By SHILADITYA BISWAS
The future of the nation is at stake, and this Saturday Monash Future Thinkers will be inviting students to offer their ideas and solutions for the biggest issues facing Australia.
Some of Melbourne’s greatest influencers will be at Monash's Clayton campus for the conference Towards 2050 to discuss the trends, opportunities and challenges of the future.
Future Thinkers operations director Eshan Gaindhar said the aim was to encourage students across disciplines with different backgrounds and different academic approaches to have a real conversation about shaping 2050.
“This will bring those people together who are motivated but don’t know how to take the first step,” he said.
The event will include an interactive workshop, in which organisations such as Headspace, World Vision and Engineers without Borders will ask students to help solve real problems.
Co-Convenor Ashley Wah said Monash's multidisciplinary students had "unique perspectives" they could offer.
The event will also touch on artificial intelligence and what it will mean to be human in 2050. The panel discussion Defining Humanity will talk about the implications of advances in robotics on humanity.
“We’ve got an AI expert, a product engineer from Google, a tech lawyer, a medical expert and a philosophy professor to bring their perspective to the cluster,” Mr Gaindhar said.
Co-Convener and law student Amanda Selvarajah said the experts would put the issues into context, and answer questions.
The final panel of the day, Our Future Cities, would discuss the topic of the urban landscape.
Mr Wah, an environmental engineering student and moderator of this segment, said with rising population, a way had to be found to build cities that were more sustainable.
“We want to look at how the buildings are going to interact off of one another, what sort of food we will be eating in the future, how we can source the energy which will essentially power the cities,” Mr Wah said.
This panel will include an energy analyst, urban designer, and an architect.
“This will give them a sense of how problems in the real world intersect among disciplines and must be looked at from different angles.”
Tickets to the event cost $25 for students. You can register and purchase your ticket here.