intersection between racial discrimination and gender discrimination in the U.S. was more than race plus gender but that's something qualitatively different happens at the intersection of race and gender for racialized and gendered subjects. Now if you've read Crenshaw if you've read critical black feminism critical race feminisms from the U.S. you'll know that this then isn't a project that is interested in kind of reproducing identities it's looking at how political legal economic structures in and of themselves reproduce and alienate some while empowering others within the structures we already have. Intersectional feminisms today obviously look beyond gender and race look at sexuality ableism religion ethnicity and well beyond to articulate and mobilize around the idea of intersectional harms and discrimination interlocking with each other. For feminists interested in law I think what's most important from the most important kind of takeaway from this is to appreciate that if we have a gender law reform policy that doesn't think through kind of intersectional privilege and intersectional power what we reproduce in our gender law reform is the capacity really only for some women to advance and the reproduction of intersectional harms in other spaces so that we find women whose identities otherwise much uh elite groups in society are often advised we have a law reform or if we think of this in a more global sense we see gender law reform in use as a tool that's imposed on some communities rather than others so it becomes part of civilizing tools. The other aspect of intersectionality for me is always a kind of methodological one so taking the end of the quote there it's about thinking about how diverse speaking subjects love may manage quote in the second part of this slide the diversity of speaking subjects and the forms of expression and treatment treatment themselves so I think intersectional politics also asks us to ask about the conditions for speech the conditions for agency and I'm sure you'll get the slide sent to you after the lecture and when you do what I encourage you to do is to click on this slide which actually has um has a short trailer for latter money's film the politics sorry the poetics of fragility embedded in it and you can see Angela Davis there really very beautiful evocative exploration of fragility which seems I think ever so timely at a moment when of course we're talking about vulnerability and fragility globally locally regionally nationally and again it just strikes me that we have some sophisticated theorizing around this rather than kind of this preoccupation with oh there's a new new way of doing community that we're doing at the moment a new way of doing care um and I want to encourage you to think about that not just as um a knowledge framing or who speaks and how we speak but people embedded kind of reorientating of the methods on which we enact and kind of uh so uh moving forward um the next slide um actually picks up how I've been monitoring the the crisis uh if we if we see it as a crisis or global pandemic uh as gendered um and why would I even question the idea of whether we see it as a crisis this is often a slide because there's so much feminist writing around how crisis thinking in and of itself is a gendered form of thinking that lends itself towards masculine solutions and embedding kind of a gendered binary in our thinking between masculine and feminist feminine not feminist form uh and um I guess this leads to asking the question of how does a program on gender such as the courses you might do at SARS but also kind of a theorization of gender such as intersectionality as we've been talking about also wider approaches such as colonial feminisms or transnational feminisms uh such as what we we deal with that look at at SARS deal with a kind of tension between focusing on women's lives and theorizing gender because to see they're two slightly different things I don't think they're unrelated and I think they're really important to think through in our approach um so just surveying the type of literature that's merging around the gender of COVID-19 I've seen quite a bit of writing on women and disaster responses in the sense of who's being cared for how caring for personalised who has access to care gendered vulnerabilities I'm sure we've all seen the kind of reports about raised risks with respect to domestic violence in particular and gendered ideas around protection about who needs protection in the state and just how protection is sort of narrativised in the kinds of public discourses we've seen at the moment and of course a little bit of attention to the idea of women and decision making in crisis times I think there's an interesting article going around that sort of looks at I think Prime Minister of Iceland, Norway and New Zealand who are all women and kind of makes a case for their kind of response to the crisis or COVID-19 being different to that of other states which I found really really very interesting of course if we focus on women's lives we always risk um we risk essentialising their lives and making some claims that perhaps women are this or women are biologically inclined in this way or women's nature is such that they are vulnerable and in need of protection while men are the agents men are the experts and men are the decision makers in the in the world so I think this kind of work is really important perhaps undoes that some of that and of course one of the most interesting aspects of COVID-19 is that we've seen more male deaths so there's a gendered kind of variance but it's not necessarily creating a vulnerability for women but what does it mean to talk about women but actually wanting to theorise gender and I think that going back to this idea in the former slide about thinking about power