Toby Walsh, Digital Humanism Visiting Fellow at the IWM in March, has recently published a highly successful book titled The Shortest History of AI: The Six Essential Ideas That Animate It (The Experiment, 2025). In this accessible work, Walsh explores how artificial intelligence is being created, how it functions—and how it will continue to transform and affect our lives, both now and in the future.
We invite experts and IWM fellows for this closed-door meeting, one day prior to Walsh’s public lecture at TU Wien.
Toby Walsh is one of the world’s leading researchers in artificial intelligence. He is Scientia Professor of Artificial Intelligence at UNSW Sydney and Chief Scientist at UNSW’s AI Institute. His work explores the foundations and implications of AI, from automated reasoning and machine learning to the ethical and societal impacts of intelligent systems. Walsh has advised governments, industry, and international organizations on the safe and ethical development of artificial intelligence. He is the author of several books on AI for a general audience, including 2062: The World that AI Made (La Trobe University Press, 2018) and Machines Behaving Badly (La Trobe University Press, 2022), which examines how AI is reshaping work, democracy, security, and daily life.
In conversation with Ludger Hagedorn, IWM Permanent Fellow.
