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:
- PhD Intern at Microsoft Research’s Social Media Collective
- Writing an ethnography of Bay-Area AI 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
Model Makers
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, where I spent 20 months embedded at an AI startup, safety lab, hacker houses, and over 80 public events.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. The techniques they develop along the way do not merely fashion the AI models that now proliferate the world; they also fashion the technologists who make them, binding them more tightly to the political and ethical commitments of their world.
My research on machine learning follows a study of artists engaging with blockchain technologies. This project took place in Berlin, and I wrote about their similar efforts to make sense of blockchain and overcome its challenges in New Media and Society.
Capitalizing
Identity
2020–2022
What does it mean to “bring your full self to work”? How have US professionals 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 