SABF 2014 - Afternoon Summary Aug-7th

Andrei Vazhnov

The afternoon continued with the presentation of Andrei Vazhnov, who is part of the Entrepreneurship Course of the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Buenos Aires. He authored “Impresión 3D: Cómo va a cambiar el mundo”, the first book about 3D printing in spanish. He has spoken at several conferences and is a strategic advisor for Trimaker and many other startups.

During his talk he mentioned the differences between morality and ethics, mostly focusing on technology. Technology always has unpredictable effects. It may produce three different kinds of impacts nowadays: transparency, scarcity and coevolution.

Vazhnov says that people would prefer to do something mundane and even negative instead of just standing in a room without doing anything and just thinking by themselves between 6 to 15 minutes. “Electricity is better than boredom”. “When I look around it seems as if everyone is actually texting. Technology is just removing our ability to just sit and be a person.” People used to value the privacy of their associations and of their own inner spaces. Today we are already living in singularity: we may be able to satisfy 4 or 5 human needs. But what did it give us in return? Was it a positive outcome or not? For example, satisfying hunger gave us obesity…

How do we replace morality in a world where weak people do not exist anymore? Does abundance remove meaning from life? It is said that the essence for human life is to struggle and get better. According to Vazhnov, “the main problem with the world today is that we have paleolithical emotions, **medieval institutions **and God-like technology.”

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Celine Coggins

PhD. Celine Coggings began her presentation talking about the interaction between the actors who design educational public politics and those who effectively implement them: the teachers. After an unstructured beginning of the talk, Celine told us her experience as a teacher and the challenges that a young man or woman has to face in order to become a teacher.

Apparently, being a teacher is not anymore a career designed for the XXI century: in a generation which main characteristic is to improve oneself and the concern to keep oneself updated all the time about new opportunities and challenges, being a teacher seems to be left out from this new paradigm. Therefore, Celine Coggins explains that** an increasing challenge in the United States is, actually, to retain the talent of the teachers with a high potential that have just stopped teaching because of the lack of challenges and recognition in their field.**

The direct question that rises after this question is: how can we increase and reinforce the commitment of the teacher within the classroom and with their profession. Celine has founded Teach Plus, an organization whose mission is to expose children who belong to an endangered population or social circle to qualified and experienced teachers. In order to achieve this, they are working on leadership skills and training teachers to extend their commitment and incentivate them to keep teaching and, specially, to stop them from changing their career even if they feel the lack of such skills.

Without any doubts, we are talking about a complex dynamic which not only involves training teachers and reward them when they excel in their field. Coggins also emphasizes the importance of creating a relationship between the public sector and the teachers in order to let the latter group have a perspective about the mechanisms that operate inside the public sector when they have to take decisions that, from a teacher’s point of view, sometimes seems wrong or counterintuitive.

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Mark Nelson – Eng

Mark Nelson, Co-Director and Co-Founder of the Stanford University Peace Innovation Lab talked about the concept of the Peace Design and how technology could be used to improve it. Peace Innovation is defined as designing technology that increases people’s ability to be good to each other; and can be achieved through a virtuous circle, composed by four main subjects: innovation, *creation *of new value and mutual benefit, *peace *and enabling better collaboration.

There are two defense theories: the person-based and the behaviour-based. In the first case, the focus is on the person and the policy tries to lock up or knock down that **evil****actor **in order to drive them away from society. This means punishment and extra cost for each part, the actor and the government. The technology created for such a goal is violent and punitive (e.g.: guns). The control over behaviour focuses on looking for positive and value-creating actions that are beneficial for both sides. This can be reached with technology through Positive Payload Systems, with weapons against violence, not people. One positive example are Facebook Campaigns.

Depending in the quality and quantity of the Engagement, we can have three different types of peace: Negative, Unstable and Sustainable. If we want to avoid negative effects, we should start reaching awareness, attention, communication, coordination and cooperation. It is only after these we can reach a sustainable peace as collaboration and *collective intelligence *are reached.

Nelson closed his presentation by describing the virtuous circle of the Peace Technology design process: choose target communities, observe and chose technology they use, pick a positive engagement behaviour, design of peace technology, create past prototype, measure impact and optimize and repeat. Examples of to be investigated are: Uber and AirBNB.