Erik J. Larson

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

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. 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.

Career
In the early 2000s, Larson worked for Cycorp, home of the Cyc artificial intelligence project, on a knowledge-based approach to network security. 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. He founded his first company, Knexient, in 2009 with funding from DARPA to process open source text documents using his Hierarchical Document Classifier algorithm. Larson later co-founded Influence Networks after developing an algorithm to produce web-based rankings of colleges and universities with funding from DARPA. The algorithm is the foundation for the AcademicInflunce.com InfluenceRanking Engine. In 2020 Larson joined Knowledge Based Systems, Inc. in College Station, Texas as a Research Scientist specializing in natural language processing.

Larson has also written articles for The Atlantic,  Los Angeles Review of Books, Wired magazine, and The Hedgehog Review, as well as for The Metro Silicon Valley and Inference: International Review of Science.

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

The Myth of Artificial Intelligence
Larson's book, The Myth of Artificial Intelligence: Why Computers Can’t Think the Way We Do (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.” The book also received endorsements from writer John Horgan and CEO of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence Oren Etzioni. It has been reviewed for The Critic, Engadget, Fast Company, The Financial Times, Inside Story, The New Atlantis, The New York Review of Books, Prometheus: Critical Studies in Innovation, R&A Enterprise Architecture, Tech Monitor, TechTalks, The Times Literary Supplement, Towards Data Science, The Village Voice, The Wall Street Journal, and The Wire India. Larson has also performed several media interviews and made conference appearances in relation to the book, such as on the Lawfare and Current Affairs podcasts, and COSM 2021.

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." On the site, Larson revealed he "was awarded a two-year grant by the Thiel Foundation to work on a second book." 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. Larson also discussed the project on the Keen On show.