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:

Essay

Socialists Will Never Understand Elizabeth Warren (I’d have chosen a different title)

December 12, 2019 Foreign Policy (online)
The Democratic candidate is part of a long intellectual tradition that’s gone forgotten in the West: pro-market leftism. Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s politics seem like a tangle of contradictions. She wants free markets, but also wants to tax billionaires’ capital. Her enemies on the right claim that she is a socialist, but Warren describes herself as ...
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Academic Article

Ontology, Methodology and Causation in the American School of International Political Economy – with Martha Finnemore

February 7, 2009 eds. (2010) International Political Economy and the Transatlantic Divide. Review of International Political Economy. Republished in Catherine Weaver and Nicola Phillips with Martha Finnemore
This paper explores disjunctures between ontology and methodology in the American school to better understand both the limits of this approach and ways we can counter its blind spots. Tierney and Maliniak’s TRIP data point to a strong elective affinity between, on the one hand, rationalist/liberal 10 ontological assumptions and quantitative methodologies, and on the other, constructivist ...
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