What role will humans play in shaping the future of the internet, especially given the meteoric rise of generative artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT? Wikipedia is tech-enabled, but very human-led. Each month, it receives more than 15 billion visits as people search for information online. The CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that hosts Wikipedia, will share more about how Wikipedia is doubling down on humans in a world of machine-generated content. Learn more about how we should all be preparing for the future of knowledge.

Register here to join us in person.

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The lecture will begin promptly at 6:00 p.m. and will be followed by a question and answer session. Guests are welcome to join us in person at 5:30 for a reception in the Cowell Ranch Hay Barn before the event begins or join the webinar via Zoom.

Maryana Iskander is the Chief Executive Officer of the Wikimedia Foundation. She has dedicated her career to breaking down systemic barriers of access to opportunity and education. Previously, she spent ten years as the CEO of Harambee Youth Employment Accelerator, a non-profit social enterprise focused on building African solutions to tackle the global crisis of youth unemployment, and received the Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship in 2019. Maryana also served as the COO of Planned Parenthood, the Advisor to the President of Rice University, and a law clerk on the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. Maryana holds a BA magna cum laude from Rice University, an M.Sc. from Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar, and a JD from Yale Law School, where she received a Distinguished Alumna Award.

This lecture series is co-sponsored by the Humanities Institute.

The Peggy Downes Baskin Ethics Lecture Series is a lively forum for the discussion and exploration of ethics-related challenges in human endeavors. The Ethics Lecture is made possible by the Peggy Downes Baskin Humanities Endowment for Interdisciplinary Ethics which enables the Humanities Division to promote a dialogue about ethics and ethics related challenges in an interdisciplinary setting. The endowment was established in honor of Peggy Downes Baskin’s longtime interest in ethical issues across the academic spectrum.