The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State

by Jill Lepore

It presented itself as a form of futurism. But the future envisioned by the architects of the Artificial State looked, chillingly, like the very worst of the past…

We live in the age of data. Over the past century, rapidly evolving technologies have transformed every aspect of our society, in troubling and seemingly unstoppable ways. Political campaigns have been reduced to attention-mining algorithms, multinational corporations control public discourse, and the era of the liberal nation-state seems to be coming to an end, replaced by the rule of artificial intelligence. Today, power is maintained through machines, we are told, know what humans cannot. Yet nothing about any of this was, or is, inevitable.

In this astounding account of how technology has corroded democracy around the world, prizewinning historian Jill Lepore traces the rise and fall of what she calls the ‘Artificial State’. Examining everything from robot rights and Elon Musk’s origins to what data centres cost wildlife, Lepore offers a history – and a perspective – wholly missing from the debate.

History, Lepore demonstrates, is driven not by machines but by individuals, societies, cultures and ideas. The architects of the Artificial State had no theory of governance, nor did they have any interest in the rule of law, or any capacity for restraint. They drew their ideas not from science, but from science fiction. Yet everything destructive that they have done can be undone. By illuminating the origins of the Artificial State, Lepore reveals how we can escape it – helping us to imagine, and fight for, a different future.

Jill Lepore 2026 (P) Penguin Audio 2026

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Politics, Technology, Science, Audiobook, Artificial Intelligence

Audible Audio

First published August 25, 2026

About the author

Jill 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.

Reviews

[Bruce Katz]

3.5
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 plan and 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 inescapable 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.

[Leo]

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

[Josh Peterson]

“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

[Rob S]

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 🤔

[Gyalten Lekden]

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.

[David Partikian]

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.

[Mark]

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.

[Cindy]

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.

[Kate Cedras]

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.

[Charles Francis]

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.

[Heather Reads Books]

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.

[Reading]

3.5. 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 want 100% certain why I was learning what I was learning despite it being fascinating.

As far as conclusions and ways forward, the abrupt final chapter does offer some solace and encouragement when the author reminds 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! Sure, I know that but oof, there's a powerful force arrayed against us! 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!

[Dave]

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.

[Katie]

Got 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.)

[Grace Stafford]

If Jill Lepore is hopeful, I guess I will be too. If the explosion of AI snuck up on you, this book is for you. Nothing is overly technical, but Lepore follows the human desire for building increasingly artificial states throughout history.
It was fascinating to read many of the final chapters as this week Altman, Musk, and Amodei have been calling again for regulatory oversight by the government.

[Zoë Moore]

FULL of rlly interesting throughlines of dystopia/political philosophy/sci fi with 2026 arguments made by SV. My only complaint would be I wanted it to go onnn

Was not expecting the connection btw the extinction, oppression, subjugation of animals, and people’s anxieties that they will experience the same thing if another “species” is more capable than them… fascinating. We rlly need to tackle.

[thisisabooktracker]

Very interesting context to why we are where we are with AI. It really veered into how it’s related to science fiction and animal welfare, to the point I did start to wonder when we’d get back to the main topic. I’m sure some people will find this detour annoying, but I enjoyed it.

[Arcadia Barrile]

Thank you to RBmedia for providing this audiobook for review consideration via NetGalley. All opinions are my own.

I’ve been a big fan of Jill Lepore since my undergrad days (over a decade ago now), when I was assigned her book The Name of War for a General Education class I had signed up for purely because it fit my schedule better than the other options. I vividly remember sitting in an IHOP across the street from my college at an ungodly early hour on National Pancake Day in 2012 with that book and thinking that I was going to change my major so i could read more like it. Well, here I am nearly 15 years later, American Studies degree in hand, still reading Jill Lepore’s books and listening to her amazing podcast. You can only imagine how excited I was to see this book pop up on NetGalley, and then to get approved to read it.

This book is an equal parts fascinating, informative, and terrifying deep dive into the historical conditions that have led us as a society to where we are now with what we call artificial intelligence (although it is not yet truly intelligent). Lepore discusses the origins of our fascination with robots and technological fantasies, and how culture and politics have interacted with those concepts throughout the years to facilitate the rise of what she calls the artificial state, a system of governance focused more on data than on the beings that data purportedly describes.

