ABSTRACT:
We are well into a decade of panic around information, its breakdown, and the complicity of digital media. We have spent the years asking: is “fake news” a new problem? (No.) Have we figured out how to fix it? (Not quite.) Does good information always win out in the end? (Assuredly not.)

What we called mis- or dis-information reveal more fundamental issues about information. Facts and messages are never merely transmitted, and always mediated. Every information problem has a social history of what we came to consider believable - and what unknowns and ambiguities we agreed not to dig too deeply into. 

In this talk, we'll walk through several cases of information panic - present (electoral politics), past (religious panics) and near future (generative AI).

SPEAKER BIO:
Sun-ha Hong's research examines forms of uncertainty, doubt, and (dis)belief around AI and data-driven technologies. He is currently a Fellow at the Stanford Humanities Centre, and previously worked at Simon Fraser University, Canada, and MIT. Sun-ha is the author of Technologies of Speculation: the limits of knowledge in a data-driven society (NYU Press, 2020), and is currently writing Predictions Without Futures.