Rule by automation

The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State

by Jill Lepore

Published by Liveright

316 pages $29.99

 

By Jennifer Szalai

You might wonder how a liberal democracy run by fallible humans turns into an automated regime ruled by robot overlords. In her preface to The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State, the historian Jill Lepore describes her new 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”. 

“Rule by automation” sounds like the stuff of political nightmares — of surveillance and dragnets and mechanised tyranny. Citing Hannah Arendt’s warnings about the connection between totalitarianism and automation, Lepore vigorously condemns the Artificial State, which she defines as “the rule of humans by machines manufactured by corporations”. It is “something inhuman” that undermines nearly every element of democratic life. 

 

But our current predicament isn’t just a matter of tech billionaires conspiring to generate profits by making us beholden to their technologies. Lepore, a historian at Harvard and a staff writer for  The New Yorker, traces an origin story for the Artificial State that is at once more surprising and more tragic. It initially emerged out of the “perfectly sensible” desire to make government run more smoothly and efficiently. She charts the story of how we went from counting humans in a census, to registering them with identification numbers, to treating them as annoying impediments to the next data centre that will power the artificial intelligence (AI) that will take their jobs. 

The experience of living in the Artificial State might feel new, but Lepore says the dynamics are in fact extremely old. She helpfully draws a “very schematic” connection between different forms of the state and forms of knowledge. A monarchy or theocracy revolves around religion and mystery; a republic revolves around secular discernment and facts. The Artificial State is oriented around data and prediction. By devaluing and degrading human wisdom, it slides toward authoritarianism.

In this way, the Artificial State doesn’t so much progress from its predecessors as come full circle. Instead of the divine right of kings, we get the divine rule by machines, “because in the age of data, not gods but machines know what humans cannot”. Yet again, power is maintained by “mystification,” she writes, in the form of rule by algorithms and corporations. Consider the right-wing programmer-turned-blogger Curtis Yarvin, who has long promoted techno-monarchy as the country’s salvation. At Tesla, Elon Musk gave himself the title Technoking. 

It should be obvious by now that the billionaires of Silicon Valley are Lepore’s ultimate villains. As a historian, she is justifiably offended by their contempt for the past, as well as what she deems their defective reading comprehension skills. She indicts them for “taking science fiction rather too literally” and “reading cautionary tales as instruction manuals”. While the first half of her book provides a history of the Artificial State’s rise, the second half uses science fiction to explore the Artificial State’s future — including its doom, which she believes is inevitable, largely because the billionaires understand only half of what they’re doing. 

“The architects of the Artificial State no longer knew, as humans, how to search for meaning in a text”, she writes. “They took more than a century of warnings about building a particular set of tools and instead of heeding those warnings, they decided to build those tools”. She offers a close reading of Musk’s complete misreading of Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy  Musk has called it the book that influenced him most, somehow unable to register that it is, in Lepore’s words, “an eviscerating indictment of imperialism, the uber-rich and unregulated capitalism”. 

Or maybe Musk simply doesn’t care. Lepore laments “the diminishment of the prestige and influence of the humanities, year by year, decade by decade”, and attributes Silicon Valley’s “myopia” to the “abandonment of the humanities in the age of data”. These guys, in other words, don’t know how to read. I’m as appalled as anyone by the devaluation of a humanities education. But would better close reading skills really save them — and therefore us — from the abyss? 

Lepore, to be clear, doesn’t say anything so crude. But even as she elegantly conveys the nightmare of the Artificial State, her wistful treatment of what it’s replacing can verge on sentimental: “The liberal nation-state requires the consent of the governed, the voice vote, quavering; the raised hand, sweating; the signature, wavering; the heart, pulsing”. This sounds pretty far removed from the experiences of the vast majority of Americans. The busy citizen working a poorly paid job and rushing to the polls before they close probably isn’t thinking about the quavering voice or the sweaty hand. 

But perhaps such harried disenchantment is part of the problem. Throughout her book, Lepore threads a bravura discussion of the relationship between the rise of the Artificial State and the destruction of the environment. We replaced animals by machines, and now we can imagine robots doing the same to us. 

Parts of The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State read like an elegy for a vanishing world. But Lepore says it isn’t too late. We humans know how to make a mess of things; we also know how to imagine a different future.

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The reviewer is the nonfiction book critic for The Times

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