Publishers Weekly
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Society is on the precipice of “abandoning constitutional democracy... and even humanity itself for... government by machine,” warns Pulitzer winner Lepore (We the People) in this powerful anti-AI treatise. She frames the book as a follow-up to Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), which analyzed “how the machinery of modern life” was “render humans superfluous.” What Arendt perceived was a glimpse of the present, Lepore argues, as the dream of today’s tech oligarchs, what Lepore calls the Artificial State, is “less a state” proper “than the dream of being without one, the dream of the severing of humans... from one another” to be “ruled... by machines owned by corporations.” Lepore tracks the rise of the Artificial State along multiple trajectories, among them the post-WWII spread of computer technologies with military origins into realms of “commerce and journalism, politics and governance.” That story begins with the Simulmatics corporation, a 1950s purveyor of “simulations of human intelligence” whose first client was the Democratic National Committee, and concludes in the 2010s with a Democratic political class that maintained “an almost religious devotion to data analytics” even as algorithmic logic’s spreading into the world of social media birthed a reactionary populism their models couldn’t compute. That populism, fueled by an existential fear that “everything was... fake,” was “itself a feature of the Artificial State,” Lepore asserts, calling it “a prison... of mirrors” that ought to be smashed by “the nearest rock.” It’s a fiery cri de coeur. (Aug.)

Book list
From Booklist, Copyright © American Library Association. Used with permission.

Madonna sang about living in the material world. Thoreau mused about living deliberately in nature. Lepore wonders and worries about whether twenty-first-century humans aren’t already citizens of an artificial state, in which digitized information and predictive algorithms influence politics and economics, escalating warfare and destroying nature. AI’s presence in our present condition can be creative and empowering, but its dominion over the future may be dangerously ubiquitous and oppressive. Distinguished Harvard professor and historian, staff writer for the New Yorker, and the award-winning and best-selling author of 20 books, Lepore posits that individuals and institutions have the wherewithal to guide the trajectory of AI towards positive ends, but only if we understand the foundations of its development and the motivations of its developers. An ardent observer of the artificial state, Lepore traces its history through literary influences, such as science fiction and its metamorphosis from simple mechanical engineering to potentially world-destroying system reconfigurations. Though alarmed, Lepore provides “know-thy-enemy” reassurance that societies can still wrest back control, but it will take the wisdom of citizens and legislators to recognize and dismantle myriad threats. Staggering, sobering, yet essential reading for all who want to understand the arc of this increasingly digital, online, corporate, and out-of-control world. HIGH-DEMAND

Kirkus
Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

The noted historian andNew Yorker staffer looks into a future ruled by machines. Thirty-odd years ago, writes Lepore, liberal democracies of old were being transformed into both authoritarian or autocratic regimes and by “automatocracy, rule by automation, government by machine-driven computation, prediction, and persuasion.” In this pointed rejoinder to Hannah Arendt’sOrigins of Totalitarianism (1951), which foresaw a world in which humans were essentially superfluous, Lepore charts a long history that extends deep into the “machine age,” beginning in the 17th century, which saw “the artificial as existing not only outside the natural but above it, an improvement upon it.” In this conception, humans were fallible, while machines faithfully and unfailingly obeyed the rules set for them. A logical progression followed in the 1920s with the rise of the Technocracy movement, a variety of fascism widely accepted in the U.S. that held that far from being free and equal, humans should be governed by scientists and engineers who alone “have the intelligence and education to understand the industrial operations that lie at the heart of twentieth-century life.” It’s a short hop from there to the present, with tech billionaires pushing AI and, in the case of the influential “self-described ‘neo-monarchist’” Curtis Yarvin, a dictatorship aided by it. In all this, Lepore writes, it is not just the human animal that suffers but all animals and all habitats, which can only worsen with the incessant demands for energy, rare earths, and water that AI requires. And what “humans crave, in that artificial world, is nature,” a nature that is increasingly silenced. This undemocratic world, benefiting only the wealthy at the expense of all else, is a prison of screens and keyboards from which, she writes memorably, “What is required is to imagine an escape, and then to conduct it.” A deeply learned dive into the frightening visions of technocrats past and present. Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.