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.

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Essay

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W. C. Sellar and R. J. Yeatman’s comic history of England, 1066 and All That, talks about nineteenth-century British Prime Minister W. E. Gladstone’s efforts to solve the Irish Question—the puzzle of what to do with rebellious Ireland, which was then part of the United Kingdom. According to Sellar and Yeatman, every time that Gladstone ...
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Essay

Zoned (On the European Union)

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European integration is boring, even when it is exciting. Over the past eighteen months, crisis has piled upon crisis in the European Union’s single-currency area, the so-called eurozone. The European project of creating an ever closer union among its member states may be about to crash, crippling America’s economy as well as Europe’s. The Washington ...
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