Spirals of Delusion: How AI Distorts Decision-Making and Makes Dictators More Dangerous – with Abraham Newman and Jeremy Wallace

In policy circles, discussions about artificial intelligence invariably pit China against the United States in a race for technological supremacy. If the key resource is data, then China, with its billion-plus citizens and lax protections against state surveillance, seems destined to win. Kai-Fu Lee, a famous computer scientist, has claimed that data is the new oil, and China the new OPEC. If superior technology is what provides the edge, however, then the United States, with its world class university system and talented workforce, still has a chance to come out ahead. For either country, pundits assume that superiority in AI

Henry Farrell, Abraham Newman and Jeremy Wallace, “Spirals of Delusion: How AI Distorts Decision-Making and Makes Dictators More Dangerous,” Foreign Affairs, September/October 2022 (Centennial Issue).

Access the full article here.

Other Writing:

Essay

Facebook and Falsehood

After the election, many people blamed Facebook for spreading partisan — and largely pro-Trump — “fake news,” like Pope Francis’s endorsement of Trump, or Hillary Clinton’s secret life-threatening illness. The company was assailed for prioritizing user “engagement,” meaning that its algorithms probably favored juicy fake news over other kinds of stories. Those algorithms had taken ...
Read Article
Essay

The Most Damaging Election Disinformation Campaign Came From Donald Trump, Not Russia with Bruce Schneier

On November 4, 2016, the hacker “Guccifer 2.0,” a front for Russia’s military intelligence service, claimed in a blogpost that the Democrats were likely to use vulnerabilities to hack the presidential elections. On November 9, 2018, President Donald Trump started tweeting about the senatorial elections in Florida and Arizona. Without any evidence whatsoever, he said ...
Read Article