Biography:Erik J. Larson

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Short description: American journalist
Dr.

Erik J. Larson
Larson photo.jpg
Born1971 (age 52–53)
Alma materUniversity of Texas at Austin
OccupationComputer scientist, author
Known forArtificial intelligence, natural language processing
Notable work
The Myth of Artificial Intelligence: Why Computers Can’t Think the Way We Do
Websitehttps://erikjlarson.substack.com/

Erik J. Larson (born 1971) is an American writer, tech entrepreneur, computer scientist. He is author of The Myth of Artificial Intelligence: Why Computers Can’t Think the Way We Do.[1]

He has written for The Atlantic, The Hedgehog Review, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Wired, and professional journals. His other projects include two DARPA-funded startups, the most recent a company that provides influence rankings for colleges and universities using an influence ranking algorithm.

Larson also publishes articles on the Substack Colligo.

Education

Larson graduated from Whitworth University in Spokane, Washington in 1994 as an All America Scholar Athlete.[2] He earned a PhD in philosophy from The University of Texas at Austin in 2009, where his dissertation was a hybrid combining work in computer science, linguistics, and philosophy.[3]

Career

In the early 2000s, Larson worked for Cycorp, home of the Cyc artificial intelligence project, on a knowledge-based approach to network security.[4] He then researched and published articles on knowledge base technology, ontology, and the Semantic Web for the Digital Media Collaboratory, a research lab founded by American businessman George Kozmetsky affiliated with the Innovation, Creativity, and Capital Institute, at The University of Texas at Austin.[5][6][7][8] He founded his first company, Knexient, in 2009 with funding from DARPA to process open source text documents using his Hierarchical Document Classifier algorithm.[9] Larson later co-founded Influence Networks after developing an algorithm to produce web-based rankings of colleges and universities with funding from DARPA.[10] The algorithm is the foundation for the AcademicInflunce.com InfluenceRanking Engine.[11][12] In 2020 Larson joined Knowledge Based Systems, Inc. in College Station, Texas as a Research Scientist specializing in natural language processing.[13]

Larson has also written articles for The Atlantic,[14][15] Los Angeles Review of Books,[16] Wired magazine,[17] and The Hedgehog Review,[18] as well as for The Metro Silicon Valley[19] and Inference: International Review of Science.[20]

Larson is a Fellow with The Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia[21] and has also been a visiting researcher at The Santa Fe Institute.[22]

The Myth of Artificial Intelligence

Larson's book, The Myth of Artificial Intelligence: Why Computers Can’t Think the Way We Do[23] (ISBN:9780674983519 ) was published by Harvard University Press on April 6, 2021. In the book, "Larson argues that AI hype is both bad science and bad for science. A culture of invention thrives on exploring unknowns, not overselling existing methods. Inductive AI will continue to improve at narrow tasks, but if we want to make real progress, we will need to start by more fully appreciating the only true intelligence we know—our own."

In his endorsement of The Myth of Artificial Intelligence, venture capitalist Peter Thiel wrote "If you want to know about AI, read this book...it shows how a supposedly futuristic reverence for Artificial Intelligence retards progress when it denigrates our most irreplaceable resource for any future progress: our own human intelligence.”[24] The book also received endorsements from writer John Horgan[25] and CEO of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence Oren Etzioni. It has been reviewed for The Critic,[26] Engadget,[27] Fast Company,[28] The Financial Times,[29] Inside Story,[30] The New Atlantis,[31] The New York Review of Books,[32] Prometheus: Critical Studies in Innovation,[33] R&A Enterprise Architecture,[34] Tech Monitor,[35] TechTalks,[36] The Times Literary Supplement,[37] Towards Data Science,[38] The Village Voice,[39] The Wall Street Journal ,[40] and The Wire India.[41] Larson has also performed several media interviews and made conference appearances in relation to the book, such as on the Lawfare[42] and Current Affairs[43] podcasts, and COSM 2021.[44]

The Return

In August 2023, Larson launched Colligo on Substack to "show the problems with our data-driven world and show or assemble a richer humanistic picture."[45] On the site, Larson revealed he "was awarded a two-year grant by the Thiel Foundation to work on a second book."[46] The title of his forthcoming book is The Return: Why the 21st Century Looks Like the Past (so far), Not the Future We Wanted. An article previewing The Return was published as "Back to the Fifties: Reassessing Technological and Political Progress" in the American Affairs Journal.[47] Larson also discussed the project on the Keen On show.[48]

