‘What is a fidget spinner?’, ‘how to make slime’, and ‘what is the Paris Climate Agreement?’ were among the top Google searches of 2017.
What was the last question you typed into Google, and what does it reveal about you? What does the data on all Google searches since the beginning of the internet tell us about our species?
Seth Stephens-Davidowitz has a few ideas. He’s a former data scientist at Google and the author of Everybody Lies, a revealing and sometimes horrifying exploration of our accumulated internet search data. Diving deep into a truly awesome dataset (humans are estimated to amass eight trillion gigabytes of data in internet searches every day), Stephens-Davidowitz asks what our Google searches expose about human anxieties, biases and aspirations.
He’ll present his findings, then take audience questions, at a fascinating evening at the Wheeler Centre.
This event is presented in partnership with Integrity 20 / Griffith University.
Dymocks Camberwell will be our bookseller at this event.
Featuring
Seth Stephens-Davidowitz
Seth Stephens-Davidowitz has used data from the internet – particularly Google searches – to get new insights into the human psyche. Seth has used Google searches to measure racism, self-induced abortion, depression, child abuse, hateful mobs, the science of humour, sexual preference, anxiety, son preference, and sexual insecurity, among many other topics.
His 2017 book, Everybody Lies, published by HarperCollins, was a New York Times bestseller; a PBS NewsHour Book of the Year; and an Economist Book of the Year.
Seth worked for one-and-a-half years as a data scientist at Google and is currently a contributing op-ed writer for the New York Times. He is a former visiting lecturer at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.
He received his BA in philosophy from Stanford, and his PhD in economics from Harvard.