structures and privileging being co-opted into gender so it's not actually about necessarily finding what is what is essential to being a women but looking at how our societies organise around gendered modes of operating and that's where I think the second set of the second list three topic becomes quite important to us um so a reference there Hilary Charlesworth's famous it's famous international lawyers anyway peace international law discipline of crisis which is in the modern law review is very easy to find and it's actually about humanitarian intervention it's not about the kind of disasters and pandemic moment but in this piece she reminds us that this idea of looking at the crisis moment and trying to make a decision during the crisis can neglect the kind of long history of decisions particularly political and economic decisions that have helped contribute to the crisis so for those of us in the UK we I think we're watching our kind of a conscious forgetting of the last 10 years of austerity the austerity politics which have cut back the resources to our hospitals and our health systems and the role that they are playing in the actually production of crisis at this moment now Charlesworth says crisis thinking is gendered because it forces us often and she's talking about insecurity and conflict in the same humanitarian crisis forces us towards militarised thinking instead of a politics of the everyday of course COVID-19 is pushing us back into the politics of everyday today I'm talking to you from my home rather than my workplace or my home is now my workplace and all of us are kind of navigating the kind of complexity of the public sphere entering our everyday so perhaps it will be a moment where we move away from crisis thinking that is gendered and we perhaps will something different through using tools such as gender as an intersectional tool where it's not enough to just look at women's lives but to think about how women's lives constructed through the production of gender, race, sexuality, ableism and how they inform the kind of capacity that access resources to access knowledge to actually speak and be perceived as holding knowledge or expertise. So crisis thinking it potentially kind of reconstruct the histories of inequalities the way that inequalities might already be enshrined and embedded in the structures in which we've got to work within assumptions about who works how we work our where expertise lies and I think COVID-19 has of course been very interesting you know in sense of who's been articulated and identified as an essential worker at this moment in time who we rely on from supermarket employees to the cleaners that keep going to work although I have to say I've seen very very little written about the cleaners the cleaners in hospitals the cleaners in number 10 Downing Street who are doing who are still going to work throughout the whole pandemic. So the next slide puts a couple of references for you so what I wanted to do was to give you some starting points to go and do some further so one of the ones that I've referred to a little bit already is the Feminist Review Blog I have to admit my own bias I'm part of the Feminist Review Collective and we sat down a couple of weeks ago and talked about you know how we wanted to respond and I think we wanted to pay attention to feminist methods and feminist practices of working around care and community so Yasmin's piece that I drew on before you can if you once you get you can either google Feminist Review Blog and you'll find it quickly or you once you've got the slides you can click on the link embedded in the slide and so Yasmin talks about feminist method as necessary and as a part of the work that we might all be doing at this moment a much broader reading list the second one that I encourage you to have a look at this is by my colleague Owino Akerch in the centre of Agenda Studies who's put together a feminist reading list on care, crisis and pandemics and this is not a collection of writing on COVID-19 but a collection of writing on disaster politics on pandemics that already exist this kind of recognition we don't necessarily need to start anew so the list goes through writing on Ebola, HIV, AIDS and of course Hurricane Katrina as well as other you know big crisis that we've seen in recent history and of course the communities that are writing this literature where we can find the expertise from Africa, LGBT, EUIA communities, African-American communities so I think it's about remembering when they're like wow at this kind of moment when things might change practically we might be theorizing or re-theorizing care and community to not forget the knowledge on the peripheries of mainstream writing even mainstream writing on gender where we can see quite different kinds of accounts and possibilities already have been thought and kind of problematized. The third one is in response to coronavirus and I have to say it's one of the most satisfying references I've found along my journeys in the last few weeks and it's written by a group that title it Asian-American feminist antibodies care in the time of coronavirus. It's very beautiful design that's online again the link is in the slide but you can also probably Google it to find it as well. Drawings, very short pieces, interjections and kind of interruptions on how we imagine care and which bodies receive and give care particularly in the context also some more practical knowledge and love this kind of re-thinking our methodologies in that piece as well. The last piece from just before who might be familiar with is an older piece again hominationalism as a somebody viral travels effective sexuality is really and I'm sorry that the full title has just scrolled off my page I'm just going to write here it's actually in the Kingdall