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The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State
“Lepore is our best scholar of the culture of governance. … Here she repudiates the prospect of AI as a replacement for democracy. This is the issue of our times … Lepore is the voice of sanity.”—Jaron Lanier, author of
You Are Not a Gadget
“Much in history is headlong but few grand transformations have been more precipitate or more heedless than the rise of … the Artificial State,” writes Jill Lepore in this passionate account of how rule by machine has ravaged the world. Inspired by Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism, which argued in 1951 that the machinery of modern life was reshaping the very fundamentals of human existence, Lepore, profoundly disturbed by the technology revolution and by the soulless inundation of artificial intelligence, unfurls a new history for our own twenty-first century.
Building on an essay in The New Yorker in 2024, Lepore’s clarion call traces our increasing dependence on and strangulation by data. Political campaigns, awash in an avalanche of fake bots, have been reduced to attention-mining algorithms, while multinational media corporations dictate public discourse, and the era of the liberal nation-state seems to be coming to a rapid end, replaced by billionaire technocrats reliant on autocracy and the tools of AI.
With Orwellian overtones, The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State demonstrates how technology has corroded global democracy, leading to the destruction of both human community and capacity for self-government, creating a new form of AI government, a digital citizen’s assembly, where AI will recommend the course of action to humans in place of human-run legislatures. Especially sobering with this proliferation of “dizzying, ever-changing schemes, prophesies, and predictions” is that the Artificial State has come at the expense of the natural world, leading to catastrophic loss of wildlife habitat and biodiversity.
Deliberately alarming, The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State, despite its abundance of dire facts, is not a funeral dirge; rather, it’s an inspiring wake-up call, written in Lepore’s typically elegiac prose, which demonstrates that nothing about the Artificial State was inevitable, for it is a “government without consent, even government without humans.” It can, Lepore asserts, be dismantled. Other heinous systems, like feudalism, fascism, and slavery, have also been dismantled, but disassembly requires identifying the parts, tracing the sources. It requires telling a new history. This is the purpose of The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State.
“Much in history is headlong but few grand transformations have been more precipitate or more heedless than the rise of … the Artificial State,” writes Jill Lepore in this passionate account of how rule by machine has ravaged the world. Inspired by Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism, which argued in 1951 that the machinery of modern life was reshaping the very fundamentals of human existence, Lepore, profoundly disturbed by the technology revolution and by the soulless inundation of artificial intelligence, unfurls a new history for our own twenty-first century.
Building on an essay in The New Yorker in 2024, Lepore’s clarion call traces our increasing dependence on and strangulation by data. Political campaigns, awash in an avalanche of fake bots, have been reduced to attention-mining algorithms, while multinational media corporations dictate public discourse, and the era of the liberal nation-state seems to be coming to a rapid end, replaced by billionaire technocrats reliant on autocracy and the tools of AI.
With Orwellian overtones, The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State demonstrates how technology has corroded global democracy, leading to the destruction of both human community and capacity for self-government, creating a new form of AI government, a digital citizen’s assembly, where AI will recommend the course of action to humans in place of human-run legislatures. Especially sobering with this proliferation of “dizzying, ever-changing schemes, prophesies, and predictions” is that the Artificial State has come at the expense of the natural world, leading to catastrophic loss of wildlife habitat and biodiversity.
Deliberately alarming, The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State, despite its abundance of dire facts, is not a funeral dirge; rather, it’s an inspiring wake-up call, written in Lepore’s typically elegiac prose, which demonstrates that nothing about the Artificial State was inevitable, for it is a “government without consent, even government without humans.” It can, Lepore asserts, be dismantled. Other heinous systems, like feudalism, fascism, and slavery, have also been dismantled, but disassembly requires identifying the parts, tracing the sources. It requires telling a new history. This is the purpose of The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State.
9 pages, Audible Audio
First published August 25, 2026
About the author
Jill Lepore
42 books1,759 followersJill Lepore is the David Woods Kemper ’41 Professor of American History, Harvard College Professor, and chair of Harvard's History and Literature Program. She is also a staff writer at The New Yorker.
Winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Award for the best non-fiction book on race, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; The Name of War (Knopf, 1998), winner of the Bancroft Prize, the Ralph Waldo Emerson Prize, and the Berkshire Prize and a finalist for the J. Anthony Lukas Award.
A co-founder of the magazine Common-place, Lepore’s essays and reviews have also appeared in the New York Times, the Times Literary Supplement, American Scholar, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, The Daily Beast, the Journal of American History and American Quarterly. Her research has been funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Pew Foundation, the Gilder Lehrman Institute, the Charles Warren Center, and the Woodrow Wilson Foundation. She has served as a consultant for the National Park Service and currently serves on the boards of the National Portrait Gallery and the Society of American Historians.
Jill lives in Cambridge,Massachusetts.
Winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Award for the best non-fiction book on race, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; The Name of War (Knopf, 1998), winner of the Bancroft Prize, the Ralph Waldo Emerson Prize, and the Berkshire Prize and a finalist for the J. Anthony Lukas Award.
A co-founder of the magazine Common-place, Lepore’s essays and reviews have also appeared in the New York Times, the Times Literary Supplement, American Scholar, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, The Daily Beast, the Journal of American History and American Quarterly. Her research has been funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Pew Foundation, the Gilder Lehrman Institute, the Charles Warren Center, and the Woodrow Wilson Foundation. She has served as a consultant for the National Park Service and currently serves on the boards of the National Portrait Gallery and the Society of American Historians.
Jill lives in Cambridge,Massachusetts.
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Review of advance copy received from Edelweiss+
Jill Lepore's most recent books — on the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution — have considered American history with an eye toward exploring how well we have lived up to the letter and the spirit of our founding documents. Her conclusion: We’ve done some things well and some things poorly or not at all. Now, however, we seem to have found ourselves on a downward slope when it comes to protecting the rights and wellbeing of our citizens. Many things have contributed to the corrosion of our liberal democracy — money, polarization, political calcification, wealth inequality, intransigence — but it’s become clear that technology is amplifying and accelerating the decline. And we -- as citizens, as humans -- have no control over development or implementation. This is the subject of her alarming new book.
Inspired by Hanna Arendt’s prescient writings about totalitarianism and automation, Lepore describes her task here as “an inquiry into what humans mean and intend in abandoning constitutional democracy, the liberal nation-state, and even humanity itself for rule by automation, government by machine, and replacement by artificial intelligence.”
The idea of liberal democracy government given us by the Age of Enlightenment and the Founders is one in which the people actively deliberate and interact in order to create a system that will “promote the safety and happiness of the people.” In other words, government by consent of the governed. It is not in itself a natural phenomenon, of course, but rather an artifice, made, monitored, and modified by humans.
The “artificial state,” on the other hand, is shaped not by humans but by data and algorithms and a vast concentration of wealth and power. It is “not something made by man but something nonhuman, something beyond human, something inhuman: the rule of humans by machines manufactured by corporations.”
This is a change of unprecedented magnitude and an existential threat to democracy. A small group of incredibly wealthy men (yes, they're all men) are shaping policy at the highest levels and designing and implementing technologies that will have enormous and possibly dangerous impacts on our lives. Think of it this way: no one is being asked to vote on or give consent to “government without consent, even government without humans.” Or to ubiquitous surveillance, AI-driven autonomous weaponry, AI anything, in fact, or a thousand other things that are happening all around us. Or to a handful of very wealthy tech leaders with enormous influence deciding our future, perhaps even our survival.
Lepore traces the roots of the Artificial State back to the Great Depression and the formation by a man named Howard Scott of an organization he called Technocracy, Inc. The profoundly undemocratic premise of the organization was that “only scientists and engineers have the intelligence and education to understand the industrial operations that lie at the heart of twentieth-century life.” (“Popular voting can be largely dispensed with,” they said, because “it is stupid.”)
Technocracy Inc eventually imploded but Scott’s vision was taken up by a man named Joshua Haldeman, who “led mass demonstrations [in New York City] of Technocrats at a time when they wore identical gray suits and drove identical gray cars in what was known as the Gray Fleet.” In time, Haldeman left the United States and his name receded from memory.
The Technocracy movement is gone today but, as Lepore demonstrates, its spirit has been resurrected in a new generation of powerful individuals such as Peter Thiel (PayPal, Palentir), Mark Zuckerberg (“There is no precedent for his ability to monitor, organize and even censor the conversations of two billion people.”), and numerous other self-proclaimed visionaries, including Joshua Haldeman’s grandson, Elon Musk.
Lepore’s book traces how the Artificial State has expanded since the ‘30s: the vast collection of data, data manipulation, concentration of power, AI, bots (there are more bots online than real people), deepfakes, monetized extremism, “government by trolling,” the loss of privacy (“By the 2010s it was nearly impossible to participate in any political behavior without supplying one’s data to the very corporations that were undermining democracy”), and more.
She describes where we are heading — where we have found ourselves — this way: Within the Artificial State, nearly every element of public and democratic life—civil society, representative government, an informed citizenry, equality of rights, freedom of thought, freedom of expression, and faith in elections—is vulnerable to subversion through the reduction of politics to the digital manipulation of attention-mining algorithms, the trussing of government by corporate-owned digital architecture, the diminishment of citizenship to minutely message-tested online engagement.
It’s a dark picture. In 2023, some 350 scientists and industry leaders signed a single-sentence statement that acknowledged the danger facing us: “Mitigating the risk of extinction from A.I. should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks, such as pandemics and nuclear war.” (Earlier this month -- August 2026 -- more than 1300 experts and technicians published an open letter calling for regulation of AI research.)
Acknowledging an existential threat to human life is one thing; acting on it is something else entirely. “Why build something that you expect will destroy the human race?” Lepore asks. “One answer has to do with the nature of modern capitalism.” Tech firms are investing in or assisting authoritarian states around the world, knowing full well the technology will be used to oppress or even harm their citizens. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei acknowledged the problem in a leaked internal memo. The technology Anthropic was selling would “enrich dictators,” but — he added — “Unfortunately, I think ‘no bad person should ever benefit from our success’ is a pretty difficult principle to run a business on.” (I suppose another way of saying this would be, There's no profit to be made in acting morally so why bother?)
