The Information Animal:

Humans, Technology & the Competition for Reality

with Alicia Wanless

Ideas / Thurs 12th Jun / 6.30-8.30pm

Humanity has always craved, and feared, information. How should we understand our enduring, ever-changing relationships with technology and knowledge?

Depending on the news you read, new tools like AI will either save or destroy us. But our response to emerging technology’s ‘unprecedented’ threats actually follows a pattern as old as civilisation. From ancient Athens to COVID-19, social media to spam, Alicia Wanless shows how humans have always consumed information, whether accurate or not.

First a new technology changes how information is shared, broadening its availability and accelerating how fast it travels. Then, as more people engage with this new content, fresh ideas arise, often challenging prevailing beliefs. Some use the new tools to promote their views, win power or simply profit, adding to the mounting information pollution. Competition and conflict follow. We scramble—in vain—to control information flows and use of the new technology.

With democracies worldwide lurching from crisis to crisis, knee-jerk reactions to information conflict won’t suffice. What’s needed is an understanding of our nature as ‘information animals’, in a millennia-long relationship with technology—and of how a content-saturated world impacts the political battle for hearts and minds.

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ABOUT THE HOST

Alicia Wanless is the director of the Information Environment Project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, which aims to foster evidence-based policymaking for the governance of the information environment. Alicia is the author of The Information Animal: Humans, Technology and the Competition for Reality. As part of her work at Carnegie, Alicia is developing the Institute for Research on the Information Environment, a multinational, multistakeholder research facility. Alicia created a multistakeholder network in partnership with the G7 Rapid Response Network to support information integrity efforts in Ukraine. Alicia was a technical advisor to Aspen Institute’s Commission on Information Disorder and is a founding member of its Global Cybersecurity Group. She is also an expert advisor to the World Economic Forum’s Global Coalition for Digital Safety. Alicia is a visiting researcher at the Institute for Digital Security and Behaviour in the University of Bath's School of Management. At King’s College London in War Studies, she completed her PhD combining strategic theory and ecology in a new approach to understanding conflict within the information environment.

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ADDITIONAL INFO 

FOOD & DRINK	EVENT SIZE	WHEELCHAIR
Bar open with snacks	Small (10-20)	Available on request