global law review again into google and you will find it online I think it's volume four yeah you can see volume four is already there so just pop back into the chat for you as well um but I think the reason I want you to maybe think about reading something like Poir's writing is thinking about the role of sexuality and the politics of sexuality uh as again already theorizing many of the things that so many of us are facing experiencing firsthand or maybe contemplating and reflecting uh at this during the pandemic and the first of those is um how we theorize care and of course if you want to theorize care you can't you can't not look to radical uh black feminist writing uh writers such as Audrey Lord and you know and pay attention to how they articulated a theory of care that is both entwined to a theory of sexuality a feminism and an anti-racism project these are theorizations of care that move beyond essentialism um and what I mean by that what I mean by that is that um I think when we theorize care what we're not saying is that women are natural caregivers that there's something in uh in a female psyche that produces an affinity with care but rather that within feminist politics there is a deep theorizing of care for example when we talk about this uh in the editorial collective that I belong to feminist review one of the things we talk about is care's responsibility uh and that one of the ways that we invoke care amongst the feminist collective is through responsibility for the work that we take on taking responsibility for the collective kind of life and space which which we which we enter though care is work rather than something intrinsic that care is a choice in the way that we uh build a feminist space and what we pay attention to as opposed to something that is uh intrinsically or essentially feminine or associated with women um the second point on kinship uh I think uh the best writing on kinship comes through queer projects that theorize alternatives to the heteronormative family uh the idea of queer queer kin as a chosen active space of kinship um and as well many of us are stuck in our homes maybe on our own maybe in family networks that we maybe otherwise no longer choose to spend so much time within uh or maybe in friendship groups that we have unexpectedly be constrained uh within and constrained by and I do think one of the things we might see is a theorizing of kinship a re-theorizing of kinship but what I would argue is that in fact we might start by looking queer kind of understandings of kinship uh someone like Jasper Foire's writing around the effective uh and and the role of um the production of sexualities that's not about subjectivity not about identity politics moving beyond rights frameworks uh and thinking about how knowledge kind of moves in our communities and choosing alternative spaces for kin for me this is related to ideas around community but what I want to talk about here is uh theorizing community through transnational feminisms which is much of the work that informs the writing that I think and and undertakings that we draw into the center for gender studies and the kind of gender modules that you do at SOAS but for me transnational feminisms is about horizontal accounts of activism histories of kind of mobilizing from the local to the global which is of course what we're seeing at this moment kind of horizontal functioning of community where there is um in a sense um you know what who's around you who's closest to you has become uh incredibly important I know uh in my own street there is a kind of renewed sense of community through a local uh social media group that allows us to connect while we're all constrained and confined to our homes um but of course these aren't new transnational feminisms have always done this and I guess we can look also into uh very very recently in London the Grenfell Tower and the kinds of theorizing and voicing and agency that's been expressed uh through the activism there uh refugee support structures again we theorize from the local to the global but always hold these ideas around care and kinship about how we take responsibility how we provide and who we see as our kin around us and of course violence against women networks which have functioned for a long time for local to the global and and by example I mean for example violence against women and women's shelters of course have to work at a local level they support local women uh they take in uh those most vulnerable they also knowledge share they work in networks for global and regional well beyond so this kind of horizontal kind of traveling of knowledge uh long exists in international activism and as a lawyer I know an international lawyer I know the power of those local networks they uh inform and um you know are heard often at an at an international level although they are grounded very much in local understandings of power and privilege and navigating that and kind of responding and challenging to that and so then number five the sort of fifth area where we might go back to feminist histories feminist reading lists and writing is around security insecurity militarization and crisis so this picks up again a little bit of the work from Charles worth that I mentioned in the last slide but I think the COVID-19 moment really does ask us some serious quest questions about how we frame security and insecurity how we respond to crisis and where we see the kind of most effective mechanisms for that and I think much of the work that we're doing it's us is already looking into and responding to global insecurity in important ways and it is a reminder that actually the best way to understand insecurity crisis and militarization is go to those places where that is experienced and understood firsthand rather than theorizing it from the