My research examines how societies can govern complex technologies through democratic processes rather than top-down expert control. Taking AI as a primary case study, I use history, political theory, and Science & Technology Studies (STS) to explore decision-making under conditions of complexity, uncertainty, and disagreement.
Current Book Project
Zen and the Art of AI Governance
A crossover scholarly work developing the “Intelligent Trial-and-Error” (ITE) framework for democratic technology governance. The book examines historical parallels, contemporary AI governance failures, and the structural dynamics that give business actors privileged influence over technology policy. Drawing on both democratic theory and contemplative practice, it argues for institutional reforms that would enable wiser collective responses to transformative technologies.
Affiliations
Visiting Researcher (2019–2023) Stanford University Human-Centered AI Institute (HAI) Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC)
Selected Publications
You can also find much of this material on my ResearchGate profile.
2022
“Predators in the Attention Economy: Identification and Defense.” In Artificial Intelligence and Its Discontents: Critiques from the Social Sciences and Humanities, edited by Ariane Hanemaayer. Social and Cultural Studies of Robots and AI. Springer International Publishing.
2021
“The ‘General Problem Solver’ Does Not Exist: Mortimer Taube and the Art of AI Criticism.” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 43 (1): 60–73.
“Unsavory Medicine for Technological Civilization: Introducing ‘Artificial Intelligence & Its Discontents.'” Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 46 (1–2): 1–18.
2020
Bayram, Mustafa, Simon Springer, Colin K. Garvey, and Vural Özdemir. 2020. “COVID-19 Digital Health Innovation Policy: A Portal to Alternative Futures in the Making.” OMICS: A Journal of Integrative Biology 24 (8): 460–69.
“‘AI for Social Good’ and the First AI Arms Race: Lessons from Japan’s Fifth Generation Computer Systems (FGCS) Project.” Paper presented at Japanese Society for Artificial Intelligence (JSAI). The 34th Annual Conference of the Japanese Society for Artificial Intelligence, 2020, June 9.
Özdemir, Vural, K. Yalçın Arga, Ramy K. Aziz, et al. 2020. “Digging Deeper into Precision/Personalized Medicine: Cracking the Sugar Code, the Third Alphabet of Life, and Sociomateriality of the Cell.” OMICS: A Journal of Integrative Biology, ahead of print, January 28.
Özdemir, Vural, Simon Springer, Colin K. Garvey, and Mustafa Bayram. 2020. “COVID-19 Health Technology Governance, Epistemic Competence, and the Future of Knowledge in an Uncertain World.” OMICS: A Journal of Integrative Biology 24 (8): 451–53.
2019
Garvey, Colin. 2019a. “Artificial Intelligence and Japan’s Fifth Generation: The Information Society, Neoliberalism, and Alternative Modernities.” Pacific Historical Review 88 (4): 619–58.
Garvey, Colin. 2019b. “Hypothesis: Is ‘Terminator Syndrome’ a Barrier to Democratizing Artificial Intelligence and Public Engagement in Digital Health?” OMICS: A Journal of Integrative Biology 23 (7): 362–63.
Garvey, Colin, and Chandler Maskal. 2019. “Sentiment Analysis of the News Media on Artificial Intelligence Does Not Support Claims of Negative Bias Against Artificial Intelligence.” OMICS: A Journal of Integrative Biology 23 (0): 1–14.
2018
“A Framework for Evaluating Barriers to the Democratization of Artificial Intelligence.” Proceedings of the Thirty-Second AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, New Orleans, Louisiana USA — February 2–7, 2018, 8079–80.
“AI Risk Mitigation Through Democratic Governance: Introducing the 7-Dimensional AI Risk Horizon.” Proceedings of the 2018 AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society (New York, NY, USA), AIES ’18, 366–67.
“Broken Promises and Empty Threats: The Evolution of AI in the USA, 1956-1996.” Technology’s Stories, ahead of print, March 12.
“Interview with Colin Garvey, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Artificial Intelligence and Systems Medicine Convergence.” OMICS: A Journal of Integrative Biology 22 (2): 130–32.
With Daniel S. Chard. 2018. “Disrupting the AAA$.” In Science for the People: Documents from America’s Movement of Radical Scientists, edited by Sigrid Schmalzer, Daniel S. Chard, and Alyssa Botelho. University of Massachusetts Press.
“Book Review: ‘Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, Vintage, 2017.'” ICON 24: 234–36.
2017
“Book Review: Robots, by John M. Jordan, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2016.” ICON 23: 200–202.
On the Democratization of Artificial Intelligence. Carleton University.
2016
“Book Review: Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies, by Nick Bostrom, Oxford: OUP, 2014.” ICON 22: 144–46.
2015
With Ron Eglash. “Hybridity, Humanity and Biodiversity.” In Shape Shifting, edited by Elke Marhöfer and Mikhail Lylov. Archive Books.
2014
With Caporael, Linnda R., and Colin K. Garvey. “The Primacy of Scaffolding within Groups for the Evolution of Group-Level Traits.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 37 (03): 255–56.
With Ron Eglash. “Basins of Attraction for Generative Justice.” In Chaos Theory in Politics, edited by Santo Banerjee, Şefika Şule Erçetin, and Ali Tekin. Understanding Complex Systems. Springer Netherlands.