Plaintiffs in a federal lawsuit that says censorship laws and policies in Georgia schools are unconstitutional and negatively affect both teachers and gender-nonconforming students have been backed by the US Department of Justice, 16 states and the District of Columbia.

The federal agency, the states, DC and plaintiffs recently filed responses to defendant Cobb county school district’s motion to dismiss the case.

The two amicus or “friends of the court” briefs “speak to the impact this case is seen as having – not just in Cobb county, but across the country”, said Michael Tafelski, interim deputy legal director at the Southern Poverty Law Center, representing the plaintiffs.

“It is rare for the DoJ” to issue such a brief, Tafelski added. The agency declined to comment.

The case concerns Katherine Rinderle, an elementary school teacher of “gifted and talented” students whom the suburban school district fired last year after she read a book titled My Shadow Is Purple to a fifth-grade class – and the impact of her firing on other teachers and students who don’t conform to gender stereotypes. Plaintiffs include the teacher and an anonymous student.

The justice department’s brief asserts that “the United States has a significant interest in ensuring that teachers, who often possess unique and direct knowledge of discrimination experienced by students in their schools, can speak out about what they reasonably and in good faith believe to be a hostile educational environment based on sex, without fear of reprisal”.

The 16 states – including California, Michigan and New York – and Washington DC argue that Cobb county’s “ban of LGBTQ topics in classrooms lacks a legitimate pedagogical purpose, rendering it constitutionally suspect”. The states also assert that such policies cause harm to children and impede learning, which could then affect other jurisdictions if those same children and their families move out of Georgia.

The lawsuit alleges that the county’s actions violated Title IX, the federal law prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sex in federally funded educational settings; the equal protection clause of the 14th amendment; and first amendment free speech rights.

Rinderle bought My Shadow Is Purple – a picture book “featuring a student who does not conform to gender stereotypes” – at a Scholastic book fair, according to plaintiffs’ response to the motion to dismiss. Scholastic recommends the book for five-to-eight-year-olds. The teacher of more than a decade chose the title “because of its anti-bullying message”, according to the amended complaint, reported on by the Guardian in July. Her class voted on books for a morning “read-aloud” session and nine of 15 students chose the 32-page book.

Two days after the reading session, one parent and then another emailed complaints to the school’s principal. The second called “anything in the genre of ‘LGBTQ’ and ‘queer’ … divisive”. The principal forwarded the emails to the school district’s central office. Within five days, on 13 March of last year, the county suspended Rinderle. By August, the school district fired the teacher of more than 10 years.

One of the two policies the district applied in its decision prohibits teaching “divisive” concepts. It was amended to include this language after the 2022 Protect Students First bill passed in Georgia; both the law and the policy refer to a series of concepts dealing with race as examples of prohibited content – but don’t mention gender.

The plaintiffs’ brief filed in response to defendants’ motion to dismiss alleges that “[d]efendants consider gender non-conforming and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (‘LGBTQ’) people, identities, and topics to be per se ‘controversial’ and ‘divisive,’ ignore gender non-conforming and LGBTQ students’ needs, and silence any discussion of them”.

In one of the two amicus briefs, the 16 states and DC describe their own policies with regard to “allow[ing] (or even requir[ing]) educators to address LGBTQ issues” while “ensuring parental input in education without targeting a vulnerable group of students”.

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The brief refers to a 2022 Child Trends report that claims: “For students who are … LGBTQ+, research demonstrates that affirming policies … are associated with reduced rates of bullying and suicide, among other outcomes.”

The same report notes that 26 states had enacted 121 such policies at the time – including anti-bullying and “inclusive educational materials”. None of these were in Georgia and few were in the south.

The plaintiffs assert that “[r]esearch shows … a failure to provide LGBTQ-inclusive classroom instruction adversely affects LGBTQ students’ … learning outcomes and results in increased anti-LGBTQ bias”.

“These are not just the opinions of some lawyers,” said Tafelski. “This is documented by experts.”

