Henry Farrell

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 were going out.”

Marion Fourcade and Henry Farrell, “Large Language Models Will Upend Human Rituals,” The Economist, September 4, 2024.

Access the full article here.

Other Writing:

Essay

The Twilight of America’s Financial Empire – with Abraham Newman

January 24, 2020 Foreign Affairs (online) with Abraham Newman
When Iraqi lawmakers voted to expel U.S. forces from the country earlier this month, the Trump administration’s response was swift and forceful: it refused to withdraw and, for good measure, threatened financial retaliation, saying it would freeze Iraq’s accounts at the U.S. Federal Reserve. The threat seems to have been effective. Although Iraqi officials still ...
Read Article
Academic Article

Stability of Democracies: A Complex Systems Perspective – with Karoline Wiesner, Alvin Birdi, Tina Eliassi-Rad, David Garcia, Stephan Lewandowsky, Patricia Palacios, Don Ross, Didier Sornet and Karim Thebault

November 27, 2018 European Journal of Physics 40
Karoline Wiesner, Alvin Birdi, Tina Eliassi-Rad, Henry Farrell, David Garcia, Stephan Lewandowsky, Patricia Palacios, Don Ross, Didier Sornet and Karim Thebault (2019), “Stability of Democracies: A Complex Systems Perspective,” European Journal of Physics 40, 1:014002. The idea that democracy is under threat, after being largely dormant for at least 40 years, is looming increasingly large ...
Read Article
Browse the Archives