One of the things I love most about Lepore’s books, The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State included, is that she has a very clear and often humorous writing style that is so conspicuously absent from most historical writing. Reading a Jill Lepore book feels like having a conversation with a friend, except your friend is one of the most brilliant historical scholars alive and spent years researching to prepare for your conversation.

I generally consider myself to be a fairly informed citizen, but I learned so much from this book that I had never even thought to look into before. Lepore has a talent for tracing seemingly unrelated historical events and then bringing them together into the most obvious-seeming roadmap of the history of a concept. One chapter covered a group of technocrats attempting quite clumsily to bring their system of technological governance to power, ending with the bombshell that the man we had been following was, in fact, Elon Musk’s grandfather (that explains a lot!). Lepore’s manner of presenting her research gives you that feeling of everything is connected without having to believe in wild conspiracy theories.

While the subject matter of this book is quite serious and at times deeply unsettling and even scary, it does end on a more hopeful note. I really appreciated that Lepore not only made it clear that she believes there is a way forward, but also presented readers with some thoughts about what steps specifically we should be taking to fix what has been broken in our society and systems of governance. I see this book as a starting point to give readers an overview of the situation from where they can begin to do further research. We are meant to use this to actually go out and make changes in the world, not just to learn about what has happened.

I listened to The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State as an audiobook, narrated by Jill Lepore herself. It felt very similar to listening to an extremely long episode of her podcast, which made the book fly by in a way nonfiction like this rarely does. Lepore is a fantastic and engaging narrator, and I particularly enjoyed the silly voices she did when quoting people like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, lending an amount of levity to a very serious topic. If you have trouble getting through nonfiction books but enjoy podcasts, try it out as an audiobook. I really enjoyed the experience.

I would recommend this book to anyone who is interested in being more informed on the history of AI and the Silicon Valley executives who seem to be ruling the US unelected at times. You don’t have to be particularly interested in or knowledgable about history to benefit from and enjoy this book. The information it contains is valuable to anyone who is concerned about where society is heading in the age of AI and what we can do about it.

[Linda Loretz]

In her much-admired style, Jill Lepore discusses the optimistic and pessimistic aspects of the rise of the artificial state throughout history. She clearly understands history, and everything she asserts is well documented. In this book, she describes how the line between human and machine has been blurred and has always been a concern, but certainly not a new phenomenon.

The author traces humanity's desire for machines to perform mundane tasks back to early censuses, when tyrannical rulers had to know how many people they controlled. Likewise, in the US, the development of counting systems that eventually led to modern-day computers has its roots in keeping track of people and has given rise to Social Security numbers and other identifiers. As more data was collected, there were more opportunities to use machines to improve human quality of life. This includes the development of trains and other infrastructure that both connect people and enable machines to perform work more efficiently.

Much of this book reads like a textbook. So, it was more informative than enjoyable. Having said that, some parts gave me pause and made me challenge my assumptions about the definitions and uses of technology in society. My favorite part was the chapter on Twitter and how Obama was among the first presidential candidates to rely heavily on it during a campaign. Then, of course, social media became a part of every future election. Although some claim that social media supports democracy because everyone can weigh in, the author provides evidence to the contrary. Social media can undermine democracy and lead to mistrust in government.

Since I mainly read fiction and learn many valuable lessons from literary artists, I particularly like the way Lepore cites both fictional and scholarly works in her narrative to make her points. She provides many examples of science fiction works that have long acted as cautionary tales and fables, essentially predicting the artificial state that has crept upon us. Contemporary novels and movies serve a great purpose in focusing our attention on the moral quandaries we face.

Many years ago, I read a biography of Isaac Asimov, and it always stuck with me. Through science fiction, Asimov created the Three Laws of Robotics and posed many questions about humans and machines. I loved how Lepore explored his influence in forcing academics and the tech world to consider the use of robots. Lepore draws on Asimov and his contemporaries' work, extrapolating from their questions to show that modern thinkers' current questions about AI have been posed in a variety of ways for a century.

Another theme I appreciated involves Elon Musk and his grandfather, Joshua Haldeman, an American-born activist in the Technocracy movement and an outspoken supporter of South African apartheid. Musk hardly knew his grandfather, but Lepore adeptly shows how some of his grandfather's ideas seem to echo in Musk's worldview. She also spends considerable time discussing Musk and his multifaceted roles in shaping the artificial state. Again, Lepore returns to the book's central questions: What is growth, and to what extent has AI infiltrated government decision-making? Lepore explores these questions from multiple angles.

