The world is awash in technological change that is transforming the way we live and think. The Hoover Institution invites you to take part in a detailed examination of new disruptive technologies and the consequences they bring for civil society, governance, and global stability.

A still accelerating communications revolution has changed the ways in which Americans get and use information as they go to the polls, prepare for their careers, and choose their friends and other civic associations. The U.S. election of 2016 and its acrid aftermath have demonstrated how the breathtakingly rapid development of social media has brought people ever closer and yet driven them further apart at the same time.

We will examine how the enormous advances in efficiency and mobilizing capacity brought by cyber and other forms of computer science have also enabled foreign governments to meddle in elections, hold banks and power grids hostage, and rewrite the international norms of privacy, surveillance, and freedom of expression. Artificial intelligence and robotics are upending the national workplace and its wage and employment structure. The development of additive manufacturing, in which machines are programmed to produce cheaper, much more easily available and “smarter” goods---including sophisticated weapons and highly destructive explosives---grows in leaps and bounds.

These are among the topics that a dozen experts assembled by the Hoover Institution will discuss with each other, and with Stanford faculty and students, at a ceremony to be held in Hoover’s new Traitel auditorium at 3 p.m. on Sept. 28. The panel discussion, which will be chaired by George Shultz, will be followed by a question and answer period. It will be dedicated to the memory of the late Sidney Drell, nuclear scientist extraordinaire and legendary senior scholar at Hoover. Read more.