The Other Cambridge Analytics: Early “Artificial Intelligence” in American Political Science

Abstract

Harold Lasswell, quoted in a 1961 issue of Harper's Magazine, described the Simulmatics Corporation as the "A-bomb of the social sciences." Simulmatics had attracted his attention after publicizing its use of computer modeling to predict public opinion for the 1960 Kennedy Presidential Campaign. A preeminent figure in the American academia, Lasswell's quotes reflects the long promise of "artificial intelligence" in a broad sense as a technology to better know politics and populations. Simulmatics was one application of this research agenda developed at MIT along with Project Cambridge. These under-studied cases are a needed counterpoint to theorize the contemporary applications of machine learning and deep learning for political management as popularized by the defunct psychographics firm Cambridge Analytica. Building on the pre-conference's periodization of AI from rule-based to today's temporal flows of classifications, I distinguish modern AI epistemology (machine learning and deep learning) from its predecessors through two key applications at MIT, the Simulmatics Corporation and its academic equivalent Project Cambridge. Drawing on archival research, I analyze the constitutive discourses that formulated the problems to be solved and the artifacts of code that actualized these projects. Simulmatics Corporation and Project Cambridge marked an important passage point of the cyborg sciences into politics and governance, integrating behaviouralism with mathematical modeling in hopes of rendering populations more knowable and manageable. In doing so, these other analytics at Cambridge erased the boundaries between artificial intelligence and political intelligence, an erasure necessary for AI to be seen as a political epistemology today.

The effects of negative social media connotations on subjective wellbeing of an ageing population: A stressor-strain-outcome perspective

“…Perceptions of illegitimate use of users’ shared data and exchange of their private personal data with other parties may give rise to emotions of privacy invasion. Previously, the Cambridge Analytica data scandal, and, more recently, the association of artificial intelligence (AI) with social media sites have already made users more sensitive about the security of their data [ 63 ]. The outcomes of our study confirmed this sensitivity by demonstrating that the complexity of social media platforms has a significant positive role in developing the perceptions of privacy invasion among the ageing population of Malaysia.…”