The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State

Detailed summary

Now she’s convinced we’re in the process of abandoning the liberal nation-state for rule by “automation, government by machine, and replacement by artificial intelligence”. It’s…

Humanity has crossed its fair share of significant thresholds. The example Harvard historian Jill Lepore gives is from October 1957 when the Soviet Union launched the first satellite into space. It prompted the German political theorist Hannah Arendt to write The Human Condition, her attempt to explain how human existence had been changed by automation. Lepore’s Sputnik moment was the release of ChatGPT in 2022. Now she’s convinced we’re in the process of abandoning the liberal nation-state for rule by “automation, government by machine, and replacement by artificial intelligence”.

The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State is divided into two parts that correspond to the arc implied by the book’s title. If the first part details the history of counting technologies and statistics, the second is a history of literature – sci-fi, to be specific. The simplest definition Lepore gives of the Artificial State is “the rule of humans by machines manufactured by corporations”. It’s an alarming, almost unbelievable, assessment of our current age. Quickly, however, we come to see how this transition, far from happening overnight, actually unfolded over centuries and that the state has long relied on machines for help in governing.

In the second part, Lepore argues that many of the world’s most relevant technologists – Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Elon Musk – took inspiration from 20th-century sci-fiction literature. Her crucial claim is that the same technologists often misread and misunderstood the messages at the core of these stories. Musk regularly cites Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, but he overlooks what Lepore considers to be Adams’s primary objective in writing the novel: “to offer an eviscerating indictment of imperialism, the uber-rich, and unregulated capitalism”.

The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State is rich with detail, and its impressive range is reflected in its form: much of the material is drawn from Lepore’s previous reporting for The…

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