“The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State” sounds a dire, Orwellian warning. Lepore frames the question starkly: “Are humans to abandon government by consent for government by machine?” From where I sit, it’s hard to see how they/we do otherwise. There seems to be little appetite in Washington, DC, and other world capitals for slowing the technology down or regulating AI. There’s too much money being made, and the technology is hard — or impossible — for ordinary people and government officials to understand well enough to regulate (if they even wanted to: in 2025 the Trump White House issued an Executive Order titled “Preventing Woke AI in Federal Government,” whatever that means, if it means anything at all). And yet more and more functions within government (think DOGE) and industry are being transferred from humans to AI-enabled machines.
Lepore contends that the Artificial State is not inevitable. “The Artificial State is a fantasy half built, dreaded, adored, awaited. I also believe it to be doomed.” I wish I shared her confidence.
“Rise and Fall” is based on a series of lectures Lepore has given at Yale and elsewhere and an article she wrote for the New Yorker. Regrettably, the seams show from time to time, leaving the book less smooth and closely argued than others she’s written.
That said, her message is powerful and necessary. On a personal note, I was pleased to see moments where her deep emotional involvement in the subject came through, as in this lovely disclaimer: “A robot did not write this book. I wrote most of this book in the woods, sheltered by trees and serenaded by birdsong, in the company of dogs, cats, sheep, chickens, ducks, and one very old and rickety dying goat, and not far from bears and porcupines, owls and coyotes.”
My thanks to Liveright Publishers and Edelweis+ for providing a digital ARC in return for an honest review.
Inspired by Hanna Arendt’s prescient writings about totalitarianism and automation, Lepore describes her task here as “an inquiry into what humans mean and intend in abandoning constitutional democracy, the liberal nation-state, and even humanity itself for rule by automation, government by machine, and replacement by artificial intelligence.”
The idea of liberal democracy government given us by the Age of Enlightenment and the Founders is one in which the people actively deliberate and interact in order to create a system that will “promote the safety and happiness of the people.” In other words, government by consent of the governed. It is not in itself a natural phenomenon, of course, but rather an artifice, made, monitored, and modified by humans.
The “artificial state,” on the other hand, is shaped not by humans but by data and algorithms and a vast concentration of wealth and power. It is “not something made by man but something nonhuman, something beyond human, something inhuman: the rule of humans by machines manufactured by corporations.”
This is a change of unprecedented magnitude and an existential threat to democracy. A small group of incredibly wealthy men (yes, they're all men) are shaping policy at the highest levels and designing and implementing technologies that will have enormous and possibly dangerous impacts on our lives. Think of it this way: no one is being asked to vote on or give consent to “government without consent, even government without humans.” Or to ubiquitous surveillance, AI-driven autonomous weaponry, AI anything, in fact, or a thousand other things that are happening all around us. Or to a handful of very wealthy tech leaders with enormous influence deciding our future, perhaps even our survival.
Lepore traces the roots of the Artificial State back to the Great Depression and the formation by a man named Howard Scott of an organization he called Technocracy, Inc. The profoundly undemocratic premise of the organization was that “only scientists and engineers have the intelligence and education to understand the industrial operations that lie at the heart of twentieth-century life.” (“Popular voting can be largely dispensed with,” they said, because “it is stupid.”)
Technocracy Inc eventually imploded but Scott’s vision was taken up by a man named Joshua Haldeman, who “led mass demonstrations [in New York City] of Technocrats at a time when they wore identical gray suits and drove identical gray cars in what was known as the Gray Fleet.” In time, Haldeman left the United States and his name receded from memory.
The Technocracy movement is gone today but, as Lepore demonstrates, its spirit has been resurrected in a new generation of powerful individuals such as Peter Thiel (PayPal, Palentir), Mark Zuckerberg (“There is no precedent for his ability to monitor, organize and even censor the conversations of two billion people.”), and numerous other self-proclaimed visionaries, including Joshua Haldeman’s grandson, Elon Musk.
Lepore’s book traces how the Artificial State has expanded since the ‘30s: the vast collection of data, data manipulation, concentration of power, AI, bots (there are more bots online than real people), deepfakes, monetized extremism, “government by trolling,” the loss of privacy (“By the 2010s it was nearly impossible to participate in any political behavior without supplying one’s data to the very corporations that were undermining democracy”), and more.
She describes where we are heading — where we have found ourselves — this way: Within the Artificial State, nearly every element of public and democratic life—civil society, representative government, an informed citizenry, equality of rights, freedom of thought, freedom of expression, and faith in elections—is vulnerable to subversion through the reduction of politics to the digital manipulation of attention-mining algorithms, the trussing of government by corporate-owned digital architecture, the diminishment of citizenship to minutely message-tested online engagement.
It’s a dark picture. In 2023, some 350 scientists and industry leaders signed a single-sentence statement that acknowledged the danger facing us: “Mitigating the risk of extinction from A.I. should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks, such as pandemics and nuclear war.” (Earlier this month -- August 2026 -- more than 1300 experts and technicians published an open letter calling for regulation of AI research.)
Acknowledging an existential threat to human life is one thing; acting on it is something else entirely. “Why build something that you expect will destroy the human race?” Lepore asks. “One answer has to do with the nature of modern capitalism.” Tech firms are investing in or assisting authoritarian states around the world, knowing full well the technology will be used to oppress or even harm their citizens. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei acknowledged the problem in a leaked internal memo. The technology Anthropic was selling would “enrich dictators,” but — he added — “Unfortunately, I think ‘no bad person should ever benefit from our success’ is a pretty difficult principle to run a business on.” (I suppose another way of saying this would be, There's no profit to be made in acting morally so why bother?)
“The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State” sounds a dire, Orwellian warning. Lepore frames the question starkly: “Are humans to abandon government by consent for government by machine?” From where I sit, it’s hard to see how they/we do otherwise. There seems to be little appetite in Washington, DC, and other world capitals for slowing the technology down or regulating AI. There’s too much money being made, and the technology is hard — or impossible — for ordinary people and government officials to understand well enough to regulate (if they even wanted to: in 2025 the Trump White House issued an Executive Order titled “Preventing Woke AI in Federal Government,” whatever that means, if it means anything at all). And yet more and more functions within government (think DOGE) and industry are being transferred from humans to AI-enabled machines.
Lepore contends that the Artificial State is not inevitable. “The Artificial State is a fantasy half built, dreaded, adored, awaited. I also believe it to be doomed.” I wish I shared her confidence.
“Rise and Fall” is based on a series of lectures Lepore has given at Yale and elsewhere and an article she wrote for the New Yorker. Regrettably, the seams show from time to time, leaving the book less smooth and closely argued than others she’s written.
That said, her message is powerful and necessary. On a personal note, I was pleased to see moments where her deep emotional involvement in the subject came through, as in this lovely disclaimer: “A robot did not write this book. I wrote most of this book in the woods, sheltered by trees and serenaded by birdsong, in the company of dogs, cats, sheep, chickens, ducks, and one very old and rickety dying goat, and not far from bears and porcupines, owls and coyotes.”
My thanks to Liveright Publishers and Edelweis+ for providing a digital ARC in return for an honest review.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
I enjoyed listening to "The rise and fall of the Artifical state" as it goes trough the history of the technical and artifical progress that led here as well as discussing the downsides as well as whats going to be its downfall. Its both interesting and gives a lot to think about.
Got the audiobook for review
Got the audiobook for review
September 20, 2026
An important and worthwhile read, using an in-depth and thorough exe past to predict the future. It reads like a collection of lectures, which is to say it is easy to follow, it doesn’t rely on insider-jargon, and it is scattered with humor (necessarily dark, as it is in the face of a supreme existential dread). The overarching thesis, about the current Silicon Valley “merchant prince” obsession with replacing humanity with technological automation (disguised as innovation) is not exactly a unique claim. That, though, is her point. She refers to this book as an archaeology, and that is fitting. She traces human relationships to automation and technology throughout history, showing how again and again innovation is sold with incredible promises but almost always edges out human dignity, creativity, and autonomy instead of the simple conveniences that are promised. She uses pop-culture and fiction as a way of further exploring human anxieties about technology and automation, and then shows how contemporary tech-bro billionaires seem to take quite literally all the wrong messages from those stories. Capitalism, greed, lust for power and a fundamental insecurity all have a part to play in the contemporary Artificial State and its architects, along with the ideas of human dignity, respect for labor, the treatment of animals, and more, and Lepore traces the continuity of these ideas with a continuity of historical precedence in great detail with prose that is accessible and yet lets the ideas take deep root. Similar to many contemporary investigations into twenty-first century life and thought the book is not particularly hopeful. The epilogue does offer some passing swipe at optimism, a kind of “the future isn’t set in stone we can still change things” color of lipstick for this particular pig, but it doesn’t make me feel particularly cheerful or empowered. However, that is not the purpose of this book. The purpose of this book is to show patterns of human behavior and thought and to help us recognize historical analogues and precedent for our present moment, while then showing how the type, reach, and speed of contemporary technologies make this moment unique in history at the same time. Her research and arguments are thoughtful and detailed, her style is readable and accessible, and the book serves as a brilliant warning as a result.
July 1, 2026
“Building the Artificial State-finally building it, turning a science fiction dystopia into a fully functioning infrastructure—would indeed make Earth uninhabitable. This did not appear to concern the architects of the Artificial State. They had escape plans: Elon Musk to Mars, Mark Zuckerberg to the Metaverse, Peter Thiel to his land in New Zealand, Jeff Bezos to space, Sam Altman's brain uploaded to the cloud.They weren't saving humanity; they were preparing to abandon it.”
The world is being run by idiots and monsters.
Thanks to NetGalley for this ARC.
8/10
The world is being run by idiots and monsters.
Thanks to NetGalley for this ARC.
8/10
August 31, 2026
I’m a big Lepore fan, if she writes it, I read it. Seeing a Jill Lepore article in the New Yorker is exciting, an immediate bookmark or read it now moment. And now this as a micro follow-up to the majestic These Truths and We the People.
The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State felt like a synthesis of articles, podcasts, and her recent book (IF THEN) woven together with an uncertain and alarming central thesis about the state of AI, led by a 1970s generation of D&D players who turned into tech titan moguls.
