Henry Farrell

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).

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Other Writing:

Chapter in an Edited Volume

“The Shared Challenges of Institutional Theories: Rational Choice,” in Historical Institutionalism, and Sociological Institutionalism, Knowledge and Institutions – eds. Johannes Glückler, Roy Suddaby and Regina Lenz

June 8, 2018 economic geography Economics eds. Johannes Glückler Roy Suddaby and Regina Lenz
Scholarship on institutions across the social sciences faces a set of fundamental dilemmas. On the one hand, it needs to explain how institutions change. Yet explanations of change which point to external factors run the risk of reducing institutions to a mere transmission belt for other, more fundamental causes. On the other, it needs to ...
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Essay

Behold the AI shoggoth – with Cosma Shalizi

June 21, 2023 machine learning as social information processing The Economist
Artificial intelligence is a familiar-looking monster The academics argue that large language models have much older cousins in markets and bureaucracies An internet meme keeps on turning up in debates about the large language models (llms) that power services such Openai’s Chatgptand the newest version of Microsoft’s Bing search engine. It’s the “shoggoth”: an amorphous monster ...
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