Jill Lepore's The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State provides some thought-provoking questions. How does change happen? How do we define human, animal, machine, and robot? Have these definitions evolved? What will lead to the demise of humans? Why are there so many stories about humanity's lost sense of purpose and human extinction? Why do societies frequently debate animal personhood? The line between human and machine may be increasingly obscure, but do human beings still have the ability, and the desire to take control?

[Serge]

As I was reading Jill Lepore’s The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State, I realized that it might serve as a concrete example of a particular skill that we will discuss all year long in my classes: historical contextualization. She opens the book with a quote from Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition (“to think what we are doing”). She describes her own book 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.She makes reference to Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism and shares the philosopher’s concern about “how the machinery of modern life [is] reshaping the very fundamentals of human existence.” Lepore invokes Hobbes who describes the state as “ an artificial man” in the Leviathan and Rousseau who describes the state as a work of art. Lepore connects the artifice of the state to its penchant for reducing “politics to the digital manipulation of attention-mining algorithms “ and citizenship to “minutely message-tested online engagement.” What results is the alienation that Rachel Carson describes in the following terms: “ the modern world worships the gods of speed and quantity and the quick and easy profit and out of this idolatry monstrous evils have arisen.” Lepore’s reading of this modern malaise is deeply indebted to Thoreau more than Marx. Lepore posits that “ across the second half of the twentieth century, liberal democracy made possible the rise of the Artificial State. She offers the reader a tour of the cyberbalkanization which social media wrought and the cooptation of technological leashes during the heroic but failed revolutions of the 21st century (Arab Spring, Kitchenware Revolution in Iceland, Indignados Movement in Spain, Facebook Revolution in Tahrir Square, The YouTube Uprising in Syria, BLM, The Sunflower Student Movement in Taiwan and the Umbrella Movement in Taiwan. These revolutions failed in no small part because we mistook the comment section for a public forum, blissfully unaware of the bots who flocked to these spaces to ramp up our sense of aggrievement. Lepore entertains the claims made by tech-dystopians that the United States has entered a “digital civil war… one waged with words and images, designed to inflict psychological harm, to wreak havoc with rhetoric.” Automated, non-human, political influencers have hijacked deliberative democracy. The second half of the book offers a master class in historical contextualization. Lepore begins with the mind-body dualism of Cartesian thought and ties this origin story for Western political consciousness to Mary Shelley’s The Last Man (a deep cut). Lepore builds on Weber’s insight on the modern disenchantment of the world to suggest that the techno-utopianism of our Silicon Valley “merchant princes” preys on a deep-rooted anomie. Her conclusion is that they are conspiring to make the world uninhabitable (having planned their own escapes to Mars, the Metaverse, Blue Origin, and cryogenic stasis), through the weaponization of a viral extractive logic that has long sought to commodify, exploit, and bring to market the world’s natural resources to make redundant the world’s working people. A bleak conclusion which Lepore insists is far from inevitable if we will but wake from the reveries of solipsistic consumption.

[Gregory]

The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State is an excellent and very timely book from historian Jill Lepore, an author I’ve been a fan of for a long time. (I received an advance reading copy through Goodreads’ Giveaways in exchange for a review.)

Although the term “Artificial State” is explained in several ways, the definition that resonated the most with me is “a future in which humans are ruled, and many replaced, by machines owned by corporations,” while the oligarchs running those corporations are the sole beneficiaries of their new technology, using it to escape the confines of governments, society, the planet and even their own bodies. Lepore gets into all of it.

The book is divided into two sections, each a distinct whole but supplementing one another.

“Part One: Government by Machine” is where Lepore makes the argument that the rise of the Artificial State, a force drastically reshaping the world we’re living in, wasn’t inevitable: “The digital revolution didn’t have to play out the way it did in the realm of politics and government; it played out the way it did because of the failure of liberal democracy to limit corporate power over politics and government, its failure to heed decades of warnings about the dangers of an automated state.” In her reliably clear-eyed manner, Lepore explores what happened over those decades, noting the flashing warning signs that were often ignored, enabling the tech oligarchs to attain the vast influence they have.

