12v26
A post this morning from Henry Farrell pointed to a paper [May 11 2026...] with Cosma Shalizi:
I read through it, copying especially trenchant passages to my email, so that I could assemble them into a single document: here's the full text (which I mean to mark up), and I made a page of passages I extracted as especially trenchant on my first reading. I have the sense that there's enough subtlety in the article to withstand (require?) multiple readings.
The essence appeared about a year ago, in Large AI models are cultural and social technologies Henry Farrell1, Alison Gopnik, Cosma Shalizi, James Evans Science 14iii25
...The new technology of large models combines important features of earlier technologies. Like pictures, writing, print, video, internet search, and other such technologies, large models allow people to access information that other people have created. Large models—currently language, vision, and multimodal—depend on the internet having made the products of these earlier technologies readily available in machine-readable form. But like economic markets, state bureaucracies, and other social technologies, these systems not only make information widely available, they allow it to be reorganized, transformed, and restructured in distinctive ways. Adopting Simon’s terminology, large models are a new variant of the "artificial systems of human society" that process information to enable large-scale coordination....we argue that large models are themselves best understood as a particular type of cultural and social technology. They are analogous to such past technologies as writing, print, markets, bureaucracies, and representative democracies.
...The anthropologist Scott argued (3) that all states, democratic or otherwise, have managed complex societies by creating bureaucratic systems that categorize and systematize information. Markets, democracies, and bureaucracies have relied on mechanisms that generate lossy (incomplete, selective, and uninvertible) but useful representations well before the computer. Those representations both depend on and go beyond the knowledge and decisions of individual people. A price, an election result, or a measure such as gross domestic product (GDP) summarizes large amounts of individual knowledge, values, preferences, and actions.
...Humans rely extensively on these cultural and social technologies. These technologies are only possible, however, because humans have distinct capacities characteristic of intelligent agents. Humans, and other animals, can perceive and act on a changing external world, build new models of that world, revise those models as they accumulate more evidence, and then design new goals. Individual humans can create new beliefs and values and convey those beliefs and values to others through language or print. Cultural and social technologies transmit and organize those beliefs and values in powerful ways, but without those individual capacities, the cultural and social technologies would have no purchase.
...Because it is hard for humans to think clearly about large-scale cultural and social technologies, we have tended to think of them in terms of agents. Stories are a particularly powerful way to pass on information, and from fireside tales to novels to video games, they have done this by creating illustrative fictional agents, even though listeners know that those agents are not real. Chatbots are the successor to Hercules, Anansi, and Peter Rabbit. Similarly, it is easy to treat markets and states as though they were agents, and agencies or companies can even have a kind of legal personhood.
...A body of cultural information that was previously too complex, large, and inchoate for large-scale operations has been rendered tractable.