Dominique Pestre to keynote Lift - With a challenge to all speakers

Are we constantly reinventing the wheel, or rather the discussion around it: Who owns the wheel, why it exists, what its consequences are, how (and by whom) its uses should or shouldn't be regulated, and whether it should be considered a positive or a negative breakthrough?

Historian of science Dominique Pestre thinks this is partly the case. For at least 2 centuries, for better or worse, technologies have found their way into production and society before becoming a public issue. For the same amount of time, they have raised the same kind of discussions: Should we assess the impacts of a technology before its market deployment - and is that even possible? Should regulation arise from personal choices and actual uses of technologies, or from collective decisions? How should we deal with "technological divides"?...

During his initial keynote address to Lift, Dominique Pestre will challenge all speakers - as well as the audience - to raise their level of thinking, to become more humble in the face of history and to embrace dissensus and complexity: How can we welcome techno-skeptics in order to invent better paths for how technology interacts with society? Can we really believe that green techs will allow us to avoid more drastic (and collective) choices on how we live, consume, move? How can the interaction between markets, democracy, usage, science, code, and other influences, become more productive?

We, in turn, will challenge the historian: Is there anything really new in the XXIst century? Can networks, or user-generated innovation, or access to knowledge, radically change the role of technology and its interaction with society?

Be part of this discussion!