If a read through of this all too short book feels slight on solutions, it’s because we’re all in a fairly disempowered state and all the regulatory power has been given to these insanely wealthy ‘geniuses.’ This should be one more call to do something; it’s a good thing we have the best minds in government to help us navigate the artificial terrain 🤔
The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State felt like a synthesis of articles, podcasts, and her recent book (IF THEN) woven together with an uncertain and alarming central thesis about the state of AI, led by a 1970s generation of D&D players who turned into tech titan moguls.
If a read through of this all too short book feels slight on solutions, it’s because we’re all in a fairly disempowered state and all the regulatory power has been given to these insanely wealthy ‘geniuses.’ This should be one more call to do something; it’s a good thing we have the best minds in government to help us navigate the artificial terrain 🤔
October 22, 2026
Lepore’s argument is that the “artificial state” quietly replaces democracy with opaque systems designed and owned by a small group of oligarchs. Accountability moves away from the people and into automated systems nobody voted for, and the result trends toward autocracy rather than freedom.
The book is a sharp takedown of Silicon Valley’s history, mostly by comparing what the industry promised with what it delivered. Smartphones and social media were supposed to connect us. Instead they’ve coincided with rising depression and anxiety, platforms that boost the most enraging content because outrage keeps people scrolling and seeing ads, and a media environment where charlatans and aspiring autocrats build huge, devoted followings. Reading and attention spans have declined along the way. We were promised a utopia and got something much closer to the opposite.
The gig economy follows the same pattern. It was sold as a way to turn millions of people into entrepreneurs working on their own schedules. What it actually produced is millions of workers with no labor protections, no benefits, and no living wage, while the wealth flows straight to the top.
One of the best parts of the book is Lepore’s observation that tech leaders love quoting science fiction but keep missing the point of it. They read novels that warn about surveillance and concentrated power, then go build exactly what those books warned against.
Her conclusion is that the tech right is selling a utopia that requires citizens to give up their rights and let AI and corporate interests run unchecked. The richest people in history are telling us that what they’re building will be good for everyone. We’ve heard that story before.
The industry talks like missionaries while the results damage the society around it. These people know they’re unpopular, and they know they can’t keep their wealth and power through persuasion alone. AI is their way out. Rather than give up power, they’re pushing toward a security state and a tiered society where they sit above the law and above governments, making decisions from behind literal fortress walls.
The book is a sharp takedown of Silicon Valley’s history, mostly by comparing what the industry promised with what it delivered. Smartphones and social media were supposed to connect us. Instead they’ve coincided with rising depression and anxiety, platforms that boost the most enraging content because outrage keeps people scrolling and seeing ads, and a media environment where charlatans and aspiring autocrats build huge, devoted followings. Reading and attention spans have declined along the way. We were promised a utopia and got something much closer to the opposite.
The gig economy follows the same pattern. It was sold as a way to turn millions of people into entrepreneurs working on their own schedules. What it actually produced is millions of workers with no labor protections, no benefits, and no living wage, while the wealth flows straight to the top.
One of the best parts of the book is Lepore’s observation that tech leaders love quoting science fiction but keep missing the point of it. They read novels that warn about surveillance and concentrated power, then go build exactly what those books warned against.
Her conclusion is that the tech right is selling a utopia that requires citizens to give up their rights and let AI and corporate interests run unchecked. The richest people in history are telling us that what they’re building will be good for everyone. We’ve heard that story before.
The industry talks like missionaries while the results damage the society around it. These people know they’re unpopular, and they know they can’t keep their wealth and power through persuasion alone. AI is their way out. Rather than give up power, they’re pushing toward a security state and a tiered society where they sit above the law and above governments, making decisions from behind literal fortress walls.
August 30, 2026
Lepore’s argument against the “artificial state” could be made in a brief essay. The book meanders through long discussions about tech titans’ takes on science fiction they read growing up, a history of 20th century science fiction and robotics, animal rights, and environmental devastation.
The “artificial state” is, apparently, the political clout of the corporations building out AI and their ability to manipulate our emotions and politics through their algorithms. The book fails to address what we need to do to reign in this artificial state, other than to exhort us to exercise our right as “the people” to revolt against it.
The “artificial state” is, apparently, the political clout of the corporations building out AI and their ability to manipulate our emotions and politics through their algorithms. The book fails to address what we need to do to reign in this artificial state, other than to exhort us to exercise our right as “the people” to revolt against it.
September 8, 2026
Sometimes I need to be reminded how much I love the way Jill Lepore’s mind works. After recently reading her essay from the August 10 New Yorker, Are You Human, about humankind’s plight in creating machines that now force us to prove to the machines that we are human, I eagerly grabbed her latest offering, The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State to revel in her further unraveling this fabulous nightmare. And indeed, her most recent work plays off the essay as well as her 2023 book, If Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future.
Ms. Lepore is the rare academic who writes clearly enough to garner a mainstream audience. Her prose is beautifully tangential, but always apropos. And this is what makes it inimitable, as compared to that of the mediocre academic who parrots this and that source, only to break a tiny bit of new ground to procure a PhD. The prose of the mediocre academic is generic enough to be low hanging fruit for AI imitation. “Chat GPT, cite sources A-Z on X, and then give it an interesting twist!” Lepore’s prose, on the contrary, is unique and immediately identifiable. She rambles to and fro and, just as the reader might get frustrated, ties all the ideas together into a coherent whole, in this case, painting a vast story of how humans created machines, inevitably leading to dehumanization, which is followed by sagacious humans predicting how awful their creation will be, beginning with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and culminating with works in the newly created Science Fiction genre which predicts our sorry plight today. And the irony is that the tech masters, i.e. the Overlords, like Musk, Alman, and Andreesen were enthralled and influenced by these seminal Sci Fi works without realizing that they were a warning and not a “How To” manual. It leaves the reader feeling awful and in despair.
Like most books that clarify and explain a dire issue facing humanity, e.g. global warming and surveillance capitalism, the pessimism outweighs the optimism. Ms. Lepore tells us, in the early chapters that she thinks the AI revolution is doomed and that she will elaborate why in the final chapter. I was disappointed to discover how brief and full of false hope the final chapter is, especially in light of the extensive damage to our planet that Ms. Lepore chronicles. I would like to think that the Pollyanna belief she espouses will prevail, but have my doubts.
Ms. Lepore is the rare academic who writes clearly enough to garner a mainstream audience. Her prose is beautifully tangential, but always apropos. And this is what makes it inimitable, as compared to that of the mediocre academic who parrots this and that source, only to break a tiny bit of new ground to procure a PhD. The prose of the mediocre academic is generic enough to be low hanging fruit for AI imitation. “Chat GPT, cite sources A-Z on X, and then give it an interesting twist!” Lepore’s prose, on the contrary, is unique and immediately identifiable. She rambles to and fro and, just as the reader might get frustrated, ties all the ideas together into a coherent whole, in this case, painting a vast story of how humans created machines, inevitably leading to dehumanization, which is followed by sagacious humans predicting how awful their creation will be, beginning with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and culminating with works in the newly created Science Fiction genre which predicts our sorry plight today. And the irony is that the tech masters, i.e. the Overlords, like Musk, Alman, and Andreesen were enthralled and influenced by these seminal Sci Fi works without realizing that they were a warning and not a “How To” manual. It leaves the reader feeling awful and in despair.
Like most books that clarify and explain a dire issue facing humanity, e.g. global warming and surveillance capitalism, the pessimism outweighs the optimism. Ms. Lepore tells us, in the early chapters that she thinks the AI revolution is doomed and that she will elaborate why in the final chapter. I was disappointed to discover how brief and full of false hope the final chapter is, especially in light of the extensive damage to our planet that Ms. Lepore chronicles. I would like to think that the Pollyanna belief she espouses will prevail, but have my doubts.
September 2, 2026
I'm so steeped in this subject from reading stacks of prior books that overlap and therefore I'm not an ideal reviewer so factor that in what I have to write.
This book moves fast and I suspect often leaves a fair amount of critical insights out. For example the author provides great detail and sets up expectations regarding the three methods used on election night 1952 to analyze returns. The three rival networks used either computers (two of them) or humans, and made competing promises regarding how quickly and accurately they would perform. But then the author just moves on and neglects to provide closure on how they performed.
In fact this book is so... overstuffed with ideas, anecdotes, comparisons and factoids that toward the end I felt like I was reading one of those books you used to find in bathrooms of certain homes that contain a hodge podge of fascinating but forgettable curiosities and 'did you know?' bits.
OK, this book is certainly not bad, it's simply that for me her thesis gets stretched thin at times and loses power vs the plethora of info. Ultimately I lost the thread towards the end and wasn't 100% certain why I was learning what I was learning despite it being sorta intriguing.
As far as conclusions and ways forward, the abrupt final chapter does offer some solace and encouragement with the author reminding the reader that the creation of an artificial state and AI's accelerating growth are not popular with the majority of citizens. "This isn't only about artificial intelligence or data centers. It's about the hijacking of public interest and the abandonment of the consent of the government." HALLELUJAH!
And yet I know that already. In fact most readers likely know this as well. It's all you read or hear about so... not all that revelatory. Alas there's no suggested follow up with actions to consider or minimally additional resources to seek ideas or inspiration. Instead the author follows the pattern of the book and unleashes a screenshot of catchy, encouraging observations and scattered 'inspirational' hoohah.
I suppose my frustration is a result of my growing tired of books that make the case for readers to be concerned about the trajectory we as a society are on, detail and document where we came from, where we are and look out, how bad it will potentially get, and then offer no follow up. I'm not demanding an activist book but it's clear the author has an opinion yet they choose to abrogate their responsibility to do more than inform. In so doing they will likely leave most readers depressed and flaccid vs informed, activated and inspired. Argh!
This book moves fast and I suspect often leaves a fair amount of critical insights out. For example the author provides great detail and sets up expectations regarding the three methods used on election night 1952 to analyze returns. The three rival networks used either computers (two of them) or humans, and made competing promises regarding how quickly and accurately they would perform. But then the author just moves on and neglects to provide closure on how they performed.
