The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State

The author opens Part 2 by investigating the desires and politics of the “Artificial State,” a system of governance by machines. To understand this new state, which is both a real infrastructure and a fantasy about the future, one must turn not to science but to science fiction. The architects of the Artificial State, particularly in Silicon Valley, have persistently misread these texts, taking cautionary tales as blueprints for their own technologies. This phenomenon is captured by the “Torment Nexus” meme, originating in a 2021 Twitter post by a writer for The Onion, where tech companies build the very dystopian devices that science fiction warned against.

The dominant fear, popularized by films like The Terminator, is one of “annihilation anxiety”—the belief that a superintelligence will decide to exterminate humanity. This narrative was given an academic gloss by philosopher Nick Bostrom, who identified a “badly programmed superintelligence” as an existential risk in a 2002 paper and introduced the thought experiment known as the “paper clip maximizer” in his 2003 paper “Ethical Issues in Advanced Artificial Intelligence” (123), later elaborating the threat of superintelligence in his 2014 book Superintelligence, which became scripture in Silicon Valley.