References

  1. ↑ Larson, Erik J. (2021). The myth of artificial intelligence: why computers can't think the way we do. Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0-674-98351-9. 
  2. ↑ "Alumni Magazine Spring 1994". Whitworth Alumni Magazine. January 1, 1994. https://digitalcommons.whitworth.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1149&context=alumnimagazine. 
  3. ↑ Larson, Erik John (December 2009). Primary semantic type labeling in monologue discourse using a hierarchical classification approach (Thesis). hdl:2152/ETD-UT-2009-12-636.
  4. ↑ "A knowledge-based approach to network security: Applying Cyc in the domain of network risk assessment". Proceedings of the 17th Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence - Volume 3. IAAI'05. July 9, 2005. pp. 1563–1568. ISBN 978-1-57735-236-5. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/1620092.1620110. 
  5. ↑ "CEUR-WS.org/Vol-101 – Knowledge Markup and Semantic Annotation (Semannot-2003)". http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-101/. 
  6. ↑ Larson, Erik; Hughes, Todd (2005). "Relational Recognition for Information Extraction in Free Text Documents". Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence Spring Symposium. https://www.aaai.org/Papers/Symposia/Spring/2005/SS-05-01/SS05-01-027.pdf. 
  7. ↑ Asher, Nicholas; Denis, P.; Kuhn, Jonas; Larson, Erik; McCready, E.; Palmer, Alexis; Reese, Brian; Wang, Linton. Extracting and Using Discourse Structure to Resolve Anaphoric Dependencies : Combining Logico-Semantic and Statistical Approaches. 
  8. ↑ Woelk, D.; Larson, Erik; Allen, Wayne; Taank, Sumit (2003). Focused Knowledge Bases for Multi-Disciplinary , Multi-Sector Decision Making. 
  9. ↑ "KNEXIENT | SBIR.gov". https://www.sbir.gov/sbc/knexient. 
  10. ↑ "Home". https://influencenetworks.com/. 
  11. ↑ "The Inspiration for Academic Influence | Interview with Erik Larson | Academic Influence" (in en). 28 April 2021. https://academicinfluence.com/interviews/computer-science/erik-larson-karina. 
  12. ↑ AcademicInfluence.com. "AcademicInfluence.com Ranks the Top Colleges & Universities in the U.S. for 2021" (in en). https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/academicinfluencecom-ranks-the-top-colleges--universities-in-the-us-for-2021-301243314.html. 
  13. ↑ "List of Knowledge Based Systems, Inc. employees". https://www.signalhire.com/companies/knowledge-based-systems-inc/employees. 
  14. ↑ Larson, Erik (May 14, 2015). "Questioning the Hype About Artificial Intelligence" (in en). https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/05/the-humanists-paradox/391622/. 
  15. ↑ Larson, Erik (April 26, 2019). "When Making Things Better Only Makes Them Worse" (in en). https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/04/why-accidents-like-notre-dame-fire-happen/587956/. 
  16. ↑ Mankin, Keith P.; Simon, Ed; Larson, Erik J.; Fletcher, Angus (September 26, 2021). "What Is Literature For?: A Symposium on Angus Fletcher's "Wonderworks"". https://www.lareviewofbooks.org/article/what-is-literature-for-a-symposium-on-angus-fletchers-wonderworks/. 
  17. ↑ Fletcher, Angus; Larson, Erik. "Optimizing Machines Is Perilous. Consider 'Creatively Adequate' AI." (in en-US). Wired. ISSN 1059-1028. https://www.wired.com/story/artificial-intelligence-data-future-optimization-antifragility/. Retrieved 2022-02-11. 
  18. ↑ "Twenty Five Years After Imagined Worlds, What World Are We Living In?". 2022-10-25. https://hedgehogreview.com/web-features/thr/posts/twenty-five-years-after-imagined-worlds-what-world-are-we-living-in. 
  19. ↑ "2012 June 27 | Metro Silicon Valley". https://www.metrosiliconvalley.com/2012/06/27/. 
  20. ↑ Larson, Erik (July 13, 2015). "Big Neuroscience" (in en). Inference: International Review of Science 1 (3). doi:10.37282/991819.15.16. https://inference-review.com/article/big-neuroscience. 
  21. ↑ "Erik J. Larson" (in en). http://iasculture.org/events/erik-j-larson. 
  22. ↑ Larson, Erik J. (2023-08-24). "Welcome to Colligo". https://erikjlarson.substack.com/p/welcome-to-colligo. 
  23. ↑ Larson, Erik J. (2021). The myth of artificial intelligence: why computers can't think the way we do. Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0-674-98351-9. 
  24. ↑ "The Myth of Artificial Intelligence". https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/55503081-the-myth-of-artificial-intelligence. 
  25. ↑ Horgan, John. "Will Artificial Intelligence Ever Live Up to Its Hype?" (in en). https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/will-artificial-intelligence-ever-live-up-to-its-hype/. 
