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).

Access the full article here.

Other Writing:

Essay

The New Economy’s Old Business Model is Dead

July 13, 2018 Foreign Policy
The titans of the new economy are different from their predecessors in one very important way: They aren’t job creators — at least not on a scale to match their dizzying growth in value. General Motors, at its peak in 1979, had some 618,000 employees in the United States and 853,000 worldwide. Facebook had just ...
Read Article
Essay

Count the Costs of Cutting Technological Ties with China

January 22, 2025 Weaponized Interdependence
The result of all this is that policy discourse about the United States, China,and technology has careened from one pathology to another: The cheeryglobalism of a decade ago has given way to today’s diffuse paranoia. Nowthe national security conversation is almost exclusively focused on theimpossible task of severing the ties of technological interdependence,with the only ...
Read Article
Browse the Archives