In “Part Two: What Robots Want,” Lepore turns her attention to what at first seems like a more trivial topic given the sobering narrative of the book’s first half. The second half is effectively a history of science fiction, specifically regarding evolving notions of artificial beings with artificial intelligence. What makes the second half of the book critical is how Lepore meticulously traces how sci-fi notions of robots, computers and space travel have directly influenced the thinking of today’s tech oligarchs, who consistently misunderstand or dismiss the humanist messages of classic sci-fi stories in their race to create the advanced technologies imagined within them. “The architects of the Artificial State,” Lepore writes, “seem to have read these stories, unironically, as instruction manuals, guides for how to build robots that would one day rule the world.” (Again, flashing warning signs were ignored.)

All of this history is thoroughly researched and written in Lepore’s engaging prose. If I have one complaint about the book, it’s the title. The book is overwhelmingly focused on the rise of the Artificial State, the era we’re either entering or have already entered. Thoughts on the fall of the Artificial State are limited to a three-page epilogue. Perhaps it’s not Lepore’s role as a historian to speculate in detail on the reforms that would be needed to curb the power of the tech oligarchs, but the title offers a promise that really isn’t delivered on. Readers looking for a manual on how to get us out of the mess we’re in will likely be disappointed.

My quibble over the title notwithstanding, this is easily the most important and most distressing book I’ve read all year. The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State should be required reading for every citizen of the early 21st century.

[Richard Jaffe]

Thank you to NetGalley and W. W. Norton & Company | Liveright for this advance ARC in return for an honest review.

In the Rise and Fall of the Artificial State, Harvard Professor, Jill Lepore, attempts to address the evils of Artificial Intelligence, and how to combat it, as if it is a political movement like fascism or authoritarianism, the latter being favored by "robots" and the "Artificial State." Her thesis is that the architects of the modern AI movement, Billionaires Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Sam Altman, et.al. grew up idolizing Science Fiction and Marvel Comics, and therefor the "solution" must lie therein as well.

The first part of this well researched book looks at the rise of the "Artificial State" dating back to the 1600's with Descartes and others involving debate about man v. Animals up to advent of robots and AI computers. While invoking science fiction to create artificial intelligence Lepore harkens to the famous Tweet from an "Onion" author Alex Blechman.
"Sci-Fi Author: In my book I invented the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale.
Tech Company: At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don't Create The Torment Nexus."

Along these lines Lepore describes Musk and Altman pro-environment and fearful of AI in the mid 2010's and then suddenly a switch went off with the start of the MAGA movement and throwing caution to the wind they entered into a race to create AI before China did.

The second part of The Artificial State is a look at the history of Science Fiction ( upon which innumerable inventors looked for their inspiration ) as a cautionary tale which were obviously misunderstood or misinterpreted by the likes of Musk and Altman. She looks at turn of the last century works, WE and R.U.R. and how these inspired Sci-Fi authors of the 50's and 60's like Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein to write works including I,Robot and the Foundation Trilogy. The latter, in turn, was mocked by the Douglas Adams in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy which was a favorite of young Musk, who, not surprisingly missed the whole point of the book, which in some ways was anti-Apartheid.

Lepore also describes how Sci-Fi writers predicted the end of the human race, and/or the environment etc.

Although fascinating, for someone who also spent much of his youth enamored by Sci-Fi novels, I was hoping for more of a solution to stopping this AI "Race" and the destruction of our environment by the increasing number of data centers cropping up due to deregulations by the Trump Administration. Although Musk, Altman, Bezos and Zuckerberg are all rushing to create the "Torment Nexus" ( as well as their personal escape hatches ) I was hoping for more on how to prevent it whether in Sci-Fi novels or Lepore's own words. With a little more of that this would be 5 Stars.

#TheRiseandFalloftheArtificialState #NetGalley

[John]

A very important, fascinating, well-executed book. Lepore traces multiple strands of the history behind the current headlong rush to surrender governance of our societies and lives to new technologies--especially artificial intelligence--and the tiny number of ultra-rich individuals who "control" and profit from them, all while destroying the natural world we are part of and on which we depend. Lepore makes clear that this process is not inevitable and can still be reversed. She documents how the tech billionaires driving it have long since abandoned their promises (always hollow) that these technologies would safeguard, even promote democracy and individual liberty and have embraced the false "necessity" of accelerating the development of these technologies in order to save (a very small portion of) humanity from the consequences of developing these very same technologies. She lays out the history of how our thinking about machines, robots, and artificial intelligence has been intertwined with our thinking about our relationship to nature, and especially to animals. And she shows, through a fascinating discussion of the history of science fiction, how the tech billionaires who point to science fiction as the source of their inspirations and ideas have failed to understand the intentions and lessons of the very stories they point to, treating what were meant to be cautionary tales as instruction manuals.

