Emerging Industries: Opportunities and Risk Trade-offs

https://riskinstitute.uk/events/emergingindustries/

Digital Conference on Emerging Industries: Opportunities and Risk Trade-offs, May-December 2021

The Institute for Risk and Uncertainty at the University of Liverpool are organising a conference on emerging industries from this summer, distributed over the year as multiple 2.5 hour sessions.

New industries drive economic growth and cultural innovation. Futurists, pioneers and researchers have been designing, building and testing novel solutions to our modern world's challenges. Emerging industries often depend on software technologies and connectivity which are becoming more pervasive in the move towards a smarter and digitalised world. They present an array of new opportunities that may revolutionise travel, health care, energy, computers, finances, the intersection between humans and technology, and many other facets of our lives. They may create threats and risks of negative consequences on society, individuals, or the environment that hinder their evolution into the mainstream.

The Institute for Risk & Uncertainty at the University of Liverpool will bring together leading academic and industry researchers to share their experiences and research results on emerging industries and their associated benefits and risks. This will provide an interdisciplinary platform to discuss the most recent innovations, trends, and concerns. We would like to examine the risk trade-offs around their impacts on economics, health, environment, and ethics, as well as foresee ways of mitigating the downsides. The goal is to inspire and inform researchers to utilise this information to understand how they can best support these industries to minimise the risky nature of innovation and improve likelihood of successful emergence.

In this conference series, we aim to ask:

• What are the current and coming trends and developments in emerging industries?

• How can we promote information and technology exchange in emerging industries?

• What are the opportunities of these emerging industries to change the world?

• What are the largest obstacles to the maturation of emerging industries?

• What are the threats and risk trade-offs that these sectors may pose?

• How can we begin to de-risk these sectors to encourage appropriate policy, regulation and investment?

We have gathered a series of talks from international thought leaders addressing a range of sectors and their trends, hurdles and potential impacts:

Quantum computing: why we need to solve our quantum security challenges?

Cybersecurity: Cyber-attack trends, patterns and security countermeasures

Sex robots: the danger of sex robots, an emerging AI risk?

Autonomous vehicles: thinking logically about the risks of self-driving cars

Alternative energy: risks of renewable energy projects

Psychedelic medicine: regulation and decriminalisation of psychedelic substances? What are the risk and opportunities?

Future of Food: Security threats in Agricultural IoT and Smart Farming

Nano technologies: risks, uncertainty and the global governance gap for regulating Nanotechnologies

Cyborgs: what are the consequences of experimenting with the brain before understanding how it works?

Blockchain: nascent design principles for reducing risk and uncertainty in decentralised environments

Cryptocurrency: What's holding back cryptocurrency and the possibility of decentralised autonomous finance?

Genetically modified humans: are CRISPR edited humans still too risky?

Dark net: is there freedom in the wilderness?

You can register for the event by clicking here. Attendance is free to all.

ZOOM

To participate in the conference live, you will need to download a small, free app from Zoom. You join the meeting by clicking on the link that will be supplied by email acknowledging your registration, or by entering a multidigit code. You can connect over the web if your device has a speaker, or connect audio by telephone if it doesn’t. You’ll need a camera (if you want to be seen) and a microphone (if you want to be heard).

You can even access the conference via your smartphone with internet access using Zoom downloaded from the app store, although detailed presentation slides might be rather small on your phone display. If you want to participate in the discussion, you would have to grant Zoom permission to access your phone’s camera and microphone. You can mute and unmute your microphone any time by moving your cursor to the lower left corner of the screen and clicking on the microphone icon. Turn on or off your camera similarly. There is also a chat facility by which you can pose questions and make silent interjections during discussions or presentations. You can leave a Zoom meeting anytime by clicking on the red button in the lower, right corner of the Zoom screen. You can rejoin the meeting later if it is still going on.

Video recordings of the talks and discussions will be archived at http://riskinstitute.uk/.

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