The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State, by Jill Lepore. Liveright Publishing, 316 pages

It has become a trite observation that technology companies are taking the warnings from science fiction novels as a guide, as in a viral 2021 tweet that read: “TECH COMPANY: At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from the classic sci-fi novel Don’t Create the Torment Nexus.” 

It seems we see new examples daily. In The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State, the Harvard professor and veteran author Jill Lepore provides an archaeological and literary history of humanity’s perception of sentience, technology, and a maker’s relationship to his own creation. The text takes the reader from Lucifer’s rebellion against God to our modern tech oligarchs, who were raised on sci-fi but have a shocking inability to understand its lessons. While the text has a couple of substantial weaknesses, it is a great success as a history of technology and a necessary inquiry into the fiction-inspired future that the men she calls Silicon Valley “merchant princes” are trying to foist upon us. 

Firstly, it is important to define the term “Artificial State.” A state is by its nature a construct, but historically one run and controlled by man. Unfortunately, Lepore fails to provide such a clear definition. The closest she comes: “The Artificial State is government without consent, even without humans,” but this is amidst a dizzying array of other incomplete definitions. Yet it appears she means, in short, the rule of machines. Her definitional failure is defensible insofar as the architects of our tech dystopia do not seem to have any coherent vision of what they are trying to accomplish, merely a dogmatic belief that progress towards the goal is positive. 

Lepore explains that, from the time when agriculture allowed the concentration of population, it has been technology that has shaped government as a system of organization. The technology of each era has determined its form of government; writing, for example, is the tool enabling liberal constitutions. Of particular interest is the fact that collecting census data and later political campaigns were some of the earliest meaningful uses of computers, and of course such scientific management gave us the Progressive Era. The government and the machine have grown in tandem.

Lepore does not neglect the spiritual side of things. From the earliest myths humans have considered the problem of creating artificial beings that turn against you or otherwise cause havoc. She also describes the process of millennia before animals were considered to have some degree of sentience that allowed them to feel pain and merit humane treatment. The concern for our era is at what point robots gain a degree of sentience, whether they should have rights, and whether it is we who are going to be their cattle. This of course presents a variety of problems, particularly to those who believe in the sacredness of man. But, in her telling, the merchant princes believe in little but wealth and their version of progress and lack the depth to seriously ponder such issues. 

The strongest part of the book is Lepore’s bold and necessary decision to use the history of science fiction to explain where our society is being steered. It is incredible how much was predicted. For example, the 1909 story The Machine Stops by E. M. Forster imagines humans isolated in cells underground with everything delivered to them by a network, which is a close approximation of the idea of the lockdowns that were universally supported by the tech oligarchs. Lepore argues that these overgrown nerdy children with enormous power have taken their worldview from 1930s comic book characters and other popular media that they don’t understand, going as far as to call comic books the lingua franca of Silicon Valley. She writes, “Perhaps the architects of the Artificial State no longer knew, as humans, how to search for meaning in a text.” This is backed up by endless, darkly comical examples, like  Sam Altman's stated desire to have his body frozen and his consciousness uploaded to a computer upon his death, despite that this is a fairly common sci-fi nightmare scenario. 

While our anxieties seem distinctly modern, they reach back centuries. Particularly after the mechanized devastation of the First World War, the inexorable march of technology was a major topic of concern.  It was in this era that the term “robot” was invented. (“Automaton” had previously been preferred.) The concerns expressed back then are remarkably similar to our own, such as those robots deciding they are abused and banding against us. While science-fiction writers and “futurists” have predicted many things that haven’t, and won’t, come to pass, the times that they were correct have been stunning, and yet the merchant princes are outright pursuing the dystopia. 

Lepore does occasionally indulge liberal pieties, but she is much better than most writers in her vein. Hers is a refreshingly nuanced view of “liberal democracy” as a fragile and recent form of government that has always had problems. (Most writers of her class just use plain “democracy” to mean “norm-following government that I like.”)  While she fully buys the Russiagate narrative—that Putin deployed a bot and spam army over social media to swing the 2016 election to Donald Trump—she gives those claims context that was sorely lacking in the mainstream media at the time, showing that nothing about such actions are particularly remarkable in an era where the same internet that once promised connection and liberation is a bot-infested hellscape ever more dominated by the powerful. 

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On the other hand, a few pages later she bizarrely claims that January 6, 2021 was, “the most destabilizing event in American history since the Civil War,” despite that it was caused by destabilization and did not cause further destabilization to speak of, outside of in the minds of liberals. Still, that sequence of events in 2020–21 certainly would not have happened if not for the various ways technology connected us but undermined our social cohesion. 

This generally worthy book has one glaring weakness, which is that, despite the title, introduction, and promises throughout, it does not meaningfully describe the “fall” of the Artificial State. Lepore simply believes that it cannot last and makes references to this throughout, while providing no narrative about how its demise could occur. Her argument is merely that it is half-built, and poorly at that, and thus can be dismantled. She points to other systems that seemed permanent, such as feudalism and slavery, but were ultimately defeated. She writes in the conclusion, “The architects of the Artificial State had no interest in democracy; nor did they have a theory of governance, or any interest in the rule of law, or any capacity for restraint.” This may all be true, but she follows it with little more than that it can be undone by voters and our human systems of government. Among a list of advice she says, “Using robots to wage wars will always backfire: one day, they will wage war on you.” That isn’t particularly comforting or helpful, since there is little reason to believe a rebellious robot will distinguish between me and Jeff Bezos. If myself and my children are enslaved by robots, it does little for me to know that it is “inevitable” that at some point, perhaps on a timeline of centuries or millennia, this system of robot domination will end (though of course the man who leads that rebellion against the machines will also be fulfilling the promises of sci-fi). 

Lepore has written a much-needed book. Technofuturists like to believe that innovation means no prior lessons from history, philosophy, or economics need apply. AI may be new, but nevertheless there are both lessons from history and literature showing that we are dealing with concepts that have caused mankind consternation and disruption since the beginning of civilization. This will be impossible to teach to the lords of AI, so it is for us to fight them. Marc Andreessen, one of the great fathers of AI, said in 2023, “We believe Artificial Intelligence is our alchemy, our Philosopher's Stone—we are literally making sand think.” They are doing no such thing, but the metaphor of the Philosopher’s Stone works in the sense that they are on a deranged and destructive quest towards something not only impossible but also undesirable. I am confident that it will destroy them, as Lepore predicts; the question remains whether it will destroy the rest of us as well.