AI as social technology: A research agenda for political science
Event Information
With Henry Farrell, SNF Agora Professor of International Affairs, Johns Hopkins University
Political scientists are only beginning to think systematically about how AI may reshape the topics they study, even though one of the founders of the field of AI, Herbert Simon, was a political scientist. In this talk, Johns Hopkins political scientist Henry Farrell will leverage ongoing work with collaborators (including Alison Gopnik, James Evans, Cosma Shalizi, and Hahrie Han) to argue that Simon’s work on collective information processing provides a useful foundation for political scientists to think about how AI affects politics.
Simon argued that individual human cognitive capacities are limited, and larger-scale institutions such as markets and bureaucracy provide means of collectively processing information and reducing down the complexities of the world to make them more manageable. More recently, computer scientists and physicists have begun to use concepts such as lossy representations and coarse graining to make closely related arguments.
In his presentation, Farrell will explain how large language models provide just such lossy representations, as previous technologies have done before. Recognizing this opens up new possible research questions for political science and political theory, says Farrell. He’ll lay out the beginnings of one new agenda item: how lossy technologies of representation affect the formation of democratic publics.
About the speaker
Henry Farrell is the SNF Agora Professor of International Affairs at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. He is the 2019 recipient of the Friedrich Schiedel Prize for Politics and Technology, a prize for “outstanding individuals who contribute to inter- and trans-disciplinary projects linking politics and technology,” awarded jointly by the Friedrich Schiedel Foundation and the Technical University of Munich. Previously, he was professor at George Washington University’s Department of Political Science and Elliott School of International Affairs.
He works on a variety of topics, including the relationship between democracy and information, the security consequences of international economic networks, and international political economy. He is the co-author, with Abraham Newman, of Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy (2023), which was awarded the Council of Foreign Relations Arthur Ross Book Award Bronze Medal.