The justice department’s focus on Title IX drilled into plaintiffs’ allegations that Cobb county created a “hostile environment” for students that included discrimination based on sex, highlighting Rinderle’s account of her unsuccessful attempts to get school administrators to address students “bullying” other students based on them being queer.

The federal agency also pointed to how “the District’s interpretation and enforcement of its ‘Divisive Concepts’ Policies heightened the sex-based hostile environment these students experienced … prohibit[ing] ‘any reference to gender nonconformity or LGBTQ topics in class’”.

This sort of prohibition results in unequal treatment, allege plaintiffs: the school district “convey[s] to one class of students that they are ‘normal’ and superior; and that the other class are outcasts and inferior”.

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“An illuminating and engaging longue durée account of everyday resistance and state-making in the Chotanagpur plateau of Jharkhand. This ambitious book takes on the tropes that have shaped the conventional understanding of the pasts and the present of peoples labeled as ‘adivasi’ or ‘tribal’ in India.”

—Sanjib Baruah, Asian University for Women

“This theoretically ambitious historical ethnography neatly displaces many of the central analytic categories by which indigenous people have been seen by state officials, scholars, politicians, and development workers, portraying them instead as modern subjects who co-produce the state on its margins and who co-author its policies and projects. Expertly crisscrossing history, politics, anthropology, and sociology, this generative and controversial book will make enduring contributions to all of these disciplines. A magnificent achievement!”

—Akhil Gupta, University of California, Los Angeles

Most of us aren’t quite sure how we’re supposed to feel about the dramatic improvement of machine capabilities—the class of tools and techniques we’ve collectively labelled, in shorthand, artificial intelligence. Some people can barely contain their excitement. Others are, to put it mildly, alarmed. What proponents of either extreme have in common is the conviction that the rise of A.I. will represent a radical discontinuity in human history—an event for which we have no relevant context or basis of comparison. If this is likely to be the case, nothing will have prepared us to assimilate its promise or to fortify ourselves against the worst outcomes. Some small fraction of humanity is, for whatever reason, predisposed to stand in awe or terror before the sublime. The rest of us, however, would prefer to believe that the future will arrive in a more orderly and sensible manner. We find a measure of comfort in the notion that some new, purportedly sui-generis thing bears a strong resemblance to an older, familiar thing. These explanations are deflationary. Their aim is to spare us the need to have neurotic feelings about the problems of tomorrow. If such hazards can be redescribed as merely updated versions of the problems of today, we are licensed to have normal feelings about them instead.

This isn’t to say that these redescriptions invariably make us feel good, but some of them do. When these arguments take up the sensationalized threat associated with a particular technology, they can be especially reassuring. In this magazine, Daniel Immerwahr recently proposed that the history of photography ought to make us feel better about the future of deepfakes: the proliferation of photographic imagery was coextensive with the proliferation of such imagery’s manipulation, and for the most part we’ve proved ourselves able to interpret photographic evidence with the proper circumstantial understanding and scrutiny—at least when we feel like it. Immerwahr’s argument isn’t that there’s nothing to see here, but that most of what there is to see has been seen before, and so far, at least, we’ve managed to muddle our way through. This is an inferential claim, and is thus subject to the usual limitations. We can’t be certain that human societies won’t be freshly destabilized by such state-of-the-art sophistry. But the role of a historian like Immerwahr is to provide us with a reference class for rough comparison, and with a reference class comes something like hope. The likelihood of technological determinism is counterposed with a reasonable, grounded faith that we have our wits about us.

