THE RISE AND FALL OF THE ARTIFICIAL STATE BY JULL LEPORE

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Lepore is our best scholar of the culture of governance, and our most vital historian. Here she repudiates the prospect of AI as a replacement for democracy. This is the issue of our times, and Lepore is the voice of sanity. Jaron Lanier, author ofYou Are Not a Gadget

Much in history is headlong but few grand transformations have been more precipitate or more heedless than the rise of… the Artificial State, writes Jill Lepore in this passionate account of how rule by machine has ravaged the world. Inspired by Hannah ArendtsThe Origins of Totalitarianism, which argued in 1951 that the machinery of modern life was reshaping the very fundamentals of human existence, Lepore, profoundly disturbed by the technology revolution and by the soulless inundation of artificial intelligence, unfurls a new history for our own twenty-first century.

Building on an essay inThe New Yorkerin 2024, Lepores clarion call traces our increasing dependence on and strangulation by data. Political campaigns, awash in an avalanche of fake bots, have been reduced to attention-mining algorithms, while multinational media corporations dictate public discourse, and the era of the liberal nation-state seems to be coming to a rapid end, replaced by billionaire technocrats reliant on autocracy and the tools of AI.

With Orwellian overtones,The Rise and Fall of the Artificial Statedemonstrates how technology has corroded global democracy, leading to the destruction of both human community and capacity for self-government, creating a new form of AI government, a digital citizens assembly, where AI will recommend the course of action to humans in place of human-run legislatures. Especially sobering with this proliferation of dizzying, ever-changing schemes, prophesies, and predictions is that the Artificial State has come at the expense of the natural world, leading to catastrophic loss of wildlife habitat and biodiversity.

Deliberately alarming,The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State, despite its abundance of dire facts, is not a funeral dirge; rather, its an inspiring wake-up call, written in Lepores typically elegiac prose, which demonstrates that nothing about the Artificial State was inevitable, for it is a government without consent, even government without humans. It can, Lepore asserts, be dismantled. Other heinous systems, like feudalism, fascism, and slavery, have also been dismantled, but disassembly requires identifying the parts, tracing the sources. It requires telling a new history. This is the purpose ofThe Rise and Fall of the Artificial State.

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