Announcing Alondra Nelson as the 2026 History of Science Frederick A. Jakobiec Lecturer

This spring we will be hosting Alondra Nelson, Harold F. Linder Professor and Chair of the Science, Technology, and Social Values Lab at the Institute for Advanced Study.

Thursday, April 9, 2026 I In Person 

4:00 PM I Harvard Loeb House, 17 Quincy St., Cambridge, MA 02138

Reception to follow I Free and Open to the Public 

This talk traces how the strategic production of ignorance—what historian Robert Proctor terms "agnotology"—has evolved from twentieth-century industrial contexts into contemporary algorithmic systems. Big Tech and AI companies have refined these prior industrial tactics into what I call "algorithmic agnotology": the exploitation of technical complexity to obscure accountability and naturalize inscrutability as inherent to digital systems. Based on analysis of firm statements, media, and scholarly literature, I examine how AI companies blur the distinction between epistemic uncertainty (what could be known with more research) and stochastic uncertainty (what is inherently unknowable)—a conflation that presents strategic opacity as technical inevitability. This framework shows how algorithmic agnotology obscures what could be known from what is claimed to be unknowable—a dynamic accelerated by the "AI race" with consequences that reach beyond technical domains to fundamental questions of democratic governance and digital rights.

For questions please contact Deborah Valdovinos at valdovin@fas.harvard.edu