This event has been canceled.
RSM welcomes Carl T. Bergstrom for a talk exploring social medias impact on the scale of human communication and our mechanisms for creating collective understanding.
We are a species of information foragers. Individually and collectively, we have evolved to scour our natural and social environments for useful information. Over the past twenty years, society has fashioned the web into an information pipeline to satisfy and profit from our evolved desires for novel information and social connection. What happens when the scale of human communication is radically transformed in the span of the generation, and our mechanisms for creating collective understanding are upended? What happens when this entire process is not stewarded to promote the spread of accurate information, strengthen democracy, and advance human well-beingbut rather is engineered by machine learning algorithms to get people to click on advertisements? What happens when large language models such as ChatGPT enter this global conversation with massive volumes of customized text indistinguishable from that produced by humans?
In this talk, Carl will look at what social media and information technology more generally are doing to society, consider how we ended up here, and explore some possible suggestions for what we can do about it.