My one frustration with this book is that while Lepore in the beginning expresses her conviction that the artificial state is "doomed," by the end she is arguing that the full realization of the artificial state is not inevitable, that we still have a choice. The latter is an important point, but it is not the same point. If by "doomed" she means that it will either not be fully realized or, if fully realized, will end very badly, in the destruction of its creators or itself or both, as predicted by so many of the cautionary tales of science fiction, I'm not sure how useful, reassuring, or motivating this claim is. Lepore is a historian, so it makes sense that he work looks principally to the past and aims mainly to show how we got here and that this history (like any history) is not inevitable. But given the framing of the book and her deep knowledge of this history, I had hoped for more substantive discussion of what our choices going forward might look like if we hope to avoid the dangers she tells us are not inevitable. Another warning of the dangers of the path we're on as a society and a species, especially a warning as cogent and persuasive as this book, is important and useful. But warnings only get us so far. We need more guidance and leadership. Hopefully those in a better position to offer both will read and learn from this book.

[Chelsea Knowles]

*Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for an advance listening copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.*

The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State traces the current obsession with AI all the way back to the beginning of the internet. When the internet was growing there was a lot of excitement and belief that technology could lead to more democracy with people able to share their opinions (on social media like Twitter). There was a belief that more data about people would help to predict who people would vote for and how political campaigns could be targeted. Unfortunately, the opposite has happened with billionaire technocrats now relying on AI, spreading their own agendas, and suppressing democracy. This book discusses the artificial state by explaining how technology was developed and what people had to say about technology. Many theorists warned society about the dangers of technology. In the second half of the book, Lepore discusses how technology/AI has taken the place of animals in media. For example, authors used to write animals as the antagonists in books like The Planet of the Apes but then authors like Philip K. Dick and Douglas Adams wrote about AI.

I think this book is an important read and I will be recommending this book. We need to be aware of AI and the agendas that certain billionaires are trying to push. This book discusses Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Peter Thiel. I’ve never been someone who was interested in AI and for that reason I agree with everything this author says about the issues with AI. The fact that some billionaires have suggested building data centres on other planets or filling the Earth with data centres and then going to live on another planet is just so ridiculous. I really liked learning about the comparison between animals and AI with the way that humans opposed them. This wasn’t the most interesting book to me though because I did already know a lot about Elon Musk and various other things regarding AI but that’s a personal issue as the author needs to include that information to give context to the artificial state. I listened to the audiobook which is read by the author and it was really good. I enjoyed listening and found it easy to follow along. According to this book, people now trust AI more than they do governments and that is so scary to me. This book is important for our current moment and a must read for people to wake up to the dangers of AI as well as a reminder to always verify where you get your information. I’m giving this 3.5 stars rounded down to 3.

[Cgallozzi]

Prologue: During the timeframe encompassing MiniComputers - I worked for a MiniComputer manufacturer - within the division that created software. In those days software engineers were thought to be the hi tech employees of the day. The culture was that there were Software Engineers and all others……I see/read that culture in this book’s section about the Merchant Princes, the Economist insider’s interview with Elon Musk and other places….there is clearly a lack of adult supervision here…. We need to understand this… in an interview with the economist Youval Hariri (sp) indicated that he believed the 2024 election was about AI - so as to control it. His feeling is that 2028 will be too late to take action.

Review:

As much as a deeply unsettling bleak diagnostic as an urgent “wake up call” for the people to organize themselves so as stop unlimited development of AI without some regulation and protections…The book is an excellent historical examination concerning how data automation and private tech companies are or may be eroding constitutional democracy and may replace the liberal nation-state. this book seems to follow a path started by Shoshanna Zuboff who wrote “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism” - The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power 2019. In this book Zuboff describes how she thinks Google and Facebook have created a new economic order that threatens human autonomy, privacy and democracy.

Lepore defines an artificial state where:

Public discourse is shaped and controlled by private tech companies.
Political campaigns are reduced to algorithms.
Governance is increasingly outsourced to unaccountable machines.


Merchant Princes Zuckerberg, and the others…who espouse techno libertarian priorities with little regard for /(contempt of) democracy and the requirement for accountability - versus “move fast and break things”. DOGE as an example.

Positives:

Historical brilliance context and perspective - Lepore’s wheel house.
Urgency - who will govern in 2028?

