Spencer Kaplan
Welcome! I’m a cultural and linguistic anthropologist. I examine how new technologies inform what it means to be human, including what it means to be a better human. I currently study relationships between humans and large language models, focusing on those who live most closely with the technology: the very researchers and engineers who make them. My work has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and the American Ethnological Society.
I am currently a PhD candidate at Yale University. Previously, I received an MPhil in Social Anthropology from the University of Cambridge and a BA in Economics from the University of Chicago. My research is motivated by experience working for an AI startup and, before that, consulting for investment banks and other large companies.
Things I’ve been up to:
- Writing an ethnography of machine learning researchers and engineers
- Visiting Scholar at NYU, organizing The Past and Future of Work Group
- Published articles on blockchain in New Media and Society and Burning Man in Platypus
Research Projects
Trust in
Intelligence
2023–Present
What does it mean to live and work with technologies we build yet struggle to understand? This question guides my ethnographic research in the San Francisco Bay Area’s machine learning community. While researchers can provide full technical accounts of their models’ development, they struggle to explain the emergence of their models’ striking capacities and behaviors. Much of their work entails interpreting their creations, and this often entails techniques adapted from the social and biological sciences. I study this interpretive side of ML as it unfolds in labs, startups, and community spaces across the Bay Area. I examine how technologists use AI as a lens for contemplating fundamental questions about human life and our collective future.
My research on machine learning follows a study of trust among blockchain/Web3 proponents working to build what they call “trustless technologies.” This project took place in Berlin, and I published the results in New Media and Society.
Capitalizing
Identity
2020–2022
What does it mean to “bring your full self to work”? How have we come to see certain “personal” or “private” aspects of our lives as sources of human capital? After facing these questions during my own work as a management consultant in New York, I studied them as an anthropologist on Wall Street. My findings are published in Anthropology of Work Review.
Read some of my work, from field notes to peer-reviewed articles, on my Writing page
Spencer Kaplan 