Information, disinformation, and the future of human society
Science & Cocktails is proud to announce an episode with evolutionary social biologist superstar, Carl T. Bergstrom, Professor of Biology at the University of Washington, and author of the book "Calling Bullshit". He will tell us what the future of human society and collective decision making looks like in a world of information generated by machines and AI. All this just after "ALT ER MED I ALT" explore visuals and sound featuring musicians Ane Trolle and Åsmund Boye, multi‑instrumentalist Alexander Valentino Clerici, artist and musician Tan Vargas, organist Nikolaj Aage Høi.
Tickets. Seated tickets are paid. Standing tickets are free and valid until 8pm. This means that you should enter before 8pm and can stay the entire event.
After 8pm we let people in on a first come, first served basis.
Why are we so captivated by information technologies such as social media? How has the Internet changed the way that we collectively make sense of the world? Why does disinformation seem to spread faster than ever before? How are large language models such as ChatGPT going to impact society and democracy? How can we move toward a healthier and more sustainable relationship with information technology?
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-five 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, Carl will look at what social media and information technology more generally are doing to society; consider how we ended up here; examine where AI chatbots are taking us; and explore some possible suggestions for what we can do about it all.
Event held in English and with the generous support of the Novo Nordisk Foundation
Talk by
Carl T. Bergstrom
Carl T. BergstromCarl Bergstrom is a Professor of Biology at the University of Washington. Though trained in mathematical evolutionary biology, Carl addresses a broad range of problems across natural and social sciences with a unifying theme of how information flows. Within biology, Carl studies problems such as how communication evolves and how natural selection puts information into the genome. In the philosophy and sociology of science, he studies how the incentives created by scientific institutions shape scholars’ research strategies and, in turn, our scientific understanding of the world. In network science, he explores how to extract the relevant information from massive networks comprising tens of millions of nodes, and how information flows through networks of this scale. In recent years he has started to focus on how social media and large language models facilitate the spread of disinformation, and what we as a society can do about it. Photo by Kris Tsujikawa.
Music by
ALT ER MED I ALT
This translates to Everything Is In Everything. Our performance is a moment where we share what we discover and process through sonic textures, visuals and your senses. We extract inspiration from the space, the human presence and the modes of time. For this special evening at Science & Cocktails, the initiators and musicians Ane Trolle and Åsmund Boye have invited multi‑instrumentalist Alexander Valentino Clerici, artist and musician Tan Vargas, organist Nikolaj Aage Høi, and visual artist Mads Buus to join the efforts."