In fact this book is so... overstuffed with ideas, anecdotes, comparisons and factoids that toward the end I felt like I was reading one of those books you used to find in bathrooms of certain homes that contain a hodge podge of fascinating but forgettable curiosities and 'did you know?' bits.
OK, this book is certainly not bad, it's simply that for me her thesis gets stretched thin at times and loses power vs the plethora of info. Ultimately I lost the thread towards the end and wasn't 100% certain why I was learning what I was learning despite it being sorta intriguing.
As far as conclusions and ways forward, the abrupt final chapter does offer some solace and encouragement with the author reminding the reader that the creation of an artificial state and AI's accelerating growth are not popular with the majority of citizens. "This isn't only about artificial intelligence or data centers. It's about the hijacking of public interest and the abandonment of the consent of the government." HALLELUJAH!
And yet I know that already. In fact most readers likely know this as well. It's all you read or hear about so... not all that revelatory. Alas there's no suggested follow up with actions to consider or minimally additional resources to seek ideas or inspiration. Instead the author follows the pattern of the book and unleashes a screenshot of catchy, encouraging observations and scattered 'inspirational' hoohah.
I suppose my frustration is a result of my growing tired of books that make the case for readers to be concerned about the trajectory we as a society are on, detail and document where we came from, where we are and look out, how bad it will potentially get, and then offer no follow up. I'm not demanding an activist book but it's clear the author has an opinion yet they choose to abrogate their responsibility to do more than inform. In so doing they will likely leave most readers depressed and flaccid vs informed, activated and inspired. Argh!
September 27, 2026
I am very familiar with Jill Lepore as a historian and have read several of her books. That is why I was a bit surprised by this book. Science fiction has never really been my thing. I have always been attracted to nonfiction or fine literature. For these reasons, at times, I was a bit uninterested in the context. That said, the scope of this book is near-exhaustive, and the information is valuable and interesting.
Lepore begins well back in history to explore the origins of AI, from tales of robots or other artificial beings rising and taking over Earth to sources of AI that have hacked into other systems and created problems. From a period of time when scientists did not believe that animals had any sense of feeling (thereby justifying the vivisection of live animals on tables in scientific labs to Data centers using extraordinary amounts of water and electricity, the author explains its development, its value, and its dangers. She has traced the history of the "tech bros" from their inception if Silicon Valley to their current status as the worlds' wealthiest men. The debate over the rights of robots are discussed both in the "real" world and through science fiction. Will AI become so advanced that man will become its slave rather than the other way around?
In a very short conclusion, Lepore asserts that the solution is to disable the computers that threaten us and to protect resources and wildlife that are required for human existence, all the while being aware that the bros see a future where AI has taken over. They have chosen different plans of escape. Musk plans to be on Mars, while others have properties they will escape to, leaving the rest of us to fend for ourselves.
Lepore begins well back in history to explore the origins of AI, from tales of robots or other artificial beings rising and taking over Earth to sources of AI that have hacked into other systems and created problems. From a period of time when scientists did not believe that animals had any sense of feeling (thereby justifying the vivisection of live animals on tables in scientific labs to Data centers using extraordinary amounts of water and electricity, the author explains its development, its value, and its dangers. She has traced the history of the "tech bros" from their inception if Silicon Valley to their current status as the worlds' wealthiest men. The debate over the rights of robots are discussed both in the "real" world and through science fiction. Will AI become so advanced that man will become its slave rather than the other way around?
In a very short conclusion, Lepore asserts that the solution is to disable the computers that threaten us and to protect resources and wildlife that are required for human existence, all the while being aware that the bros see a future where AI has taken over. They have chosen different plans of escape. Musk plans to be on Mars, while others have properties they will escape to, leaving the rest of us to fend for ourselves.
August 26, 2026
Not for me but recommend that each reader dive in and make their own decisions on whether or not the book is a good read.
September 3, 2026
Book Review: "The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State" by Jill Lepore, read by the author
Rating: ★★☆☆ (2/5) Reading time: ~4 minutes
Thanks to NetGalley, W.W. Norton, and RBmedia for providing an advance audiobook copy for review.
About the author
Jill Lepore is the David Woods Kemper '41 Professor of American History at Harvard University, a professor at Harvard Law School, and a staff writer at The New Yorker. She's the author of several bestselling, prizewinning works of history, including "These Truths" and "We the People." She's a historian first — and that scholarly instinct is both this book's foundation and, per this listening experience, its biggest obstacle.
An eight-hour audiobook that argues machines are quietly taking over civic life shouldn't require this much endurance from the human on the other end of the headphones.
That's the central frustration with "The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State," Lepore's expansive case that data, algorithms, and corporate infrastructure have been steadily replacing the machinery of democratic government. The idea is urgent. The delivery, in this listener's experience, wasn't.
Why it matters
The premise is a serious one, and timely: that the "artificial state" — governance by algorithm and corporate architecture rather than consent — has been assembling itself for a century, and that nothing about its rise was inevitable. That's a genuinely important argument, expanded from an essay Lepore wrote for The New Yorker in 2024. The ambition here is real.
Where it struggles
The trouble is scale and pacing, not substance. What plays as a sharp, urgent argument at essay length stretches thin across a full book — digressions into subjects like the history of animal dissection, in service of a broader point about science and technology, add texture for some readers but read as padding for others. What could have been a tight five-hour case instead runs closer to eight, and in an audiobook, that gap is felt in real time. A book built around a single, forceful argument benefits from getting in, making its case, and getting out — and this one, in this listening experience, doesn't move with that urgency.
The self-narration question
Lepore narrates her own book, and results on this front vary. In this experience, the delivery came across as flat where the material called for emphasis — historical figures and case studies that needed a lift in tone to land instead blurred together in a steady, even register, and attempts at wit didn't fully break through the pacing.
It's worth saying plainly: that's not the universal verdict. The book carries a starred Kirkus review and blurbs from writers like Jaron Lanier and Elizabeth Kolbert, and at least one other listener has described Lepore's own narration as clear and well-paced, closer to sitting in on a good lecture than slogging through one. Self-narration by an academic author is always a gamble — sometimes it adds authenticity, sometimes it lacks the vocal range a professional narrator brings — and the divide in how it's landing suggests this is one of those cases where it comes down to what a given listener needs from a narrator to stay locked in.
What works
The intellectual scaffolding is sound. Lepore is a serious historian working a serious argument, and the connections she draws — from Hannah Arendt's mid-century warnings about the "machine age" to today's algorithmic politics — are the kind of long-arc thinking her other books are known for. The ideas in here are worth having. They just may be better encountered in the original essay, or in a format that lets you set your own pace, than in an nine-hour listen.
The bottom line
"The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State" makes a case worth making, but this listening experience found the delivery worked against the urgency of the argument — dense, slow, and, at times, a genuine test of endurance. Readers who prefer to move at their own pace, or who are drawn to Lepore's long-form historical style specifically, may fare better with it in print than this listener did in audio.
Rating: ★★☆☆ (2/5) Reading time: ~4 minutes
Thanks to NetGalley, W.W. Norton, and RBmedia for providing an advance audiobook copy for review.
About the author
Jill Lepore is the David Woods Kemper '41 Professor of American History at Harvard University, a professor at Harvard Law School, and a staff writer at The New Yorker. She's the author of several bestselling, prizewinning works of history, including "These Truths" and "We the People." She's a historian first — and that scholarly instinct is both this book's foundation and, per this listening experience, its biggest obstacle.
An eight-hour audiobook that argues machines are quietly taking over civic life shouldn't require this much endurance from the human on the other end of the headphones.
That's the central frustration with "The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State," Lepore's expansive case that data, algorithms, and corporate infrastructure have been steadily replacing the machinery of democratic government. The idea is urgent. The delivery, in this listener's experience, wasn't.
Why it matters
The premise is a serious one, and timely: that the "artificial state" — governance by algorithm and corporate architecture rather than consent — has been assembling itself for a century, and that nothing about its rise was inevitable. That's a genuinely important argument, expanded from an essay Lepore wrote for The New Yorker in 2024. The ambition here is real.
Where it struggles
The trouble is scale and pacing, not substance. What plays as a sharp, urgent argument at essay length stretches thin across a full book — digressions into subjects like the history of animal dissection, in service of a broader point about science and technology, add texture for some readers but read as padding for others. What could have been a tight five-hour case instead runs closer to eight, and in an audiobook, that gap is felt in real time. A book built around a single, forceful argument benefits from getting in, making its case, and getting out — and this one, in this listening experience, doesn't move with that urgency.
The self-narration question
Lepore narrates her own book, and results on this front vary. In this experience, the delivery came across as flat where the material called for emphasis — historical figures and case studies that needed a lift in tone to land instead blurred together in a steady, even register, and attempts at wit didn't fully break through the pacing.
It's worth saying plainly: that's not the universal verdict. The book carries a starred Kirkus review and blurbs from writers like Jaron Lanier and Elizabeth Kolbert, and at least one other listener has described Lepore's own narration as clear and well-paced, closer to sitting in on a good lecture than slogging through one. Self-narration by an academic author is always a gamble — sometimes it adds authenticity, sometimes it lacks the vocal range a professional narrator brings — and the divide in how it's landing suggests this is one of those cases where it comes down to what a given listener needs from a narrator to stay locked in.
What works
The intellectual scaffolding is sound. Lepore is a serious historian working a serious argument, and the connections she draws — from Hannah Arendt's mid-century warnings about the "machine age" to today's algorithmic politics — are the kind of long-arc thinking her other books are known for. The ideas in here are worth having. They just may be better encountered in the original essay, or in a format that lets you set your own pace, than in an nine-hour listen.
The bottom line
"The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State" makes a case worth making, but this listening experience found the delivery worked against the urgency of the argument — dense, slow, and, at times, a genuine test of endurance. Readers who prefer to move at their own pace, or who are drawn to Lepore's long-form historical style specifically, may fare better with it in print than this listener did in audio.
August 29, 2026
This engaging and wide-ranging book traces humanity's fascination with technology: its promises and pitfalls. I learned about many things, including a political movement in the 1930s in the US and Canada that promoted "technocracy" as a new and better system of government. There are many references to science fiction, and especially to how influential the classic works may have been when members of the billionaires' club were in their formative years. (This goes a long way towards explaining their collective penchant for space exploration, colonizing Mars, and/or buying their own islands!)
