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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Other Writing:

Academic Article

The Role of Effects, Saliencies and Norms in U.S. Cyberwar Doctrine – with Charles Glaser

March 31, 2017 Journal of Cybersecurity with Charles Glaser
The US approach to cybersecurity implicitly rests on an effects-based logic. That is, it presumes that the key question determining how the US and others will respond to attacks is what effects they have. Whether the effects come about as a result of cyber means or kinetic means is largely irrelevant. In this article, we ...
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Essay

Chained to Globalization – with Abraham Newman

December 10, 2019 Foreign Affairs Weaponized Interdependence with Abraham Newman
Why It’s Too Late to Decouple In 1999, the columnist Thomas Friedman pronounced the Cold War geopolitical system dead. The world, he wrote, had “gone from a system built around walls to a system increasingly built around networks.” As businesses chased efficiency and profits, maneuvering among great powers was falling away. An era of harmony was at ...
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