Henry Farrell

Count the Costs of Cutting Technological Ties with China

The result of all this is that policy discourse about the United States, China,
and technology has careened from one pathology to another: The cheery
globalism of a decade ago has given way to today’s diffuse paranoia. Now
the national security conversation is almost exclusively focused on the
impossible task of severing the ties of technological interdependence,
with the only question being how much further to go.

In Jessica Chen Weiss, ed. Getting China Right at Home, Johns Hopkins SAIS Institute for America, China and the Future of Global Affairs.

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Other Writing:

Academic Article

Watching from Afar: Media Consumption Patterns Around the Arab Spring – with Sean Aday, Deen Freelon, Marc Lynch, John Sides and Michael Dewar

March 15, 2013 American Behavioral Scientist 57 Deen Freelon Henry Farrell
Uses of new media in the context of the Arab Spring have attracted scholarly attention from a wide array of disciplines. Amid the anecdotes and speculation, most of the available empirical research in this area has examined how new media have enabled participants and spectators to produce and circulate protest-related content. In contrast, the current study investigates patterns of consumption of ...
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Essay

Behold the AI shoggoth – with Cosma Shalizi

June 21, 2023 machine learning as social information processing The Economist
Artificial intelligence is a familiar-looking monster The academics argue that large language models have much older cousins in markets and bureaucracies An internet meme keeps on turning up in debates about the large language models (llms) that power services such Openai’s Chatgptand the newest version of Microsoft’s Bing search engine. It’s the “shoggoth”: an amorphous monster ...
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