position of the global north where the solutions have been ineffective again and again in gendered ways in racialized ways in and all the intersections so um I obviously could just keep talking you might have put up so I've got but I'm gonna end there it's just a kind of taster for you I think that you know there's a hope that the center for gender studies modules allow both theorization a kind of platform for different methodologies and ways of thinking about everything from security and insecurity to histories of knowledge to intersectionality what we mean by gender except but in terms of the legal work in particular I think what I'm most interested in working with students is understanding that we already have significant gender law reform in different international spaces in different national spaces you could think about where you come from what legal jurisdictions you've lived in and you can probably identify a handful of kind of gender law reforms that have happened around violence against women perhaps around maybe abortion laws uh anti-discrimination laws so I guess for me one of the things we do at SIRS is think about we live in a world where gender law reform has uh happened and some of it's happened not all of it obviously how do we understand critiquing appraisal laws how is it that we still live gendered lives that we see the gendered kind of power dynamics continuing to influence uh different lives so it's about situating legal change within these kind of transnational feminist networks and asking how it is that the translation from feminist transnational network into law doesn't produce the kinds of changes that we will have perhaps hoping for personally I'm interested in the nexus between feminist activism protests and policy how do we move from the state of space of protest to see a policy on the books yet the policy doesn't necessarily respond effectively to the original activism and then some of the things that we've talked about already gender at SIRS is an interdisciplinary classroom and we mentioned this already what do we mean by that it's not only a space where as students come from interdisciplinary backgrounds but it's also a space where we probe at knowledge through intersectional and interdisciplinary approaches so that when we hold law perhaps if that's the discipline that we're working within we don't hold as something separate to other kinds of disciplinary knowledges in fact we would interrogate law through other disciplines for example history um agenda as all these courses do politics IR development studies language or or area studies and regional studies as well but it's not just kind of bringing together an amalgamation of lots of different disciplines it's interdisciplinary in the sense of what new knowledge do we produce when we sit between the disciplines and we can see one discipline from the perspective of interdisciplinary classroom all the work that we do is attention to transnational lgbtq by a and intersectional approaches we have trans positive center and law school and we embed that in the knowledge frames and methodologies that we use across our modules cgs offers like most master's courses a combination of added and intensity and we love working with you all to kind of make that happen and beyond myself who's an international lawyer lawyer there's kind of wealth of regional expertise and the last thing which is kind of sliding off which is amazing community alumni and there's actually a link when you get the slides you'll see to the center for foreign policy sorry the center for feminist foreign policy which was set up by one of my former gender and law ma's and i'm proud of them all to go out and do some amazing things at the end of your trees right so uh that's been about 45 minutes of me talking which is probably more than enough for all of you um so i am quite happy to take some questions now um or and i just got my email address in the chat box you can also email me if you'd like to come back to me with a question if it brings to mind later on happy to take practical questions or intellectual uh kind of subject college questions uh whatever whatever you might have um so i can see there's a few of you still here so if you've got a question type away or um pop your hand up or just shout out mon happy to answer your questions no no questions i'll just quickly throw out an offer as well in case anyone has general questions about being a student at SOAS or choosing which degrees to apply for or what subjects and just general things you're also welcome to ask those to me as well and um i'm sure you'll take questions offline so that they know that i'm not telling you what to say or yes i can pop my email address in too if that's helpful if you don't mind i mean i i think it can be a quite nice way to find out about different modules if you get in touch with one of our current students i can also put you in touch with some of our gender studies students if you allow me i'm more than happy to do so great any questions regarding applications what do we look for in your in the personal statement and experience um well uh for the most part we look at um your academic profile first of all um and then we will look to your personal statement to see what your kind of motivation is for coming to cgs uh or or to the law school so what kinds of things you've done in the past you think might inform um your capacity for critical analysis or understanding of gender um you know that i mean it is really a personal statement and we used to talk about this a lot in different studies about how deeply moving many of your personal statements were and we felt we wish that we could put a book together of them all because um you all come from such amazing backgrounds um so i just encourage you to be honest this is why i want to do this