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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AI as Governance

July 12, 2025 featured
Political scientists have had remarkably little to say about artificial intelligence (AI), perhaps because they are dissuaded by its technical complexity and by current debates about whether AI might emulate, outstrip, or replace individual human intelligence. They ought to consider AI in terms of its relationship with governance. Existing large-scale systems of governance such as ...
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Academic Article

Bias, Skew and Search Engines Suffice to Explain Online Toxicity – with Cosma Shalizi

March 15, 2024 Communications of the ACM with Cosma Shalizi
Henry Farrell and Cosma Shalizi (2024), “Bias, Skew and Search Engines Suffice to Explain Online Toxicity,” Communications of the ACM, preprint, 67,4:25-28. U.S. political discourse seems to have fissioned into discrete bubbles, each reflecting its owndistorted image of the world. Many blame machine-learning algorithms that purportedly maximize“engagement” — serving up content that keeps YouTube or ...
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