There is another kind of deflationary argument, one more often associated with the broader and more generic threat of machine intelligence rather than with a discrete technology like deepfakes. The logical premise here is not the precedent of human savvy but an analogy to human fallibility. This might be called the “Since when were we so great?” approach. ChatGPT hallucinates a lot of nonsense? Our own brains hallucinate a lot of nonsense. Facial recognition misidentifies criminal suspects? Eyewitnesses routinely misidentify criminal suspects. There are more and less sophisticated versions of these claims. One liability of this way of thinking is that an emphasis on our own crappiness, alongside reasons of convenience, laziness, or technological fetish, might function as an alibi—an excuse to grant unearned and unexamined authority to machines. The adverse consequences of this attitude include runaway feedback loops: below-average pilots crash planes, we compensate with an increasing reliance on automated systems, the automated systems make allowances for even worse pilots (who lack the skill or training to recover the craft when the automated system fails). But, on the whole, the contrast between inscrutable machines and terminal human mediocrity is once again supposed to be soothing. Machines might make mistakes, but these mistakes aren’t really qualitatively different from the mistakes we ourselves make. Machines, one might add, are subject to iterative engineering. Once we give up our irrational bias in favor of human rationality—once we realize that we should prefer self-driving cars that get into occasional horrific crashes to human-driven cars that get into frequent horrific crashes—we’ll resign ourselves to our dependence on these tools in the way that we reconciled ourselves to reliance on the plow.

Both of these modes of consolation—by precedent or by analogy—rest on the assumption that history is continuous, that change is more or less gradual and invisible to those experiencing it, and that humanity will remain in a position to address new complications in the way it has addressed, with varying degrees of success, prior ones. All of these assumptions may very well prove correct, and it’s not at all unreasonable to make them, or to find them persuasive. They provide a warrant to worry about the things we’re used to worrying about rather than the things we don’t even know how to worry about. But they ignore, elide, or diminish the possibility, however far-fetched, that we might have to confront a genuine discontinuity.

The crux of the residual case for doom is the alignment problem—the prospect that an artificial superintelligence might have no use for human values. (These values are usually under-specified but might include the belief that life is sacrosanct, humans have dignity, etc.) An advanced A.I. wouldn’t even need to be hostile; indifference is equally unfortunate. You can give an advanced black box of a machine a clear directive and find that it executes its goals without sentiment: you ask a housecleaning robot to reduce untidiness and it kills your dog. One of the ways to relieve oneself of this apocalyptic concern is to decide that intelligence and values are necessarily correlated, that an entity of sufficient intellect would perforce absorb our ethical concerns. In this case, however, no argument by continuity—by precedent or analogy—could possibly make us feel better: we are acquainted with the existence of murderous sociopaths. Murderous sociopaths are a kind of existence proof of what people in the A.I.-safety community call the orthogonality thesis—the idea that intelligence and morality exist in different dimensions. For the past few hundred thousand years, we’ve been able to contain murderous sociopaths before they confronted us with total annihilation. But a machine superintelligence that takes the form of a murderous sociopath, or becomes in any case allied to a conventional murderous sociopath, might very well command resources of an unprecedented order. It would be both genuinely bad and genuinely new. Such an existential threat might seem wildly implausible or remote. But it, by definition, would seem to flout any attempts to provide historical easement.

At first glance, David Runciman’s “The Handover: How We Gave Control of Our Lives to Corporations, States, and AIs” seems poised to furnish just such a reassurance—to domesticate the alignment problem. Runciman, a witty and refined writer, is a professor of politics at Cambridge and a contributing editor to the London Review of Books, which has also provided a home for his enlivening podcasts. He is also the Fourth Viscount Runciman of Doxford, a title that inspires not inconsiderable faith in his commitment to historical continuity. Runciman’s basic argument, which unfolds in the elegantly shaggy manner of a Peripatetic seminar, is that the alignment problem is not in fact an anomaly, and that the coming singularity might best be historicized as the Second Singularity. Runciman identifies a precedent and an analogy for the alignment problem in our relationship to two other artificial agencies: the state and the corporation. This idea, in his account, first emerged in 1651, when Thomas Hobbes described the Leviathan as, in Runciman’s words, “a kind of robot.” Hobbes, of course, didn’t call it a robot—a term that first appeared in the nineteen-twenties—but he did elaborate his vision of the state as an “Artificiall Man; though of greater stature and strength than the Naturall, for whose protection and defence it was intended.” As Runciman glosses the concept, “We assemble it in the same way we might construct any other machine of moving parts. This one is designed to resemble its creators. But it can do things we cannot. It is much more powerful than we are. That’s why we built it in the first place.” The state has the supra-human advantages of durability and reliability, and serves as a means of coördination.

