Sara Polak: Cloud civilizations: when the savannah and the metaverse meet

As a prominent archeologist and cognitive evolutionary anthropologist, Sara Polak explores how classic evolutionary principles, together with technological advancements, play a role in society today, how we can bridge the gap between the old and the new, and what this means for our future. Sara is originally an archaeologist and cognitive evolutionary anthropologist. For the past decade, she has been working in startups in the UK and US, mainly focusing on artificial intelligence. Since the start of the COVID pandemic, she has been focusing on educating the general public in digital literacy and demystifying artificial intelligence and demonstrating its usefulness in the 21st century as well as the need for understanding it in multidisciplinary context, especially as the member of the NGO Parallel Polis. For these efforts she was awarded the #Forbes30Under30 and Innovator of the Year 2022. She freshly started a new research group called CHAOS, focused on studying the phenomenon of cloud civilizations and understanding/modelling social interactions and evolution using VR and AI. Sara is currently writing a book on memes and history, is a big fan of Monty Python and Wikipedia.