Cambridge Forum on Institutions Under Technological Change
What allows an institution to remain recognisably itself when the technologies, rules and people underneath it change?
Institutions Under Technological Change is a small interdisciplinary forum bringing together researchers and practitioners across law, organisational studies, financial systems, public policy, artificial intelligence and decentralised infrastructure.
Rather than asking simply how institutions should adopt new technologies, the forum starts from a different set of questions:
What is worth preserving? Who gets to decide what preservation requires? How should institutions respond to risks they cannot fully predict? How much can the underlying system change before rights, norms or institutional identity change with it? And when authority is distributed, who is ultimately responsible for coordinating the transition?
Across the day, speakers will approach these questions from very different perspectives: credible neutrality and reconstitution; organisational anticipation and technological lock-in; institutional responsibility and user sovereignty; operational resilience; post-quantum migration; property and legal continuity; the assumptions inherited by AI systems; private ordering; and authority in systems without a single sovereign actor.
Refreshments, snacks and light bites will be available during the programme.
Programme
10:00: Welcome & Framing
10:10: Shyam Sridhar
Ethereum Foundation
The Fifth Freedom
10:35: Dr. Virginia Leavell
University of Cambridge
Anticipating Technological Change Without Lock-In
11:00: Joey Garcia
Xapo Bank
Institutional Responsibility Without Mandatory Gateways
11:25 — Coffee, Refreshments & Snacks
11:45: Damla Sat
Ethereum Foundation
Operational Resilience and PQ-Readiness for Permissionless Infrastructure
12:10: Dr. Hui Gong
University College London
Coordinating Post-Quantum Migration in Decentralised Systems
12:35: Farhana Hamid-Butt
University of Cambridge
Legal Continuity Under Technological Change
1:00 — Light Bites, Lunch & Networking
1:30: Dr. Wenbin Wu
Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance, University of Cambridge
What Language Models Remember About Money
1:55: Dr. Henning Grosse Ruse-Khan
University of Cambridge
Private Ordering, Legitimacy and Cross-Border Technology
2:25 : Fireside: Authority Under Technological Change
Hangze Xing (EPRG, University of Cambridge)
Alex Reid (Algosoup, Schwarzman Scholar)
Moderated by Eugene Yu Jin, President, Cambridge Blockchain Society
2:55 — Closing Remarks