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.[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.
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's book, The Myth of Artificial Intelligence: Why Computers Can’t Think the Way We Do[23] (ISBN9780674983519 ) 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."
Larson wrote "Back to the Fifties: Reassessing Technological and Political Progress," published in the American Affairs Journal.[44] Larson also discussed the article on the Keen On show.[45] His article "Who’s Smarter: AI or a 5-Year-Old?" appeared in Nautius.[46]
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."[47] On the site, Larson revealed he "was awarded a two-year grant by the Thiel Foundation to work on a second book."[48]
^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. ISBN978-0-674-98351-9.
^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.
^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. ISBN978-0-674-98351-9.