The Information Animal
Humans, Technology and the Competition for Reality
Humanity has always craved, and feared, information. Alicia Wanless offers a fresh understanding of the relationship between people, technology and knowledge, today and throughout history.
Description
Depending on which news story you read, new tools like artificial intelligence will either save or destroy the world. The threat from emerging technology might seem unprecedented, but our response to it 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. It’s a familiar tale: first we develop a new technology that changes how information is shared, increasing the availability of content and the speed at which it can travel. Then, as more people engage with this new content, fresh ideas arise, often at odds with 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. Fearing the worst, we scramble—in vain—to control flows of information and use of the new technology. With democracies around the world lurching from crisis to crisis, knee-jerk reactions to information conflict won’t suffice. What’s needed is an understanding of humans’ nature as ‘information animals’—of our long-standing relationship with technology, and the ways in which a content-saturated world impacts the political battle for hearts and minds.
Author(s)
Alicia Wanless is a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where she runs the Information Environment Project. She completed her PhD in War Studies at King’s College London, combining ecology and strategic theory in a new approach to understanding conflict within the information environment.
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