The Sydney Dialogue, in partnership with Amazon Web Services and Bloomberg, invites you to join a free virtual event exploring humanity’s relationship with technology - watch it here.

With technologies evolving at speed, their implications far-reaching and many not even yet comprehensible, what does the future of humanity look like and what is its relationship with technology?

Anders Sörman-Nilsson will lead this session with a scene-setting address providing alternative visions of plausible technology futures: what it looks like if we achieve a utopian outcome where technology enables, empowers and connects global citizens, and the dystopian opposite, where technology is applied at scale to oppress, control and divide them.

The session is designed to bring us back to the fundamental judgements, choices and actions that must be taken today to ensure that humanity sticks to the core ideas that underpin our freedoms so that we can harness technology and its applications for good and mitigate its abuse for malign purposes.

This will be followed by a panel discussion that dives into today’s new era of geo-strategic competition, exploring the power competition taking place between the world’s largest economies, the United States and China, and explain how this rivalry has jumped from security relations and markets, to a race to create and sustain technological advantage.

The session will conclude with a fireside chat with the Founder of Anduril Industries, Palmer Luckey, led by Bloomberg News Anchor, Haidi Stroud-Watts.

It will examine how, for the first time, the US is confronting a challenger of equal economic potential and technological sophistication.

The session will also discuss attempts to reconnect the US defence innovation and acquisition system to Silicon Valley’s disruptive innovators and investors to meet the challenges of today, as well as explore how the US can partner across national lines to mobilise a global front.