course sometimes it's like i don't really know much about gender but there's something in me that's kind of bringing you here uh other times it's more well you know actually i've done this work and there's a more policy space and i really want to think behind it you know whatever works for you but i think we're just interested in that personal statement any additional work that you've done whether it's writing analytical activism organizing you know it might be in gender it might be around sexuality it might be around race um you know you should also include that as well does that help great excellent so we got time for a couple more questions if anyone uh oh sorry um your mic isn't quite working okay no problem i'm quite happy to read the questions as they come through that's not a problem um great any other questions okay so if there's no further questions i think we'll probably end on the last slide there's a short I'm not going to play it now but you may have seen it already it's on our front page for the Center for Gender Studies website and it's just a handful of our current students talking uh okay i'll just go back to this question before i end but make sure you do go and watch our video we we're really proud of it in terms of academic profile is that that regarding models and interests or regarding degree classification well it's a little bit on both we will look at your degree classification um and we are an interdisciplinary center so we do take uh people from most uh sort of backgrounds uh in terms of academic profiles but occasionally we'll get an application from someone that's come from a discipline that we feel is just a little bit too far from uh what we would expect so for example a kind of uh i guess hard science background or um you know a finance and management background where we're just maybe would want to know more about what other work that they've done um so that would be the only time we'd look more at the modules but um you know i'm sure you know if you want to come back me in an email and ask me about your specific case um but we'll first look at your classification and we'll look at the modules more broadly but i wouldn't worry too much about that unless you're coming from a kind of degree where perhaps you aren't writing long essays for example mathematics or then we might want kind of a little bit more information uh just to know that you're going to cope with the academic requirements of the course uh first and foremost so we might ask for a writing sample if we had any concerns for example but you can send in a writing sample from the outset if you prefer not necessary at this stage uh no problem right so as i was saying there's a video on our home page the centre of jenn studies so i asked do have a look some of our current students talking about uh what they love about the degree and the different aspects of the different degrees that have a look at as well okay thanks everyone for joining us uh i'm gonna end there


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Hello, everyone. Welcome. Saul is giving the next talk about Libov. Please welcome him. Thank you. Thanks. So I'm Saul, or Sa'Gul, everywhere else on the internet. I'm one of the League of League Corps genders. And can I get a quick show of hands who knows about League of League? All right. So you may learn something, hopefully. For those who don't, it's a cross-platform is Incarno's I.O. library, which does a little bit more. So we try to do networking stuff, but also other cross-platform stuff that we need. It's relatively small. That is 30,000 lines of code without tests, which is not a lot for a C library that tries to do anything and everything. We have an extensive test suite, so I way didn't count it for this, but we try to test everything. And we have a vast CI infrastructure kind of donated by the Node.js project, which makes it robust. But of course I would say that, right? It's designed for C programs that means the joy of callback held in JavaScript, I guess, and is used by many, many projects these days. It started off as a way to bring Windows support to Node.js, like in a good way. So Windows is a first-class citizen here, in case you want to support Unix and Windows with a consistent API. And we have a Wiki link there with all the projects that use it. If you want to use it from programming language X, it's very possible that somebody wrote bindings for it, because there are many bindings out there. I personally wrote the ones for Python, and that's how I got started into all these things. So what is it we do in LiveUV? It's an event loop, so it's a single-threaded event loop, follows this model, and everything that surrounds this slide, it's actually tied into this event loop. So we can do timers, signal handling, so there is no problems with where to help the signals get dispatched. We go child process management, TTIs, TCP, UDP, name pipes, file system operations. This is, for example, a thing that you don't typically find in a networking library, but if you want to do a cross-platform application, you will need to access your file system, and Windows is a mess, and nobody knows how it works. So we take care of that for you, and you just have to use it. We have some trading utilities and the coolest logo in the open source community. As for if you approach LiveUV, I think that the best way to approach it is from the outside to the inside. So in a nutshell, we have three constructs. The biggest is the loop. So everything pretty much runs in the context of a loop. So all operations are related to a loop, and it's where all the magic happens, if you will. And then we have handles and requests. So a handle represents a resource, something that is there to do some job. Let's say a TCP connection. So this is our representation of something. It's a handle. And a request represents an operation that has a starting and an ending. So for example, writing on a TCP connection is a request. We use a request for it, and this way. So when we do it this way, we can know when an operation ends and if it finishes successfully or not. So we have this differentiation, and requests always operate on some handle. And then we also have a vast array of other utility functions, for example, a way to get high resolution time, which you can use for benchmarks and the like. Let's look a little bit at like a block diagram here.  