Join Henry Farrell, SNF Agora Institute Professor at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, moderated by Pepper Culpepper, Blavatnik Chair in Government and Public Policy, as he delivers the Astor Lecture on AI as social technology, as part of his Astor Visiting Lectureship.

There is vigorous debate over whether AI Large Language Models are a kind of "normal technology" like electricity that will gradually change the economy, or alternatively whether we are on the cusp of an epochal change, in which agentic machine intelligence might even replace the human species. These arguments overlook the ways in which AI can be considered instead as a social technology: that is, a systematic means for reorganising social relations among human beings. Building on joint work with collaborators, Professor Farrell will explain how emerging AI systems can be considered as equivalent to past large scale systems of information and coordination like markets, bureaucracy and even democracy.

Henry Farrell 

Henry Farrell is SNF Agora Institute Professor at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and 2019 winner of the Friedrich Schiedel Prize for Politics and Technology. He works on a variety of topics, including democracy, the politics of the Internet and international and comparative political economy. He has written articles and book chapters as well as three books, The Political Economy of Trust: Interests, Institutions and Inter-Firm Cooperation, published by Cambridge University Press, and (with Abraham Newman) Of Privacy and Power: The Transatlantic Fight over Freedom and Security, published by Princeton University Press, and Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy (with Abraham Newman), published by Henry Holt (US) and Penguin (UK), and translated into Chinese, Finnish, French, Japanese and Korean.