César A. Hidalgo

What made the economy of Peru different from that of South Korea in the 1970s? If we look at macroeconomic statistics, both countries looked similar, but these aggregate similarities do not tell us the full story. In the 1970s, the economic structures of Peru and South Korea were quite different, and these differences explain their future divergence in economic growth. In 2009, César Hidalgo published a pioneering mathematical formula quantifying an economy’s productive structure. In the following years, this measure of economic complexity has proven to be a robust predictor of future economic growth, international variations in inequality, and greenhouse gas emissions. Supported by machine learning and artificial intelligence, economic complexity offers a new way of understanding the global market and predicting which countries are going to experience growth and why. In this presentation, Hidalgo explores how governments and businesses can build strategies for growth around incredibly nuanced and specific economic activities that have become measurable thanks to the new language of economic complexity. With data on economic activity for every country, César will tailor this presentation to your region for maximum audience impact.

People around the world have grown increasingly disillusioned with their governments. Corrupt politicians are more loyal to their deep pocketed funders than the citizens they’re meant to represent. And division across the spectrums of politics, age, gender, race, and other sociodemographic dimensions is at an all-time high. What if we could bypass the bureaucracy of modern politics and vote directly on issues with the support of AI? In this expansive presentation that covers both the conceptualization of digital democracy and real stories of what it looks like in practice, César Hidalgo dives into the changes that would need to happen on the governmental level and in the minds of the citizenry to make this new approach to democracy viable and sustainable. He also shares unexpected findings from grassroots direct democracy experiments that reveal the true sources of division in a society and discusses how this data can best serve democracy.

When a fellow coworker makes a mistake, it might be a pain to correct, but ultimately, we chalk it up to human error. But when a machine that is meant to be infallible errs, who do we blame? Do we perceive the machine’s error as more egregious than the one made by a person? Does our perception change if the machine has more humanlike qualities, such as the ability to plan or to feel? How does morality come into play? Based on his book How Humans Judge Machines and more recent research, César Hidalgo reveals the biases that permeate human-machine interactions. The insights shared in this talk are crucial for understanding how artificial intelligence is to be regulated and governed as AI assumes a greater position in every corner of our daily lives.

Memory is a funny thing. We can remember the lyrics to a song we haven’t heard in a decade but may forget what we ate for lunch yesterday. How does memory work on a larger scale? When and how does a topic that everyone is talking about become a niche interest that only few discuss? Who decides what pieces of culture get passed down to posterity and which fade to obsolescence and are forgotten? In this presentation César Hidalgo shares his research on the laws that govern collective memory, how it decays over time, how the language one speaks affects what we remember, and how collective memory is shaped by technology.