Robin Hanson is an associate professor of economics at George Mason University and a research associate at the Future of Humanity Institute of Oxford University and onethe world’s most influential futurists.We talk to Robin about how rigoroussocial science can help us describe a society in which “mind uploading” – the idea of simulating whole brains on digital hardware – might actuallylook. How does a society look where most minds live their lives in virtual reality, immortalsin a worldwhere labour is plentiful?Will the emulated humans be rich or poor, happy or miserable, care-free or stressed, honest or false, lazy or industrious, diverse or all the same? Will they fall in love, have friends, swear, distrust others, commit suicide,and find meaning in their lives?Robin’s book about this topic is“The Age of Em:Work, Love and Life when Robots Rule the Earth”(Oxford University Press, 2016). Robin blogs about rationality athttp://www.overcomingbias.com.

Tim Roughgarden is professor in the Computer Science and Management Science and Engineering Departments at Stanford University. He is also a very active science communicator, hosting a popular algorithms course on the Coursera online learningplatform.Among many recognitions,Tim has received theGödel Prize for hisresearch in computational game theory, a field that residesin theintersection of two disciplines:economics and computer science. We talk to Tim about one of the central insights of that work: the Prize of Anarchy, which quantifies the loss in efficiency of a system due to selfish behaviour of its agents.We also look at applications of game-theoretic algorithms in the real world, when Tim explains the role that computer science played in designingthe 2016“incentive auction” used to by the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) tobuy and sell broadcast airwaves.

Claire Mathieu is a leading researcher in algorithms design and director of research at Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS) in Paris, France.) Claire has been involved in the 2018 redesign of the college admission procedure in France, where close to a million students apply for more than ten thousand different college programmes. At the root of the procedure is the famous and widely used Stable Marriage method of Gale and Shapley (1962), a result that was recognised with the 2012 Nobel Prize in Economics. Claire explains to us the basic algorithmic ideas, but also the many challenging details that must be addressed when an otherwise clean and well-understood procedure is implemented to tackle a real-world scenario. Many domain-specific peculiarities arise, such as social, cultural, political, administrative, and legal issues, which are themselves often ill-defined and frequently conflicting. The episode was recorded on 20 August 2018, during the European Symposium of Algorithms 2018, hosted by Aalto University in Helsinki, Finland.

Yves Bertot is a senior researcher that the French Institute for Research in Computer Science and Automation (INRIA) in Sophia Antipolis and a leading researcher on correctness of software and the verification of mathematical proofs. Recently, his team was able to formally verify the correctness of the computation on the one millionth decimal digit of pi (which is 1, by the way), including a formally verifiable proof of the mathematics behind the formula and the correctness of the implementation of arithmetic operations used in the computation. We use this result as an inspiration to talk about interactive theorem proving and improving software quality. Yves’ book with Pierre Casterán about interactive theorem proving using the Coq system is “Interactive Theorem Proving and Program Development – Coq'Art: The Calculus of Inductive Constructions”, Springer Verlag, EATCS Texts in Theoretical Computer Science, 2004, ISBN 3-540-20854-2.

Sarah Pink is a Professor of Design and Media Ethnography at RMIT University, Australia, and the author or co-editor of several books about digital ethnography. To approach this area, we get Sarah’s help with some conceptual groundwork about the methods, values, and history of ethnography, and its relation to neighbouring fields such as anthropology or cultural geography. But the conversation focusses on digital ethnography: Information technology changes not only the methods of ethnography by providing tools or modes of expression, but also raises new questions by changing notions of embodiment, geographic place, and social relation, all of which are central themes for ethnographers. We also talk about how an field that largely eschews prediction and hypothesis can reason about future technology such as self-driving cars. Sarah’s book is Pink et al., Digital Ethnography: Principles and Practice, SAGE Publications, 2016.

Roman Beck is professor of Business Informatics at IT University of Copenhagen and the head of the European Blockchain Center. We talk to Roman about blockchain, a cryptographically secure, distributed database technology sometimes called a “trust machine.” Blockchain applications include the cryptocurrency Bitcoin, as well as various ideas for ensuring trust across institutional boundaries, such as contracts. It may also serve as the conceptual infrastructure of the next generation Internet. Which are the main ideas underlying this technology, how does it makes us think differently about digital information, and what are the possibilities, challenges, promises, and threats of this technology?

Ivan Bjerre Damgård is professor of theoretical computer science at Aarhus University, Denmark, and one of the world’s leading researchers in the foundations of cryptography. Among other things, Ivan is known for the Merkle–Damgård construction, which underlies many modern digital signatures. We talk to Ivan about the mathematical basics of modern cryptography, internet security, authentication, secret sharing, and privacy. This includes the emerging field of secure multiparty computation: how can individuals collaborate to compute a solution without revealing too much of their private information? Ivan’s recent book on these matters is Ronald Cramer, Ivan Bjerre Damgård, and Jesper Buus Nielsen, “Secure Multiparty Computation and Secret Sharing,” Cambridge University Press, 2015.

Espen Aarseth, professor in Game Studies, is the Head of the Center of Computer Games Research at IT University of Copenhagen and the founding editor-in-chief of the journal Game Studies. We talk to Espen about founding computer games research as an academic discipline, the Games study programme at ITU, what a game is (entertainment? sports? waste of time? cultural artefact? social activity? storytelling? shared illusion?), PewDiePie, how the established narratological concepts of literary theory succeed or fail in describing games, playing The Hobbit over a landline phone in the 1980s, and Dungeons Dragons.Recorded on 12 October 2017.

Rebecca Slayton is a professor at the Department of Science and Technology Studies and Judith Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies at Cornell University. We talk to Rebecca about cybersecurity, the early history of software engineering during the Cold War, the role of scientific and technological expertise in public policy, and how to think about risk and reliability. Rebecca’s book on how knowledge about computing was shaped by and influenced the development of US missile defence during the Cold War is “Arguments that Count: Physics, Computing, and Missile Defense, 1949-2012” (MIT Press, 2013), which won the Computer History Museum Prize in 2015.Recorded on 18 May 2017.

We ask Vincent F.Hendricks, professor of formal philosophy at Copenhagen University and the director of the Center for Information and Bubble Studies how to think about information, knowledge, and truth, in the internet age, where information is quickly shared or algorithmically curated, and where the model of liberal democracy, such as the public sphere, are undergoing rapid change. We talk about fake news, Trump, radical scepticism, social psychology, filter bubbles, power laws of attention economics, and pluralistic ignorance.Vincent’s web page is athttp://vince-inc.com/vincent/and his 2016 book on explaining individual behaviour on the social net isHendricksand Hansen, “Infostorms,” Springer 2016.