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:

Academic Article

The Consequences of the Internet for Politics

Political scientists are only now beginning to come to terms with the importance of the Internet to politics. The most promising way to study the Internet is to look at the role that causal mechanisms such as the lowering of transaction costs, homophilous sorting, and preference falsification play in intermediating between specific aspects of the ...
Read Article
Essay

A Most Lonely Union

In September 2019, two months before officially taking office, the new European Commission president was already insisting that the European Union needed to change. On the one hand, Ursula von der Leyen promised a new “geopolitical Commission,” but on the other, she wanted the EU “to be the guardian of multilateralism.” The difficult question was ...
Read Article