The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State

The book’s central concept, the Artificial State names a new form of tyranny that Lepore argues is replacing the liberal nation-state. It operates as both a fantasy of machine rule and a half-built infrastructure in which private corporations automate political behavior and public discourse through networked computers, predictive algorithms, and AI. This mode of governance functions without the consent of the governed, severs humans from one another and the natural world, and replaces democratic deliberation with calculated prediction and control.

Terms used to trace the evolving boundary between humans and machines, from antiquity to the present. The book uses historical automata (complex machines such as Vaucanson’s duck that mimic living things) to explore the origins of the bête-machine doctrine and the uncanny valley, the feeling of unease humans experience when an artificial being resembles but does not quite match a living one. It then follows the development of the modern robot, a term coined in science fiction, to analyze the fantasy of replacing human labor, and ultimately humanity itself, with an artificial successor species (131, 174).