So network IO related things, file system IO related stuff, other stuff, and then other OS independent stuff. Because in some cases, we have implemented it in such a way that it's not tied to the operating system, necessarily. And then we can reuse it. So for example, when it comes to the networking IO part, we have TCP pipes and TTIs, which we abstract them as streams. So they have a certain API, and they behave like streams. So they get the read callbacks, call you can write to them, send file scriptors over them, and so on. UDP and poll handles are also dealing with network IO or sockets, but they are not streams. And they are all backed by this internal kind of thing, which is what abstracts us from IO polling in different operating systems on the Unix site. On Windows, we don't have this, because Windows works different. But on Unix, we have this layer, and then every different Unix system sits on top of it, and we can implement them easily. For file IO or related utilities, we have file system requests, work requests, which allow us to get a piece of work, spawn it to a thread, do the work there, and then come back. And we have name resolution functionality as well. So get a DDR info blocks, but we run it on a thread and give the result back to you. Just a quick word on threads. We use threads just for file system IO, not for network IO. The reason why we do it is very nicely summarized in this blog post by the BitTorrent guys. There is no way to do asynchronous file IO cross-platform in a reliable way. Our default thread pool size is four, and let me say it one more time. We don't use it for network IO. The internet is usually wrong oftentimes, and I've seen many diagrams of people trying to explain what liveUV is with incorrect diagrams looking at queues and thread pools, and I don't know what the hell. We don't do that. We only use threads for file operations. So it's single-threaded. There is a thread pool, but that's for file operations. And we get the results in the loop thread anyway. So to the eyes of the user, there is no thread pool. We have other stuff that you can use as well. So we got timers, some other types of handles that operate in the loop at different points of the event loop execution, and then signals and processes that are operating system dependent, for instance. So how does our event loop run? Well, so we start by thinking, do we have to do anything? Because if we don't, then we're done. Then we run the due timers. So timers that are due right now, because we scheduled them in 20 milliseconds, and they hit. So it's time to run their callbacks. In some pending callbacks, we also run them at the top. That is, for example, callbacks that have happened as a result of a write operation, we report the result there. Then we run other types of handles that are loop watchers, these things that run right before polling and right after polling. When we poll for IO, all the read and write operations run. And at the end, we run close callbacks. So when you close a handle, when you want to dispose of it, not use it anymore, this operation is asynchronous. So you call UV close, and then when the callback hits, you can free the memory. This is because we need to do some work in the background sometimes. Now, I mentioned that UV came in because Node wanted to use it. So let's have a quick look at how UV is used within Node. So the Node event loop, in a simplified way, basically runs timers. Now, the thing is Node.js, for performance reasons, doesn't use one UV timer equals one node timer. They coalesce them. So they have one UV timer backing potentially multiple node timers if they are scheduled at the same millisecond. So they have different buckets there. Then we run some pending callbacks. The polling happens. So all the data received callbacks are also fired. And so on and connection callbacks as well. And then there is two weird things happening. The first one is set immediate. So set immediate runs on a check handle, which is after polling for IO. So it's called set immediate, but it doesn't run immediately. Yeah. And then there is process.nexttick, which you probably know, which is supposed to run a function on the next tick. But what the tick is, nobody knows. And in a nutshell, it doesn't. It actually runs those callbacks run every single time that we call into JavaScript from the C++ code. There is a helper function called node make callback. And it drains a little bit of the callback queue from process.nexttick. It's a little bit counter-intuitive. And you should never program or architect your application with any of these in mind. It should be transparent to this.  