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Speaker:  Carl T. Bergstrom, professor in the Dept. of Biology at the University of Washington, Seattle 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 a 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-being—but 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, Bergstrom 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.  This talk will be simultaneously offered online via Zoom webinar and in person at the Charles E. Young Research Library. Light refreshments will be served. The Marschak Colloquium speaker series is presented by the UCLA Library.