Brexit and the Northern Irish Border

A new fight has been brewing over the consequences of Brexit for the border between Northern Ireland and the neighboring Republic of Ireland. Both British and EU negotiators have identified the border as one of the key political questions that have to be addressed early on in negotiations. It’s easy not to have a border between two states that are both part of the EU’s single market (the regulatory regime that allows easy trade across the EU) and customs union (the arrangement under which European states do not impose customs duties on each other and maintain a common

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Other Writing:

Academic Article

The Moral Economy of High-Tech Modernism – with Marion Fourcade

This short piece compares 21st century machine learning to 19th and 20th century bureaucracy – we hope to write more. While people in and around the tech industry debate whether algorithms are political at all, social scientists take the politics as a given, asking instead how this politics unfolds: how algorithms concretely govern. What we ...
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Essay

Large Language Models Will Upend Human Rituals – with Marion Fourcade

ARTHUR C. CLARKE wrote a story in which the entire universe was created so that monks could ritually write out the nine billion names of God. The monks buy a computer to do this faster and better, with unfortunate consequences for the rest of us. The story’s last sentence: “Overhead, without any fuss, the stars ...
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