The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State

Author Jill Lepore frames the book as an inquiry into why humanity is abandoning constitutional democracy and the liberal nation-state for rule by automation and artificial intelligence—a transformation she terms the “Artificial State.” Inspired by the political theorist Hannah Arendt, who in the 1950s worried that automation would render humans superfluous, Lepore seeks to take up Arendt’s call to “think what we are doing” (xiii). When the Soviet Union launched Sputnik in 1957, Arendt was struck by descriptions of the satellite as a step toward escaping humanity’s “imprisonment to the earth” rhetoric that reflected what she saw as a broader effort to sever humanity’s ties to nature (xiv). Around the same period, researchers began developing artificial intelligence and investigating the computer simulation of human thought and behavior. Lepore traces this desire for escape into the present, describing the Artificial State as a fantasy of severing humans from nature and one another and of allowing corporate-owned machines to rule humans and replace many of them. She points to an extreme version of this fantasy in the plans of a small number of Silicon Valley billionaires to upload their consciousnesses to computers after death.