The book outlines the drivers of data collection, the focus on data science, and the dangers of the unimpeded growth of data centers and AI access. It's so chock-full of well-presented history, current ideas, and forward-looking concerns that I'll be going back to it again and again.
It's a big-picture look at how we got to this Artificial State, with plenty of detail that drives home the importance of knowing what we can do to help dismantle it before the bots decide they no longer need humans.
The author does an excellent job reading the audiobook, which is based on some of her lectures and essays with new material. Yet, it comes across as a seamless work that builds a sense of urgency if not inevitability. My thanks to the author, publisher, @RBMedia, and #NetGalley for access to the audiobook for review purposes. It is now available.
The book outlines the drivers of data collection, the focus on data science, and the dangers of the unimpeded growth of data centers and AI access. It's so chock-full of well-presented history, current ideas, and forward-looking concerns that I'll be going back to it again and again.
It's a big-picture look at how we got to this Artificial State, with plenty of detail that drives home the importance of knowing what we can do to help dismantle it before the bots decide they no longer need humans.
The author does an excellent job reading the audiobook, which is based on some of her lectures and essays with new material. Yet, it comes across as a seamless work that builds a sense of urgency if not inevitability. My thanks to the author, publisher, @RBMedia, and #NetGalley for access to the audiobook for review purposes. It is now available.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
September 21, 2026
This was a bit of a wild card pick for me considering I don't follow much of the AI developments / industry (living in my own hospital bubble), but I was hoping to branch out some... and Jill Lepore has been so well-acclaimed in her writing (We the People more recently). This was a short read, but I found I got lost often in the text. It may have been better to read this in the context of a class with discussion, especially as I felt it was easy to glaze over how some ideas (e.g. juxtaposition of nature / animal rights movement with artificial machines) were very nuanced.
That being said, it does present some interesting take-home points about why we have always worried that AI will "exterminate" mankind (seeing AI as a "corporation" with ultra-capitalism), how we fear AI will treat mankind as "animals," and proving that many of these concerns about the artificial state have been in play for years (since the 1970s, for example, writing about "the atomized person" ~ today's echo chambers).
That being said, it does present some interesting take-home points about why we have always worried that AI will "exterminate" mankind (seeing AI as a "corporation" with ultra-capitalism), how we fear AI will treat mankind as "animals," and proving that many of these concerns about the artificial state have been in play for years (since the 1970s, for example, writing about "the atomized person" ~ today's echo chambers).
September 11, 2026
I adore Jill Lepore. Her writing is uncannily thoughtful, and I love her narrating voice to boot. I listened to all of her podcast The Last Archive a few years ago, and have been sad it seems to have come to an end.
In seeing she had a new book about AI and its architects, I couldn't check out the audiobook fast enough. The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State is an exhaustive history, not just of our relationship with the concept of machines, but how human technological progress has often come at the cost of ruthless disregard and disdain for the natural world. At times this book feels less like a takedown of AI and the goons (or, as Lepore calls them with more class than I possess, "merchant princes") driving it, and more like a call to action for conservationists everywhere.
The artificial state as defined by Lepore is an indictment of our current moment: government not by people but automation, and the profit-driven motives of so many of our power brokers being allowed to pursue this goal at the expense of all else. She even quotes Sam Altman positing that one day, the entire world will be covered in data centers, bringing to horrific reality all those science fiction cautionary tales I used to think we were on the same page about. But Altman, Musk, Zuckerberg and their ilk were so disdainful of the humanities, so unlearned in their approaches to literary analysis, that they took these dire predictions of the future not as warnings, but as instruction manuals.
In another review, it mentions that in a book cataloguing the "rise and fall," Lepore is quite short on the "fall" part of the artificial state. And to some degree, I agree with this. Actual proscriptions of the fall involves the usual suspects: vote them out, pass legislation for regulations, stop rolling back protections on wildlife preservation, etc. But I think it actually goes deeper than that. If you listen closely, the fall of the artificial state is baked into its rise. The premise is so fallacious, the benefit so vanishingly small for most of humanity, that one day the house of cards is destined to fall — and at last, we'll point and laugh and announce that the emperor has no clothes.
In one of her most striking anecdotes, Lepore tells of a man in the 1700s so determined to prove that artificial men are the same as humans that he built an automaton that could play chess. This was a wonder for some time, no doubt wowing observers and piquing my interest as I stood in the produce aisle with the audiobook on my headphones. How was such a thing accomplished?
By having a short, human chess player hidden inside, making all the moves.
I can think of no better analogy of the so-called technological wonders being forced on us now. Whether it's LLMs that spit out pretty but meaningless prose, or warnings that the AI future is "inevitable" and we must adapt, or the advent of "driverless cars" – actually remote driven by workers in the Philippines being paid pennies on the dollar – it's all a bunch of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
The fall of the artificial state can't come fast enough for me. I just hope we haven't, as Lepore warns, destroyed the planet by then.
In seeing she had a new book about AI and its architects, I couldn't check out the audiobook fast enough. The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State is an exhaustive history, not just of our relationship with the concept of machines, but how human technological progress has often come at the cost of ruthless disregard and disdain for the natural world. At times this book feels less like a takedown of AI and the goons (or, as Lepore calls them with more class than I possess, "merchant princes") driving it, and more like a call to action for conservationists everywhere.
The artificial state as defined by Lepore is an indictment of our current moment: government not by people but automation, and the profit-driven motives of so many of our power brokers being allowed to pursue this goal at the expense of all else. She even quotes Sam Altman positing that one day, the entire world will be covered in data centers, bringing to horrific reality all those science fiction cautionary tales I used to think we were on the same page about. But Altman, Musk, Zuckerberg and their ilk were so disdainful of the humanities, so unlearned in their approaches to literary analysis, that they took these dire predictions of the future not as warnings, but as instruction manuals.
In another review, it mentions that in a book cataloguing the "rise and fall," Lepore is quite short on the "fall" part of the artificial state. And to some degree, I agree with this. Actual proscriptions of the fall involves the usual suspects: vote them out, pass legislation for regulations, stop rolling back protections on wildlife preservation, etc. But I think it actually goes deeper than that. If you listen closely, the fall of the artificial state is baked into its rise. The premise is so fallacious, the benefit so vanishingly small for most of humanity, that one day the house of cards is destined to fall — and at last, we'll point and laugh and announce that the emperor has no clothes.
In one of her most striking anecdotes, Lepore tells of a man in the 1700s so determined to prove that artificial men are the same as humans that he built an automaton that could play chess. This was a wonder for some time, no doubt wowing observers and piquing my interest as I stood in the produce aisle with the audiobook on my headphones. How was such a thing accomplished?
By having a short, human chess player hidden inside, making all the moves.
I can think of no better analogy of the so-called technological wonders being forced on us now. Whether it's LLMs that spit out pretty but meaningless prose, or warnings that the AI future is "inevitable" and we must adapt, or the advent of "driverless cars" – actually remote driven by workers in the Philippines being paid pennies on the dollar – it's all a bunch of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
The fall of the artificial state can't come fast enough for me. I just hope we haven't, as Lepore warns, destroyed the planet by then.
November 2, 2026
Short but sprawling, this meditation is more a history of philosophy than Lepore's other histories of the United States. The most interesting side quests are when she traces the idea of non human intelligence back in time to debates about animal intelligence through science fiction portrayals of automated regulated humans and human like robots.
October 14, 2026
Summary The rise of machine rule and the corporations that make them, its impacts, and possible demise.
Artificial intelligence. Data centers. So much of what I read these days expresses the concern of these two connected things. Could artificial intelligence not only take our jobs and mimic our human creation but could it even take our lives? Large corporations are building data centers, many using as much power and water as a city and occupying, in many cases, formerly productive farmland. For historian Jill Lepore, these are manifestations of an underlying reality, one that has been decades in the making: the Artificial State.
What does Lepore mean by the “Artificial State”? Writing of the Silicon Valley billionaires leading this movement, aspiring to escape their own bodies and to upload their consciousness to computers, she observes: “The Artificial State they envision for everyone else, and have begun to build, is a future in which humans are ruled, and many replaced, by machines owned by the corporations owned by themselves.” The machines place human governance with digital infrastructure.
But how did we get here? As a historian, Lepore traces the history of both technological developments and the ideology of technocracy from the first calculating machines to the latest AI releases. She traces the work on “machines that think” from the early computers of the 1940’s to the present. Lepore traces the increasing use of computers in political processes from computation to prediction. Then there is the revolution of social media, literally fueling revolutions and accentuating political divisions and propaganda. Finally, we enter the AI era where the possibility of machines both displacing humans on a massive scale and controlling their lives becomes a reality.
The second part of the book turns to the fall of the Artificial State. Lepore take a novel, as in science fiction novel, approach. Fundamentally, her thesis is that the very works that were meant as cautionary tales have been read by our contemporary tech leaders as a blueprint for the tools they build. She shows, for example, how Elon Musk completely misreads Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Lepore discusses the warnings inherent in the works of Isaac Asimov and more recently Murderbot author Martha Wells. She explores everything from the disposibility of earth’s environment, assumed by tech leaders, to the rights of robots when they evidence marks of sentience. By the way, she observes that the architects of the Artificial State are not particularly concerned about rendering the earth uninhabitable:
“They had escape plans: Elon Musk to Mars, Mark Zuckerberg to the metaverse, Peter Thiel to his land in New Zealand, Jeff Bezos to space, Sam Altman’s brain uploaded to the cloud. They weren’t saving humanity; they were preparing to abandon it.”
Lepore, however, is not pessimistic. She believes the Artificial State is not fated. She affirms the institutions of democracy, particularly the consent of the governed. For all the bandied-about intelligence, she argues that much of the Artificial State is badly conceived, on shaky intellectual, and technological foundations. Instead, she believes we have the chance to envision a better future rather than cede it to the tech titans.
But it is here that I have questions for Lepore. Where is the alternative intellectual framework that envisions life differently than in a tech-enabled future? Why have we so readily accepted everything from smartphones and social media to AI? Why doesn’t it trouble us to see huge server farms displacing food farms? Are we disturbed by species extinctions to fuel the energy intensive AI? What happens when we prioritize energy for datacenters over affordable energy for heating and cooking? Behind all this, I wonder why we have assented to all this. What does it reveals of our true beliefs and values?
