Dr. Jill Lepore on why AI backlash is vital for the future

Today, I’m talking with Harvard professor and New Yorker staff writer Dr. Jill Lepore about her new book, The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State, which comes out on August 25. Jill is one of the best writers there is at identifying institutional patterns in history, and Decoder is a show about systems, so this book could not possibly be more in our zone.  You build systems by measuring things — gathering information, quantifying it as data, and taking action on it. And Jill’s big thesis in the book is that this kind of systemic measurement is really a dehumanizing act, one that flattens human concerns into something, well, artificial. These artificial structures touch everything — not just in the more obvious places like in apps or AI, but all the way up to politics and governance itself, and Jill’s insights here are a telling portrait of the way Big Tech and its billionaire figureheads have managed to break the very idea of the state itself.   Verge subscribers, don’t forget you get exclusive access to ad-free Decoder wherever you get your podcasts. Head here. Not a subscriber? You can sign up here. You’ll hear Jill tell me she wanted to write a “kind of grumpy book,” but in my reading, it’s a pretty dead-ahead look at the last century and a half of technological and social developments and how we got to a place where bots are maybe running everything. Jill’s idea of the artificial state starts with the very idea of quantification, from the first stabs at taking a census thousands of years ago to the invention of modern political polling in the 1930s. But where she really sees a big pivot — and the era she and I talked about most — is in the 1980s, when we saw the emergence of the Silicon Valley culture we have today, when computers got personal, and when computer-aided targeting and microtargeting really truly became both possible and commonplace, both for ads and for political campaigns. What Jill and I did disagree about is some of her pessimism about the internet, because the internet is what made jobs and careers like mine — and businesses like The Verge, and shows like Decoder — even possible at all. There really was a great democratizing of access that happened in the late 20th century and into the 21st, as people got online, and not all of it was as illusory as maybe the great hopes for Twitter after the Arab Spring turned out to be. But as I said, Jill thinks in systems, and so her response, about the way systems of power keep adapting to how people use new technology, was as illuminating as ever. Of course, we also talked about the future — including where she thinks she still sees hope for the future. And yes, that does include college kids booing the AI CEOs at graduation ceremonies. Okay: Dr Jill Lepore, on the Artificial State. Here we go. This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity. Dr. Jill Lepore, you’re a staff writer at The New Yorker, you’re a professor of history and law at Harvard University, and most importantly, you’re the author of a new book, The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State. Welcome to Decoder. Hey, thanks for having me. I am really excited to talk to you. I’m a big fan of your work over the years. And I have to say, this book is one of the most Decoder-y, Verge-y, Nilay-Patel-strike-zone books of all time. [Laughs] Wow. I’m not sure how to take that, but I guess that’s good. The producers and I just had a thrill ride reading this book. It is essentially about how computers and measurement flatten us and then systems can take advantage of that flattening. Like I said, it’s in the strike zone. So let’s just start at the very beginning for folks. The book is called The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State. Tell us what the “artificial state” is. Define it so we can start from that foundation. What I mean by the artificial state is a successor to the liberal nation-state, the constitutional democracy under which our freedom of speech, free discourse, and constitutional rights are central to our experience as citizens within a nation-state. We talk a lot about democratic decay and democratic backsliding, and there’s a whole public discussion of what’s happening with democracy, but I don’t think we talk about the nation-state as much as we might. And that is to say the state itself. And so what I mean by the ‘artificial state’ is a state in which more and more of the functions of the nation-state have been taken over by private multinational corporations. The easiest example of that to think about is what is euphemistically called the public square, which is where people get information about how to vote, what’s going on in the world, how to make decisions, and how to exercise their rights and duties as citizens. Our public discourse is almost entirely privatized and owned by corporations. As many, many people have demonstrated — it’s not news to your listeners or to anyone — the priority of public discourse is not the free expression of ideas and

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