And then because the developer is going to do that, I'm going to, no, don't do that. Because hopefully one day we will get this sorted out and then your application will break. So not a good thing to do. So if we look at it from node's perspective, we follow an onion architecture. So we got your net sockets wrapping a TCP wrap in C++, wrapping a UV handle in C, wrapping a file descriptor on Unix or a handle on Windows. And the idea being that you can happily put any of these layers as long as it's above this one, the abstraction levels should be high level enough so that you don't have any problem there or you don't need to take into account that Solaris, that's, I don't know what, and that macOS behaves some other way. Of course, a good way to learn all this is to write your chat application. Of course, why not? So I wrote down, I wrote one. It's on these repository. I wrote it to show different usage patterns in using LiveUV, so it's a TCP server, it accepts multiple connections. Which user that joins the room gets a Pokemon name assigned. And the idea is that you can see how the different moving parts work together and different patterns on how to deal, for example, with memory allocations. Because we got a little time, I'm not planning on showing it to you here. So the idea is you go and look at yourself and let us know if you run into any issues or whatever. Only yesterday I learned about two other applications using LiveUV while I was in a different dev room. So what do you know? If you're already using it, please do come talk to me and let me know. And sometimes some problems may happen in your event loop so I want to give a shout out to everyone in the core contributors team. It's seven of us at the moment. Five of us are active. And we work on it. The release cut-ins is when we feel like it's a good moment to do a release. And sometimes when Node.js asks us, hey, can you please do a release because we want these features in. It's basically, do you want something don't-driven development? So if you want something, don't you do it? And otherwise, well, things would stay. But we're actively working on it and hoping that maybe this year we can get 2.0 release with cleaning up some craft-like Windows XP support, which was like 2,000 lines or something. That was very nice to delete. And if you want to reach out, our website is just a quick way to arrive at the others. So our API documentation is at docs.libubi.org. There's an IRC channel, LiveUV, also Google Group. And also, we are in Stack Overflow. And I believe I have time for maybe one or two questions if there should be any. I have a question about compare with Boost Azure because it uses similar model. What is the difference from Boost Library? Right, well, so LiveUV is very small, very self-contained. It doesn't depend on any. So Boost, I haven't used Boost myself older than in other projects. So my perception of it is that it's a big library with different components. LiveUV was initially, from the beginning, it was designed to be a small thing that you could use in any project and it would abstract you as much as it can, but it's not the kitchen sink solution. We're actually thinking about creating a work, we're going to create a new project called LiveUV Extress, where we're going to add some more stuff that doesn't belong in core, but can be useful for some people. This one is also written in C, so there's also that difference, but in a way, they solve the same problem. So you want to do some cross-platform networking operations and also file system utilities and abstracting all this is a job as well. So I would, of course, say LiveUV is easier to use, but that's what I know and yeah, so that's pretty much the answer. They solve the same problem, but they are different. Anything else? Would you recommend LiveUV for a very multi-threaded application? Well, so as I said, the event loop is single-threaded, but the event loop is the context, so you can essentially run multiple threads with multiple loops on each of them, as long as you don't do cross-calling because our API is not thread safe, that's fine. So many projects do this, so for example, if you want to do a similar model to what NGINX does, for example, so multiple processes and then some event loops as well, you could do multiple event loops on multiple threads and that's perfectly fine. So I think that's all. Very quick last one. I don't know if the alarm clock wants to allow it. I don't want the clock to blow on me. Let's try. Since we all like Schwag here, I'm gonna drop some things on the table right outside FYI after I leave in case you're interested. Hello, Jess. I would like to ask for LiveUVXX, whether it's official? XX. There's a C++ wrapper. Oh, so no. Basically LiveUV is written in C and that's the one and only official anything there is to do. However, all the projects there that wrap it or not wrap it, some of them like were closed, cousins, let's say, so for example, I co-maintained the library and I also write the Python binding, but it's not official, let's say. We don't bless any binding. Here goes the alarm clock. Thanks a lot, Saul, for the talk.


And outside Africa, President Joe Biden has made an impression appeal to Russian President Vladimir Putin to step down from war with Ukraine. In his words, he said on court, there would be needless debts and destruction, end of court. In national televised speech, Biden said the United States estimates that 150,000 Russian troops are now encircled Ukraine. I think that while reports that some forces had withdrawn were welcomed, they were unified and an invasion remained very much as possible. Biden said diplomacy remains a welcome of ramp. If Russia does invade in the days and weeks ahead, the human cost for Ukraine will be immense. And the strategic cost for Russia will also be immense. If Russia attacks Ukraine, it will be met with overwhelming international condemnation. The world will not forget that Russia chose needless death and destruction. Invading Ukraine will prove to be a self-inflicted wound. The United States and our allies and partners will respond decisively. The West is united and galvanized. Today, our NATO allies and the alliance is as unified and determined as it has ever been. And the source of our unbreakable strength continues to be the power, resilience and universal appeal of our shared democratic values. We do not seek to destabilize Russia.