Jacques Ellul, Lewis Mumford, and Paul Kingsnorth have gone further in articulating the intellectual framework need to resist techno-capitalism. In Against the Machine, Paul Kingsnorth envisions a culture that values past, people, place, and prayer. I hear Lepore only hoping to use political processes already eaten alive by techno-capitalism. I question whether, apart from these other things, it will have the substance to resist.
This said, Lepore offers a cogent historical analysis and an interesting study of the science fiction intellectual history tech leaders have misread. Understanding this “past” is important and I hope others will build on Lepore’s work.
Artificial intelligence. Data centers. So much of what I read these days expresses the concern of these two connected things. Could artificial intelligence not only take our jobs and mimic our human creation but could it even take our lives? Large corporations are building data centers, many using as much power and water as a city and occupying, in many cases, formerly productive farmland. For historian Jill Lepore, these are manifestations of an underlying reality, one that has been decades in the making: the Artificial State.
What does Lepore mean by the “Artificial State”? Writing of the Silicon Valley billionaires leading this movement, aspiring to escape their own bodies and to upload their consciousness to computers, she observes: “The Artificial State they envision for everyone else, and have begun to build, is a future in which humans are ruled, and many replaced, by machines owned by the corporations owned by themselves.” The machines place human governance with digital infrastructure.
But how did we get here? As a historian, Lepore traces the history of both technological developments and the ideology of technocracy from the first calculating machines to the latest AI releases. She traces the work on “machines that think” from the early computers of the 1940’s to the present. Lepore traces the increasing use of computers in political processes from computation to prediction. Then there is the revolution of social media, literally fueling revolutions and accentuating political divisions and propaganda. Finally, we enter the AI era where the possibility of machines both displacing humans on a massive scale and controlling their lives becomes a reality.
The second part of the book turns to the fall of the Artificial State. Lepore take a novel, as in science fiction novel, approach. Fundamentally, her thesis is that the very works that were meant as cautionary tales have been read by our contemporary tech leaders as a blueprint for the tools they build. She shows, for example, how Elon Musk completely misreads Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Lepore discusses the warnings inherent in the works of Isaac Asimov and more recently Murderbot author Martha Wells. She explores everything from the disposibility of earth’s environment, assumed by tech leaders, to the rights of robots when they evidence marks of sentience. By the way, she observes that the architects of the Artificial State are not particularly concerned about rendering the earth uninhabitable:
“They had escape plans: Elon Musk to Mars, Mark Zuckerberg to the metaverse, Peter Thiel to his land in New Zealand, Jeff Bezos to space, Sam Altman’s brain uploaded to the cloud. They weren’t saving humanity; they were preparing to abandon it.”
Lepore, however, is not pessimistic. She believes the Artificial State is not fated. She affirms the institutions of democracy, particularly the consent of the governed. For all the bandied-about intelligence, she argues that much of the Artificial State is badly conceived, on shaky intellectual, and technological foundations. Instead, she believes we have the chance to envision a better future rather than cede it to the tech titans.
But it is here that I have questions for Lepore. Where is the alternative intellectual framework that envisions life differently than in a tech-enabled future? Why have we so readily accepted everything from smartphones and social media to AI? Why doesn’t it trouble us to see huge server farms displacing food farms? Are we disturbed by species extinctions to fuel the energy intensive AI? What happens when we prioritize energy for datacenters over affordable energy for heating and cooking? Behind all this, I wonder why we have assented to all this. What does it reveals of our true beliefs and values?
Jacques Ellul, Lewis Mumford, and Paul Kingsnorth have gone further in articulating the intellectual framework need to resist techno-capitalism. In Against the Machine, Paul Kingsnorth envisions a culture that values past, people, place, and prayer. I hear Lepore only hoping to use political processes already eaten alive by techno-capitalism. I question whether, apart from these other things, it will have the substance to resist.
This said, Lepore offers a cogent historical analysis and an interesting study of the science fiction intellectual history tech leaders have misread. Understanding this “past” is important and I hope others will build on Lepore’s work.
September 23, 2026
Pros
Well written and easy to follow, and genuinely interesting in its details: AI being modeled after capitalism with the same embedded assumptions, tech oligarchs drawing their playbook from sci-fi, the stated goals of the people building these systems, and the question of what actually constitutes a "person" in the age of AI. These are fascinating threads worth pulling.
Cons
>>What is the point of this book? It catalogs known problems with AI and the strategists behind it, but never lands on a destination. A return to a previous era? Halting AI altogether? Overthrowing the tech oligarchs? A new constitutional convention? Without a thesis that points somewhere, the details feel like an elaborate shrug, a well-reported emptiness.
>>The author claims liberal democracy existed for roughly 60 years, from 1945 to 2005, which is historical fantasy. The U.S. wasn't even a democracy on paper until the civil rights amendments of the 1960s, so whose democracy is she describing? And if that era represents liberal democracy at its peak, it's a deeply wanting peak. U.S.-backed coups around the world, intelligence agencies running live experiments on American citizens, corporations funding disinformation campaigns to block environmental and food legislation, and this is the gold standard? Only someone historically incurious or heavily invested in their own narrative would make that claim without qualification.
>>The author never satisfactorily defines "artificial" or "state," which undermines one of the book's central arguments. Somehow an AI-supported state becomes "artificial", implying that what came before was organic. But a state is an artificial construction by definition. The founders themselves viewed the Constitution as a machine, with legislators as mechanics who update and replace its parts. Calling that "organic" isn't an argument, it's a confusion. And it's one of the main reasons the book feels like it's built on sand.
>>Because the author treats the current moment as a unique rupture in American history, she misses that it's the latest iteration of a very old pattern: oligarchs using political machinery to consolidate power and wealth after periods of popular gains. The founders of 1787 worked in secrecy to ratify a document that handed power back to the propertied class after the Revolution. The industrialists of the 1870s dismantled the political gains of the 1860s. The oligarchs of the postwar era did the same to the New Deal. And it's happening again now. Missing that cycle doesn't just weaken the analysis: it makes the book's alarm feel naive misguided, just another distraction from America's original sin: oligarchic rule.
Summary
This book is at its most interesting in its details: the ideological DNA of AI, the sci-fi fantasies animating the tech oligarch class, the philosophical questions about personhood and power that the current moment is forcing into the open. But it collapses under the weight of its own analytical failures. The central arguments rest on undefined terms, a selective and sanitized reading of American democratic history, and a stubborn insistence that what's happening now is historically unprecedented rather than historically familiar. Worst of all, the book never answers the question it implicitly raises: so what do we do? Observation without direction isn't analysis; it's misdirected dread dressed up in research. Worth reading for the details it surfaces; deeply frustrating for the thinking it fails to do.
Well written and easy to follow, and genuinely interesting in its details: AI being modeled after capitalism with the same embedded assumptions, tech oligarchs drawing their playbook from sci-fi, the stated goals of the people building these systems, and the question of what actually constitutes a "person" in the age of AI. These are fascinating threads worth pulling.
Cons
>>What is the point of this book? It catalogs known problems with AI and the strategists behind it, but never lands on a destination. A return to a previous era? Halting AI altogether? Overthrowing the tech oligarchs? A new constitutional convention? Without a thesis that points somewhere, the details feel like an elaborate shrug, a well-reported emptiness.
>>The author claims liberal democracy existed for roughly 60 years, from 1945 to 2005, which is historical fantasy. The U.S. wasn't even a democracy on paper until the civil rights amendments of the 1960s, so whose democracy is she describing? And if that era represents liberal democracy at its peak, it's a deeply wanting peak. U.S.-backed coups around the world, intelligence agencies running live experiments on American citizens, corporations funding disinformation campaigns to block environmental and food legislation, and this is the gold standard? Only someone historically incurious or heavily invested in their own narrative would make that claim without qualification.
>>The author never satisfactorily defines "artificial" or "state," which undermines one of the book's central arguments. Somehow an AI-supported state becomes "artificial", implying that what came before was organic. But a state is an artificial construction by definition. The founders themselves viewed the Constitution as a machine, with legislators as mechanics who update and replace its parts. Calling that "organic" isn't an argument, it's a confusion. And it's one of the main reasons the book feels like it's built on sand.
>>Because the author treats the current moment as a unique rupture in American history, she misses that it's the latest iteration of a very old pattern: oligarchs using political machinery to consolidate power and wealth after periods of popular gains. The founders of 1787 worked in secrecy to ratify a document that handed power back to the propertied class after the Revolution. The industrialists of the 1870s dismantled the political gains of the 1860s. The oligarchs of the postwar era did the same to the New Deal. And it's happening again now. Missing that cycle doesn't just weaken the analysis: it makes the book's alarm feel naive misguided, just another distraction from America's original sin: oligarchic rule.
Summary
This book is at its most interesting in its details: the ideological DNA of AI, the sci-fi fantasies animating the tech oligarch class, the philosophical questions about personhood and power that the current moment is forcing into the open. But it collapses under the weight of its own analytical failures. The central arguments rest on undefined terms, a selective and sanitized reading of American democratic history, and a stubborn insistence that what's happening now is historically unprecedented rather than historically familiar. Worst of all, the book never answers the question it implicitly raises: so what do we do? Observation without direction isn't analysis; it's misdirected dread dressed up in research. Worth reading for the details it surfaces; deeply frustrating for the thinking it fails to do.
November 5, 2026
A very promising and interesting start, but it got a bit repetitive and required more effort to keep reading towards the end.
Still an interesting socio-historical book.
Still an interesting socio-historical book.
November 5, 2026
I am dumber for having read this.
September 27, 2026
It's unfortunate Jill discredited herself in the first eight pages of the book by grouping Trump with other actual authoritarians such as Putin and Erdogan. More unfortunate for me was spending $30 on a book that sounded like it had a good premise only to realize the author is ideologically captured in the first eight pages.
To support her Trump claim, she cites the "Democracy Index" from 2006 and 2016, and then shifts to "by the 2020s, slight more than half of Americans between the ages of eighteen and twenty-nine believed either that American democracy was 'in trouble' or that the country was a 'failed democracy.'