  26. ↑ "The limits of logic | Kit Wilson" (in en-GB). January 26, 2022. https://thecritic.co.uk/issues/february-2022/the-limits-of-logic/. 
  27. ↑ "Hitting the Books: Is the hunt for technological supremacy harming our collective humanity?" (in en-US). May 2021. https://www.engadget.com/hitting-the-books-the-myth-of-artificial-intelligence-erik-j-larson-harvard-university-press-153017524.html. 
  28. ↑ Larson, Erik J. (May 12, 2021). "Silicon Valley has been taken over by 'technological kitsch'" (in en-US). https://www.fastcompany.com/90635442/technological-kitsch. 
  29. ↑ Thornhill, John (March 25, 2021). "The delusions of techno-futurists who ask: crisis, what crisis?". The Financial Times. https://www.ft.com/content/1c1daa87-c48e-4d19-a574-046eadb5b665. 
  30. ↑ "Ghosts in the machine" (in en). August 5, 2021. https://insidestory.org.au/ghosts-in-the-machine/. 
  31. ↑ "Why We Still Don't Have True AI" (in en-US). https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/can-machines-have-common-sense. 
  32. ↑ Halpern, Sue. "The Human Costs of AI" (in en). New York Review of Books. https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2021/10/21/human-costs-artificial-intelligence/. 
  33. ↑ "Erik J. Larson, The Myth of Artificial Intelligence: Why Computers Can't Think the Way We Do – Prometheus" (in en-GB). http://www.prometheusjournal.co.uk/product/erik-j-larson-the-myth-of-artificial-intelligence-why-computers-cant-think-the-way-we-do/. 
  34. ↑ Wierda, Gerben (August 21, 2021). "AI is a Myth, says AI-researcher and engineer Erik Larson" (in en). https://ea.rna.nl/2021/08/21/review-of-the-myth-of-artificial-intelligence-a-conversation-with-erik-larson/. 
  35. ↑ Clarke, Laurie (May 12, 2021). "Forget the hype, we've no idea how to reach human-like AI" (in en-US). https://techmonitor.ai/technology/we-have-no-idea-how-to-reach-human-like-artificial-intelligence. 
  36. ↑ Dickson, Ben (September 20, 2021). "Abductive inference: The blind spot of artificial intelligence" (in en-US). https://bdtechtalks.com/2021/09/20/myth-of-artificial-intelligence-erik-larson/. 
  37. ↑ "The Myth of Artificial Intelligence by Erik J. Larson review: What the human mind can do that the man-made one can't" (in en-GB). https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/the-myth-of-artificial-intelligence-erik-j-larson-review-christopher-mole/. 
  38. ↑ Chugg, Ben (June 9, 2021). "The False Philosophy Plaguing AI" (in en). https://towardsdatascience.com/the-false-philosophy-plaguing-ai-bdcfd4872c45. 
  39. ↑ Ascend, Amir Bakian / Partner content from (2023-07-05). "How Will AI Affect White Collar Management Jobs?". https://www.villagevoice.com/how-will-ai-affect-white-collar-management-jobs/. 
  40. ↑ Shaywitz, David A. (May 21, 2021). "Big Brains: New Books on Artificial Intelligence" (in en-US). Wall Street Journal. https://www.wsj.com/articles/big-brains-new-books-on-artificial-intelligence-11621607063. 
  41. ↑ Kulkarni, Viraj (June 1, 2021). "In Erik Larson's New Book, a Cogent Case Against the Inevitability of True AI" (in en-GB). https://science.thewire.in/the-sciences/in-erik-larsons-new-book-a-cogent-case-against-the-inevitability-of-true-ai/. 
  42. ↑ "The Lawfare Podcast: The Myth of Artificial Intelligence" (in en). March 31, 2021. https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/lawfare-podcast-myth-artificial-intelligence. 
  43. ↑ "Why You Don't Need To Worry About "Superintelligent AI" Destroying The World (But Artificial Intelligence Is Still Scary)". September 30, 2022. https://www.patreon.com/posts/why-you-dont-to-72712668. 
  44. ↑ (in en) The Myth of Artificial Intelligence with Erik Larson at COSM 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LN1_1mvYjp8, retrieved 2023-03-19 
  45. ↑ Larson, Erik J. (2023-09-05). "Colligo | Erik J Larson | Substack" (in en). https://erikjlarson.substack.com/. 
  46. ↑ Larson, Erik J. (2023-08-24). "Welcome to Colligo". https://erikjlarson.substack.com/p/welcome-to-colligo. 
  47. ↑ Larson, Erik J. (2023-08-20). "Back to the Fifties: Reassessing Technological and Political Progress" (in en-US). https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2023/08/back-to-the-fifties-reassessing-technological-and-political-progress/. 
  48. ↑ Keen, Andrew (October 8, 2023). "The Myth of Progress: Erik J. Larson on Silicon Valley's failure to change anything of any significance since the Fifties". https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/keen-on/the-myth-of-progress-erik-j-qmipj5dVcQ9/. 



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