Shortcomings:

Little discrimination between the associated technologies there is or may a difference between AI, robots, LLM’s - these seem to be discussed in one group. These technologies could be disaggregated
For additional impact analysis.

There are few if any proposed solutions other than don’t do AI..

An important well written book should be read. A book not without some short ominous but should start the conversation on this important topic.

Carl G.
Cgallozzi@comcast.net

[Cassie]

Our current world is at a unique technological tipping point. This is no secret nor is it broadly new. Innovation usually brings uncertainty and panic. Yet it is increasingly obvious that this time is not the same. That fears have very real basis. How did we get here? What is the nature of this thing that could be a real threat? What has influenced the conditions that surround artificial intelligence's current role in our society? Where is it going? What can we learn from predecessors? These are the big questions Lepore takes on.

It seemed a bit of a universal gag that my hold on this book became available the same week that those majorly involved in the industry are screaming alarm bells. Yet it perhaps could not have come at a better time. This is not just the normal doom and gloom prophecies or enthusiastic optimism to tame those concerns. While whose to say if that for the individual reader it might lean in either of those directions, it was grounding. Enough to give perspective rather than just all around despair.

I confess, I have very little experience with any AI tools other than ones systems and internet integrate into their programs. I don't interact with bots or generate content. I have very little personal interest. While I'm not as naive to think I can bury my head in the sand, I see no need to interact with more gratuitous uses of what could legitimately been a useful tool in a much more limited scope than its currently being utilized.

That is to say, if it hadn't been an author I loved and found immensely insightful I wouldn't have probably picked this up. But it was and I did. Once again, the author delivered.

She goes beyond the low hanging fruit and really gets into the development of technologies that would lead to this stage but also why. What was it used for? How do you get from statistics collection to cat-in-outer-space and break-out programs? Where are the lines of creativity, politics, and production. What are the philosophies, stories, that frame how we think about both tools, personhood, and the very definition of intellect? What role does the legal system have in all of these? The scientists themselves? Propaganda? And to some extent prejudice?

This broad look helps the reader understand the phenomenon ways I had never considered. It has its bias of course. One I happen to agree with. But to me it wasn't so much a tool for persuasion as to invite consideration of the process and the involved concepts. And not a bad way to construct a sci-fi reading list on the side.

[Rae]

In a quite pessimistic and scholarly tone, Jill Lepore establishes how we have become an alarmingly artificial technological society and how we might mitigate the damage before the planet is irretrievably harmed. She spends a good portion of the book using science fiction novels and popular movies to illustrate how media has had an influence on the architects of technology. Though I am not much of a science fiction reader, I was aware of most of the authors she mentioned (if not the plots of their books) and thought this was one of the strongest areas of her content. I also loved that she made connections to the natural world and how technology (really since the Industrial Revolution) has had a negative impact on natural ecosystems and the extinction of specific species. The supposed need for more (and even larger) data centers shows that the harm continues now with no regard for the depletion of existing energy supplies, especially water.

The last third of the book was the most interesting to me as Lepore discusses the modern world and the mindsets of the various moneyed CEOs and government leaders who seem to be determined to continue with their plans to "improve" our planet and see to my supposed needs. I wish she had spent more time discussing how we might lessen the damage being done and actually take steps to change technology's direction and uses. As she so astutely (and humorously) states, the billionaires have outs. They can leave a decimated Earth and relocate to a new planet, live in a virtual reality state, or upload themselves to the clouds of data. Her only real advice to me is to unplug, as best I can.

Even though this book builds on some of Lepore's lectures as well as a particular New Yorker magazine essay and should have been readable, I found her writing here to be less accessible and more dense than her usual material and that made it more difficult for me as a reader to maintain much of a connection to her thread as a whole. None of this negates a good reading experience, however, and I did ultimately enjoy the book.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for an advanced digital copy in exchange for an honest review.

#theriseandfalloftheartificialstate
#netgalley
#liveright

[Lisa Britton]

3.75 ⭐️

The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State is an informative, thought-provoking, and, at times, genuinely concerning exploration of artificial intelligence and its relationship to democracy. Jill Lepore makes a compelling case against the idea that AI could or should replace democratic institutions, while also examining the long history of humanity’s fascination with machines and artificial intelligence.