Runciman continues, “The Leviathan is not a problem-solving machine, like a smartphone. It is a decision-making mechanism, like a set of dice. It might not give you the right answer—it will simply give you an answer.” In theory, these answers reflect the will of the polity. “But because it comprises people,” he writes, “once the people get better at coming up with answers, the state should too. These dice can think for themselves.” In practice, however, Hobbes is generally regarded as a pessimist. Of the Leviathan, Runciman writes: “Its argument assumes that humans are incapable of peaceful co-existence without franchising out our decision-making power to an unaccountable higher body. At that point, we will have lost control of our fate, because whatever the state decides becomes our choice too.” In Hobbes’s time—of the well-known “war of all against all”—these powers were arbitrary and absolute, but this was the price to be paid for security. Runciman readily concedes that we have spent the past few hundred years constructing better mechanisms for democratic accountability, but “the basic machinery of the modern state continues to bear the hallmark of a mechanistic understanding of politics set out nearly four centuries ago. We still have governments that take decisions for us on matters of life and death, including war and peace.” He continues,

We are bound by those decisions whether we like them or not. The state has the power to enforce its choices against anyone who resists, though it may not choose to use it. Most of the time, in contemporary democracies, these arbitrary powers are sufficiently buried beneath layers of legal limitations and political pushback that we barely notice them. But sometimes, in a crisis, they reveal themselves. Then we must acknowledge that we are still living with the Leviathan—older, wiser, but recognisably the same as before.

Without belaboring the comparison, Runciman elaborates a case for the state, which binds human reason in a lattice of rules and procedures, as an algorithmic device. The twinned essential functions of the state—the ability to issue debt and the prerogative of war—have undergirded its durability and afforded it a capacity for long-term planning that has thus far eluded other forms of human organization. For those of us privileged enough to escape the brutality of the state in the service of imperialist extraction, the state has considerably enhanced our longevity, wealth, and happiness. But the state, even if it comprises the human, is not itself human. “Our ability to fulfil our potential—to live longer, richer, more varied lives—was made possible only by handing over some of our capabilities to artificial versions of ourselves, which do not suffer from our natural frailties. We have had to give up features of our essential humanity—some of what Arendt would call our capacity for independent action—to enjoy these other benefits,” Runciman writes.

So it should come as no surprise that the state cannot be counted upon to demonstrate a commitment to human values. It has an artificial life of its own, even as it acts through us—when we are asked to kill in wartime, we are granted leave from human values. States are “persons without scruples,” Runciman notes, and we have had hundreds of years to grow familiar with this contrivance and its discontents. The machine-learning era is, in some sense, merely an extension of the mechanical one. “Let’s not kid ourselves that the age of AI—with the looming challenges of black-box decision-making and algorithmic procedures whose outcomes are a mystery even to their creators—poses a unique challenge for human understanding. Just look at your own life. Do you fully understand where the group decisions come from that shape who you are?,” Runciman writes. “The fact that groups are made out of people doesn’t make them any easier to see inside than other kinds of machines. The black boxes are all around us already. In one sense, at least, they are us.”

One of the things that make the machine of the capitalist state work is that some of its powers have been devolved upon other artificial agents—corporations. Where Runciman compares the state to a general A.I., one that exists to serve a variety of functions, corporations have been granted a limited range of autonomy in the form of what might be compared to a narrow A.I., one that exists to fulfill particular purposes that remain beyond the remit or the interests of the sovereign body. Corporations can thus be set up in free pursuit of a variety of idiosyncratic human enterprises, but they, too, are robotic insofar as they transcend the constraints and the priorities of their human members. The failure mode of governments is to become “exploitative and corrupt,” Runciman notes. The failure mode of corporations, as extensions of an independent civil society, is that “their independence undoes social stability by allowing those making the money to make their own rules.” There is only a “narrow corridor”—a term Runciman borrows from the economists Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson—in which the artificial agents balance each other out, and citizens get to enjoy the sense of control that emerges from an atmosphere of freedom and security. The ideal scenario is, in other words, a kludgy equilibrium.