Pulitzer prize-winning US historian Jill Lepore’s new book addresses the threat posed to liberal democracy by artificial intelligence. According to Lepore, the extraordinary power of private tech companies led by men whose priorities may not align with the wellbeing of the Earth or its inhabitants is set to destroy civilisation as we know it.

Lepore’s concept of the Artificial State is capacious. It includes both a fantasy desired by a select few and a reality that is already with us. The fantasy is of an atomised society in which an elite can transcend biological and planetary restrictions, “abandoning constitutional democracy, the liberal nation-state, and even humanity itself for rule by automation, government by machine, and replacement by artificial intelligence”. The reality is that of public discourse having shifted to privately owned platforms on which monetised attention is valued above all else.

That social media feeds are crafted to manipulate users’ behaviour, whether to consume a product or to shift political position, is now well established. X, formerly known as Twitter, is one example. It is riddled with bots controlled by various actors – state, non-state, criminal or corporate – whose activity contributes to an algorithmic flood of rage-bait that polarises citizens.

According to Lepore, the Artificial State is not just the dream, but “the actual plan of a very small number of staggeringly powerful 21st-century merchant princes, Silicon Valley billionaires”. When our priority ought to be climate change, these “princes” – Lepore mentions Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Peter Thiel and Sam Altman – would rather focus on space travel or ramping up “compute” to beat China in the AI arms race. After scorching the Earth with energy-guzzling datacentres, she notes, their plan is to escape to Mars, hide in a bunker in New Zealand, or have their frozen brains uploaded.

Intriguing, jewel-like stories are Lepore’s hallmark, and The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State sparkles with them. She presents numerous micro-histories that link the past to the present, including the roots of the apparently hyper-modern philosophy of techno-libertarianism in the paranoid science fiction of the cold war. Lepore recounts the origins of the census in ancient Mesopotamia, making the point that counting people gives those in power “the ability to tally, torment, and tax a population”. Her rich survey of science fiction tropes of the 20th century, many of which have infused the hopes and dreams of the Technorati, is revealing. While Lepore interprets much classic sci-fi, such as Isaac Asimov, as cautionary, she observes that “the architects of the Artificial State seem to have read these stories, unironically, as instruction manuals, guides for how to build robots that would one day rule the world”.

By her own admission, Lepore has written “a grumpy book”. Almost every chapter ends with a deeply ominous line. However, she is not a true AI doomer at heart. She clarifies that it is not the technology itself that is the problem, but our lack of a coherent, democratically forged strategy about how to develop and use it. Yet she cites the growing number of industrial robots as if it were self-evident that such technology is always bad. By lumping together a range of different technologies under the umbrella of AI and “robots”, the wrong questions arise. Should a Russian state-operated chatbot fomenting far-right discontent in the UK be in the same categorical boat as machine-learning models used to create potentially life-saving drugs? Should the robot hoover sucking up toast crumbs in my kitchen be ontologically adjacent to a drone dropping bombs on houses full of children, using AI-generated intelligence? To analyse how technologies are reshaping the political order requires conceptual precision.

Lepore’s argument that humanity is in the process of ceding vast power to a tiny group of unelected businessmen – some of whom appear to be cartoon supervillains – is a sound one. She concludes the book with an exhortation to “unplug” and connect with nature and animals but prescribes nothing further. This is no doubt a good idea. But in the face of a technological revolution that threatens to undermine the entire world order, logging off to touch grass can only be the first step.

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