The irony here is pretty astounding and the only way she couldn't see it is due to the aforementioned problem of being ideologically captured. Part of her argument is that "democracies" (the citizens in the democracies) are being unduly influenced by AI algorithms, and her evidence of this is the circular logic that young people think so. Public opinion is never evidence of anything, but it's even funnier here given the context.
If I would have done a simple google search of Jill Lepore and looked at her picture I would have known this was going to be an ideologically slanted book, but alas, I did not. If you're a leftist and want a guilty pleasure read, this might be up your alley. But if you're looking for an objective look at AI and government you won't find it here, unfortunately.
To support her Trump claim, she cites the "Democracy Index" from 2006 and 2016, and then shifts to "by the 2020s, slight more than half of Americans between the ages of eighteen and twenty-nine believed either that American democracy was 'in trouble' or that the country was a 'failed democracy.'
The irony here is pretty astounding and the only way she couldn't see it is due to the aforementioned problem of being ideologically captured. Part of her argument is that "democracies" (the citizens in the democracies) are being unduly influenced by AI algorithms, and her evidence of this is the circular logic that young people think so. Public opinion is never evidence of anything, but it's even funnier here given the context.
If I would have done a simple google search of Jill Lepore and looked at her picture I would have known this was going to be an ideologically slanted book, but alas, I did not. If you're a leftist and want a guilty pleasure read, this might be up your alley. But if you're looking for an objective look at AI and government you won't find it here, unfortunately.
September 30, 2026
Three stars because it was never boring, but loses stars for the failure to stay on point and make a clear argument. The amount of references to science fiction books, movies, and tv, got in the way of the argument or was a way to fill pages without substance. Science fiction isn’t reality whether it has accurately described reality in the past or not. I wanted more substance on the current state of AI and the near future. There are better things to read if that’s what you’re looking for, but if you want a history of major science fiction works, this book delivers.
September 1, 2026
I was surprised how quickly Lepore was putting out another book when she published the mammoth 700+ page We the People only a year ago. I have since learned that she is a prolific nonfiction author on a vast array of topics (I had NO idea she wrote The Secret History of Wonder Woman, a book I have had on my shelf for a decade now) and she must have the ability to sit down and research I could only dream of.
If I'm being honest, my focus on listening to this came in and out a lot -- the book does not follow a direct path in any capacity, so each chapter feels a bit random. I don't know that I got a single thesis out of this book, but I did make connections that I would not have before. I especially liked the parallel she drew between how humans thought of animals in the past to how we think of robots now (though I do not see myself being an advocate for robot rights the way I feel about animal rights).
That all being said, it was interesting, but likely won't stick with me for very long.
Thank you to RBmedia and Netgalley for an audio ARC in exchange for an honest review.
If I'm being honest, my focus on listening to this came in and out a lot -- the book does not follow a direct path in any capacity, so each chapter feels a bit random. I don't know that I got a single thesis out of this book, but I did make connections that I would not have before. I especially liked the parallel she drew between how humans thought of animals in the past to how we think of robots now (though I do not see myself being an advocate for robot rights the way I feel about animal rights).
That all being said, it was interesting, but likely won't stick with me for very long.
Thank you to RBmedia and Netgalley for an audio ARC in exchange for an honest review.
September 26, 2026
I appreciated the history and contextual understanding I gained of AI and it's connection to prior technocrat movements of the past. While I agree with Lepore's views (that an over-reliance on AI as a society is net bad for our democracy and environment) the book does not explore how having a CHOICE of wether or not to use AI is in itself a bit of a class-marker and a luxury good some people cannot afford.
Many companies and organizations are outright demanding that their employees and staff use and rely on AI. Job seekers are encouraged to list AI tools on their resumes and to embrace in their interviews the utilization of AI to complete tasks quicker and therefore cheaper. Being outright antagonistic towards AI and refusing to use it in many corporate spaces can cost you at work and is frankly not a luxury many of us have.
Something that has bothered me recently as I have searched for jobs is being asked the question of "what do you think of AI." This is a political question that feels almost like asking "are you a liberal or a conservative" in a job interview. Some companies want you to embrace AI wholeheartedly. Others want you to shun it completely. There's not a way to know other than context clues how the interviewer across from you and the company writ-large feel might feel about AI going in, so it feels like a gotchya question to me. There is no safe answer that costs you nothing and still says something of substance.
To those who by the nature of their class status and who are secure in their jobs and have the money and options to tell their boss, job, corporations and large language models to shove it: I salute you. However, many of us job seekers and corporate baddies don't have this same luxury. And when people act like they "don't use AI" to them I say: if you ever buy something from a major store online, choose a show to watch from the recommended choices on your streaming app, or select your next book to read based off what you see here on Goodreads (owned by Amazon and Jeff Bezos) those recommendations and choices are being fed and influenced by algorithms often powered by the predictive capabilities of Large Language Models.
While I appreciate vociferously anti-AI people and the camp they prescribe too, when they act like they never use this technology or never interact with it even unintentionally, and that those who do are lazy and unethical they are lacking nuance and it comes across as a bit entitled and 'holier-than-thou'. Sometimes people must use AI and interact it with in their workplace and if you are someone who doesnt have as much choice in the matter at times, I don't believe it makes you less of a good person. It means the issue is complex and varied and shows just how embedded these technologies have become in our work lives and leisure pursuits.
I do not believe that AI itself is the core problem, more so that human greed, short-sightedness, and blind self-interest and the pursuit of individual achievement and money above all else are always our greatest downfalls and the root of all evil. On that Jill Lepore and I certainly agree.
Many companies and organizations are outright demanding that their employees and staff use and rely on AI. Job seekers are encouraged to list AI tools on their resumes and to embrace in their interviews the utilization of AI to complete tasks quicker and therefore cheaper. Being outright antagonistic towards AI and refusing to use it in many corporate spaces can cost you at work and is frankly not a luxury many of us have.
Something that has bothered me recently as I have searched for jobs is being asked the question of "what do you think of AI." This is a political question that feels almost like asking "are you a liberal or a conservative" in a job interview. Some companies want you to embrace AI wholeheartedly. Others want you to shun it completely. There's not a way to know other than context clues how the interviewer across from you and the company writ-large feel might feel about AI going in, so it feels like a gotchya question to me. There is no safe answer that costs you nothing and still says something of substance.
To those who by the nature of their class status and who are secure in their jobs and have the money and options to tell their boss, job, corporations and large language models to shove it: I salute you. However, many of us job seekers and corporate baddies don't have this same luxury. And when people act like they "don't use AI" to them I say: if you ever buy something from a major store online, choose a show to watch from the recommended choices on your streaming app, or select your next book to read based off what you see here on Goodreads (owned by Amazon and Jeff Bezos) those recommendations and choices are being fed and influenced by algorithms often powered by the predictive capabilities of Large Language Models.
While I appreciate vociferously anti-AI people and the camp they prescribe too, when they act like they never use this technology or never interact with it even unintentionally, and that those who do are lazy and unethical they are lacking nuance and it comes across as a bit entitled and 'holier-than-thou'. Sometimes people must use AI and interact it with in their workplace and if you are someone who doesnt have as much choice in the matter at times, I don't believe it makes you less of a good person. It means the issue is complex and varied and shows just how embedded these technologies have become in our work lives and leisure pursuits.
I do not believe that AI itself is the core problem, more so that human greed, short-sightedness, and blind self-interest and the pursuit of individual achievement and money above all else are always our greatest downfalls and the root of all evil. On that Jill Lepore and I certainly agree.
October 12, 2026
This book can be summed up as taking a very long walk to enjoy a very short drink.
It really should have just remained the short essay in The New Yorker, that the author wrote in 2024 - which with the fast advances of AI is now very outdated.
“The rise and fall of the artificial state” is a history of how the world has arrived at a place where machines – largely in the form of Artificial intelligence (AI) – are posed to rule the world, and why this doesn’t have to end up this way.
It’s a story of the rise of technology moving into the systems that govern us – from census taking to politicial projections to ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity and it fellow AI platforms are used to communicate and govern us.
The book shows how machines have gradually made their way into governing bodies, and rising to the point the champions of AI believe there is a significant chance (10-20%) that this technology could end our humanity. The book ends with a few short pages of what it will take to prevent this from happening.
"The rise and fall...." takes you on a meandering course of how people have imagined technology affecting our future. As such it would be better titled “A history of how the world has looked at technology”. Moreover, it covered the rise of technology and did very little to talk about its fall – apart from saying it’s possible that this could/should happen.
The history can be interesting but what we learn of it is much more important.
The best part of the book were 1.) the ideas that “Reading science fiction is crucial to both understanding the rise of the Artificial State – for predictions are difficult (especially about the future according to Yogi Berra) and 2.) that one should carefully study how expanding rights – from a small set of men, to all races of men, to women, children, corporations and potentially animals and also forests, rivers and other natural things, is now being considered for machines.
Should these now be extended to machines? This is a bigger question to answer that it is presented by the author - for without these rights of ownership and agency, how can AI control us?
I felt the book was severely lacking in its analysis of granting rights to machines. She was very remiss in covering off current thinkers on this subject such as Noah Yuval Hariri – who make strong arguments against the granting of right to machines, the way we grant them to corporations.
Clearly if machines represent a 10-20% threat to human existence that we should be doing some concrete things to prevent this. What are those things and why must they happen?
This was a fairly difficult book to read, that doesn’t really giving specific solutions about the future.
I don’t recommend it.
It really should have just remained the short essay in The New Yorker, that the author wrote in 2024 - which with the fast advances of AI is now very outdated.
“The rise and fall of the artificial state” is a history of how the world has arrived at a place where machines – largely in the form of Artificial intelligence (AI) – are posed to rule the world, and why this doesn’t have to end up this way.
It’s a story of the rise of technology moving into the systems that govern us – from census taking to politicial projections to ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity and it fellow AI platforms are used to communicate and govern us.
The book shows how machines have gradually made their way into governing bodies, and rising to the point the champions of AI believe there is a significant chance (10-20%) that this technology could end our humanity. The book ends with a few short pages of what it will take to prevent this from happening.