One of my favorite aspects of this book was the historical perspective. Lepore traces the development of AI and machines through different periods and explores how these advancements have influenced culture, society, politics, and our ideas about government. I particularly enjoyed the references to the science fiction and dystopian literature of each era and how those stories reflected the hopes, fears, and general mindset of society as technology continued to evolve.

One of the most interesting—and unsettling—ideas in the book is the contrast between how most people view the rise of an artificial state as a dystopian nightmare, while for a select few, it has increasingly become something closer to a goal. That idea really stuck with me and made the book feel especially relevant to the current moment.

I also found Lepore’s discussion of humanity’s relationship with animals and the natural world fascinating. She draws an intriguing parallel between the way humans have historically viewed and used animals and the possibility that advanced AI or robots could eventually view humans in a similar way. It’s a thought experiment that is both fascinating and deeply uncomfortable.

I listened to the audiobook, which is narrated by Lepore herself, and I thought her passion and extensive knowledge of the subject added significant weight to her arguments. Her delivery made it clear how deeply she has engaged with these ideas and gave the audiobook an added sense of urgency.

While this wasn't a perfect read for me, I appreciated how much history and context Lepore brings to a conversation that can often feel focused solely on the future. The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State is ultimately a warning about what we risk losing if we begin treating technology as a substitute for the messy, complicated, but essential work of democracy. It left me with a lot to think about—and more than a little concern about where we may be headed.

Thank you to NetGalley and Recorded Books for the ALC and the opportunity to give my honest feedback.

[Andrea]

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for a digital ARC.

I’m a fan of Jill Lepore’s other works, namely These Truths: A History of the United States and If Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future. Rise and Fall is a sort of combination of both of these, both a history of the United States when it comes to technology and where we’re headed as a society. It was inspired by Hanna Arhendt’s work on totalitarianism, and it reads in some ways like a more erudite, more history-focused companion to Eliziers Yudkowsky’s If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All.

Despite a fairly slow start and how obvious this is a stitch-up of separate essays and lectures, I think the book is well-worth reading. I especially enjoyed the history of science fiction and how it influenced Silicon Valley leaders in the last few chapters. Here are the parts that will stick with me the most:

The contrast between Elon Musk and his grandfather Joshua Haldeman’s influence on contemporary thought and politics as an illustration of how social media has served as a way to elevate voices that do a disservice to democracy and equality. Haldeman typed newsletters full of racist diatribes and crazy conspiracy theories. These were read by a handful of South Africans in his immediate vicinity. To contrast, his grandson can reach millions of people using the device in his pocket.

The future isn’t yet set, and we may be able to make a difference. Only a small fraction of Americans expect AI to have a “positive” impact on elections (9% of respondents and 11% of “AI experts”) and 61% of Americans would like more control over AI.
The internet has had more bots than people since 2012.

Newt Gingrich closed the federal government’s Office of Technology Assessment in 1995.

A quote from a political scientist: “Today the internet isn’t about the communication revolution anymore, it’s about the data revolution and the data revolution doesn’t empower people, it doesn’t empower individuals, it empowers big organizations that control data” (The Telegraph, 2018)

[Billy]

I received an advance copy through the library I work at, which received it from the publisher.

Historian Jill Lepore's newest work, tracing the wide history and possible future of the artificial state--long discussed in science fiction and philosophy, but gaining much more attention with the rise of artificial intelligence and increasingly powerful computers and data analytics--is just as informative as one would expect given her recent track record. Curiously though, Lepore's writing takes a harder stance against the modern day tech barons (here described as "merchant princes", which is incredibly apt when she explains it, and here very much illuminating how shallow their ideas really are) and the ideas that provide the foundations for their current aims, which were first born in the 19th Century and explored in myriad ways by 20th Century science fiction but trace back to the ideas of governance and personhood explored during the Enlightenment period, than it does against the technology itself. While this may seem incongruous based on, well, the title of the book seeming to be more about government and technology than admittedly important figures, her arguments as a whole coalesce into some notable ideas, such as AI regulation, legal standing for animals and the environment in the face of Anthropocene climate change, and resistance against tyranny. The latter of these drives well-deserved comparisons to Hannah Arendt's works on the fight against fascism, which are necessary reading to understand the state of the world; the comparison also leads to the question of whether or not this book could be considered necessary reading for that same purpose, which will likely be a matter of debate for some time, but in my humble opinion, the answer is yes. In any case, this is a very important book about the intersections of technology and politics that deserves to be widely read and will hopefully (rightfully) get a lot of attention when it releases. Highly recommend.