Jill Lepore - The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State

The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State by Jill Lepore describes itself 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 book attempts to outline the growing influence of automation, statistical prediction, and future-oriented thinking on the state. The first half focuses mostly on historical analysis, which starts in earnest with the 19th century. This part of the book looks at the demystification of the world by science and technology and the changes in belief that accompany that new knowledge, especially as concerns government. To me, the main focus of this portion seems to be the impact that statistics and prediction have had on elections. The second half of the book looks at science fiction narratives, both utopian and dystopian, tracing the ways they are understood and brought to life by people using technology. In this later half, the focus turns more to the shifting balance between animals, humans, and machines, outlining how machines take on the roles that humans previously ascribed to nature and biology.

While I enjoyed many parts of this book, overall I felt it came up short in a few ways. The idea of the artificial state is, in my opinion, not well enough defined and not well enough connected to the figures and movements that Lepore criticizes in the book. She describes the artificial state as, “the dream of a future in which humans are untethered, free and alone, disembodied minds, with no ties, not to one another, not to any place, not to any village or city or nation.” I understand this to point to a libertarian ideology where technology grants freedom and renders previous religions, social formations, and states obsolete. Another side of the fantasy is the idea that a statistical program can better predict and serve human interests than a democratic institution.

However, many of the examples Lepore draws on are strongly grounded in individual and national interests. She traces the rise of statistics in shaping elections, starting with John F. Kennedy’s hiring of the Simulmatics corporation to help analyze voter preferences and demographics in 1959, leading up to his 1960 election. This thread moves on to Obama’s data-driven 2008 campaign, as well as the 2015-2016 Cambridge Analytica scandal leading up to Donald Trump’s election. Part of her intent here is to show how skepticism of analytics in elections in the 1950s gradually turned into acceptance by the 2000s. However, what I think goes missed is that none of these figures are trying to conjure a technological utopia where they perfectly represent voter preferences by means of statistical analysis. They’re using the tools for their own interests and to win elections. Among politicians, I don’t see the drive to realize the fantasy of the artificial state. The people advocating for rule by machines and the people using machines to win elections come from very different camps. Likewise, I think advocacy for an unregulated internet in the 1990s by someone like Newt Gingrich is very different from the advocacy of somebody like Marc Andreessen around the same time. The former seems more rooted in a liberal economics and pro-business mindset that is looking to the present, the latter might be closer to the techno-utopian future-oriented ideology Lepore is outlining.

So who are the people advocating for rule by machine, or who are at least the closest to the ideas represented by the artificial state? Really there was one figure that Lepore discussed where I felt the artificial state seemed to resonate the most. That figure is Elon Musk. It was here that I learned about two movements I hadn’t encountered before as well. The first is the Technocracy movement, which Elon Musk’s grandfather, Joshua Haldeman, was a leader of. The central thesis of the Technocrats was that “popular voting can be largely dispensed with,” because the “Technate of America,” which was to include all of North America, would be better served by scientists and engineers who actually understood the industrial needs of the 20th century.

The second movement the book exposed to me is the Longtermism movement. This is a moral outlook developed by two philosophers at Oxford, William MacAskill and Toby Ord, which argues that the outsized number of people to come in the distant future have moral concerns that outweigh those of the present. It’s not hard to see elements of both of these philosophies in Elon Musk’s businesses, political interventions, and in his Tweets. Musk has stated his goals outright also. Lepore quotes him remarking that since college he believed three things would have the biggest impact on humanity, “the internet, transitioning to a sustainable energy economy, and space exploration, in particular, the extension of life to multiple planets.” The internet has mostly been replaced with AI today, which is an evolution that the book touches on briefly as well. In 2024 Peter Thiel said that Musk stopped seeing Mars as an escape from politics. However, that means that Musk believed for a long time it was, and it’s only Thiel’s guess as to Musk’s change in behavior. Overall, Musk’s interplanetary focus seems to genuinely combine some elements of Longtermism with the kind of techno-utopian stateless vision that Lepore is interested in understanding. Even so, it’s hard to imagine Musk wants machines to decide for him what he should and shouldn’t do, especially if they were to limit his autonomy. As I discussed earlier, using the technology to create power for oneself and trusting the technology as the deciding power are at odds in a way that I think this book somewhat underestimates. There is a bit of a conflation between rule by engineers and rule by machines. What this points to is that the fantasy of the artifcial state is wrapping a few concepts that could be better examined in isolation. Or perhaps the tension inherent in the fantasy could be better explored in the book.

I won’t spend as much time talking about the second half of the book, but one of my frustrations was that it offers cursory readings of many sci-fi books, which it treats as fact, then goes on to explain how Silicon Valley takes away “the wrong” lessons from the books. As a recovering literature PhD, this is a big red flag to me, because it presumes there is a “correct” interpretation that can easily be drawn from the book, and it also treats the literature as purely didactic (intended to provide a clear moral example) which is not always the case. Often these books are nuanced and ambivalent, not coming to a clear conclusion regarding right and wrong. What’s interesting about them is they can provide insight into real moral dilemmas where there is not a clear answer. I think the second half can roughly be summarized by a viral tweet that many are familiar with and which the book quotes directly.

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

This pretty much encapsulates the majority of the examples in the second half of the book. Lepore provides a quick reading of a particular sci-fi book, which she argues is cautionary, either by pointing to a negative outcome in the book, or the author’s personal beliefs. Afterward, she points to how some aspect of that book has been partly realized by Silicon Valley. What bothers me here is that we are looking at technologies, like AI, which genuinely have both tremendous potential and risk. And as Lepore points out herself, many of the outcomes of our use of technology are unexpected and counterintuitive. Overall, I was just not compelled by the suggestion that the answers to using technology responsibly were in sci-fi all along, and we just ignored these crystal clear lessons. The reality is so much messier than that and the social and economic pressures to build these technologies are often developed organically outside of literature.

To conclude, The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State brings to attention many pertinent historical moments and connections which are useful to understand today’s current technological culture. I felt the first half of the book was stronger than the second, however, and I would’ve liked to hear more on some of the harder to answer moral conundrums related to our dependence on technology and inability to control it.