"The rise and fall...." takes you on a meandering course of how people have imagined technology affecting our future. As such it would be better titled “A history of how the world has looked at technology”. Moreover, it covered the rise of technology and did very little to talk about its fall – apart from saying it’s possible that this could/should happen.
The history can be interesting but what we learn of it is much more important.
The best part of the book were 1.) the ideas that “Reading science fiction is crucial to both understanding the rise of the Artificial State – for predictions are difficult (especially about the future according to Yogi Berra) and 2.) that one should carefully study how expanding rights – from a small set of men, to all races of men, to women, children, corporations and potentially animals and also forests, rivers and other natural things, is now being considered for machines.
Should these now be extended to machines? This is a bigger question to answer that it is presented by the author - for without these rights of ownership and agency, how can AI control us?
I felt the book was severely lacking in its analysis of granting rights to machines. She was very remiss in covering off current thinkers on this subject such as Noah Yuval Hariri – who make strong arguments against the granting of right to machines, the way we grant them to corporations.
Clearly if machines represent a 10-20% threat to human existence that we should be doing some concrete things to prevent this. What are those things and why must they happen?
This was a fairly difficult book to read, that doesn’t really giving specific solutions about the future.
I don’t recommend it.
September 8, 2026
In 1955, Isaac Asimov imagined how humans lost the ability to vote to machines. Jill Lepore lets us know that humans didn’t unknowingly give machines power over us. Greed, corruption and a techno libertarianism overwhelmed regulation and created this moment where even AI cheerleaders believe we may have let the robots out of the barn.
Robota is a Czech word for forced labor or serfdom. Robots were imagined as our slaves, like beasts of burden. Plants and trees and other animals were there for our pleasure, to eat, clothe or amuse us. Now many species are gone, but we have robot dogs that ice wants to use to corral black or brown people who may or may not have green cards or be US citizens.
A small group of techno millionaires now don’t want to hire humans, preferring agentic Ai. Here’s how this came about. They have US clearance to destroy the world as long as China doesn’t get AI first.
Lepore shows the source code that inspired Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg and Sam Altman — science fiction stories and films — and how each techno billionaire profoundly misinterpreted the books and the writers. As a kid in South Africa, Musk, who later would push Trump’s Afrikaner First refugee policy, adored “A Hitchiker’s Guide to the Universe,” which Douglas Adams wrote on a manual typewriter with a “No Apartheid” sticker on it.
These days, even early proponents of Mars settlement think it’s not feasible before 3000 instead of Musk’s 2043. Said writer Kim Stanley Robinson: First we should take care of Earth.
“The rise of the artificial state was not fated,” Lepore concludes. “It was anticipated.”
Humans now spend more time indoors and speak fewer words than they once did, kept indoors by pollution and an addiction to machines. We’re lost connection witn animals and natural surroundings. We are being told that the thing than makes us human — empathy — is weakness.
But Lepore says that with everything from data centers to widespread Flock surveillance, humans still can consent to be governed, instead of being squashed by greedy, mentally untethered and unstable billionaires.
Ai that tells a billionaire what he wants to hear may muffle a billionaire from the lesson of the tale of a King Midas — greed will get you in the end.
Robota is a Czech word for forced labor or serfdom. Robots were imagined as our slaves, like beasts of burden. Plants and trees and other animals were there for our pleasure, to eat, clothe or amuse us. Now many species are gone, but we have robot dogs that ice wants to use to corral black or brown people who may or may not have green cards or be US citizens.
A small group of techno millionaires now don’t want to hire humans, preferring agentic Ai. Here’s how this came about. They have US clearance to destroy the world as long as China doesn’t get AI first.
Lepore shows the source code that inspired Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg and Sam Altman — science fiction stories and films — and how each techno billionaire profoundly misinterpreted the books and the writers. As a kid in South Africa, Musk, who later would push Trump’s Afrikaner First refugee policy, adored “A Hitchiker’s Guide to the Universe,” which Douglas Adams wrote on a manual typewriter with a “No Apartheid” sticker on it.
These days, even early proponents of Mars settlement think it’s not feasible before 3000 instead of Musk’s 2043. Said writer Kim Stanley Robinson: First we should take care of Earth.
“The rise of the artificial state was not fated,” Lepore concludes. “It was anticipated.”
Humans now spend more time indoors and speak fewer words than they once did, kept indoors by pollution and an addiction to machines. We’re lost connection witn animals and natural surroundings. We are being told that the thing than makes us human — empathy — is weakness.
But Lepore says that with everything from data centers to widespread Flock surveillance, humans still can consent to be governed, instead of being squashed by greedy, mentally untethered and unstable billionaires.
Ai that tells a billionaire what he wants to hear may muffle a billionaire from the lesson of the tale of a King Midas — greed will get you in the end.
October 17, 2026
"By the middle of the 2020s, vastly consequently decisions about the future of earth, and everyone and everything on it, were being made by a handful of men based on their colossal accumulation of wealth, their catastrophic misreading of history, literature, and philosophy, and their breathtaking contempt for ordinary people, living and dead," Lepore writes of Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and other champions of the Artificial State. "They wrote their articles of faith, their techno-utopianism, into their very tools, as if quietly sneaking so many Gideon's Bibles into bedside tables at roadside motels."
That comes late in The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State, and the preceding chapters provide historical context, tracing the strains of thought that have shaped A.I. architects like Musk and Altman. As a historian Lepore is not predisposed to jeremiad, and she's more concerned here with girding our present moment with historical context and perspective. But it's clear she is no fan of the champions of the Artificial State, throwing shade at their terrible close reading skills of science fiction. She accuses them of "taking science fiction rather too literally" as well as "reading cautionary tales as instruction manuals." To wit: "They took more than a century of warnings about building a particular set of tools and instead of heeding those warnings, they decided to build those tools."
This week in class my high seniors were buzzing about Tesla's latest gimmick: a Roadster that can levitate with rocket-style thrusters and flip before landing again. One said he really admired Musk for being a "visionary" and "innovator." It was hard for me to share that opinion when, based on all available evidence, Musk would likely fail my class due to his ability to extract the exact opposite message from a text that the author intended.
That comes late in The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State, and the preceding chapters provide historical context, tracing the strains of thought that have shaped A.I. architects like Musk and Altman. As a historian Lepore is not predisposed to jeremiad, and she's more concerned here with girding our present moment with historical context and perspective. But it's clear she is no fan of the champions of the Artificial State, throwing shade at their terrible close reading skills of science fiction. She accuses them of "taking science fiction rather too literally" as well as "reading cautionary tales as instruction manuals." To wit: "They took more than a century of warnings about building a particular set of tools and instead of heeding those warnings, they decided to build those tools."
This week in class my high seniors were buzzing about Tesla's latest gimmick: a Roadster that can levitate with rocket-style thrusters and flip before landing again. One said he really admired Musk for being a "visionary" and "innovator." It was hard for me to share that opinion when, based on all available evidence, Musk would likely fail my class due to his ability to extract the exact opposite message from a text that the author intended.
September 23, 2026
History on the artificial state and how there have always been warning signs about the dangers of this kind of technology yet capitalism won over placing any kind of regulations (simplistic synopsis, the book is much more detailed). Instead now we have AI bots everywhere pushing far right propaganda and deepfakes.
A really important read to understand more about AI and the Silicon Valley bros. Confirmed what I already knew about men like Musk, Zuckerberg, Thiel, Altman etc. They are losers trying to make themselves cool with technology and money and create the made up worlds they read about in science fiction books yet completely lacked critical reading skills and missed the entire point these books were trying to make.
It’s all pretty depressing. Lepore, in her epilogue, does try to add some semblance of hope, stating that 60% of US believes there should be regulations and then mentions something about standing up for our rights. With how things are and with how apathetic people (especially in the USA) are I don’t have very high hopes of sweeping changes. But hopefully we as a society wake up and fight against these techoligarchs and politicians who don’t care about us and only care about lining their pockets.
A really important read to understand more about AI and the Silicon Valley bros. Confirmed what I already knew about men like Musk, Zuckerberg, Thiel, Altman etc. They are losers trying to make themselves cool with technology and money and create the made up worlds they read about in science fiction books yet completely lacked critical reading skills and missed the entire point these books were trying to make.
It’s all pretty depressing. Lepore, in her epilogue, does try to add some semblance of hope, stating that 60% of US believes there should be regulations and then mentions something about standing up for our rights. With how things are and with how apathetic people (especially in the USA) are I don’t have very high hopes of sweeping changes. But hopefully we as a society wake up and fight against these techoligarchs and politicians who don’t care about us and only care about lining their pockets.
Did Not Finish
August 5, 2026Got my hands on an advanced copy. Currently DNF - really enjoyed the chapters about social media corporations, plus some interesting tidbits about the rise of data collection, but the part II that focused more on science fiction didn’t grab me. This is a personal preference, as I wanted more policy / political analysis instead of a discussion of how robots are treated in fiction. But, that’s not the book LePore wrote, so I really shouldn’t count it against her!
(Side note: while we’re on the portrayal of robots + AI in fiction, I was curious to see that LePore didn’t talk much about the marvel universe, arguably the most popular modern portrayal of it, what with ultron & the algorithm that was going to decide which humans to kill. I feel like she skipped over a lot of 21st century media.)
(Side note: while we’re on the portrayal of robots + AI in fiction, I was curious to see that LePore didn’t talk much about the marvel universe, arguably the most popular modern portrayal of it, what with ultron & the algorithm that was going to decide which humans to kill. I feel like she skipped over a lot of 21st century media.)
October 25, 2026
Hard to say what this is as it's all over the place. Feels like it could have been an essay, but even as an essay, I would struggle to define the central point, or a point that hasn't been made before. Also we get a lot of Rise, but only three pages of the Fall.
Good tidbits strewn throughout, though: Douglas Adams hated science fiction, for example, or the career of Joshua Haldeman. And she does of good job of showing how the AI/robot debate is definitely nothing new.
Three stars for all the cool references.
Good tidbits strewn throughout, though: Douglas Adams hated science fiction, for example, or the career of Joshua Haldeman. And she does of good job of showing how the AI/robot debate is definitely nothing new.
Three stars for all the cool references.
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