Front Burner - Is AI inevitable? Jill Lepore says no

Episode Date: October 13, 2026

In late September, amid mounting warnings about the risks of AI, the CEOs of six of the world’s most powerful technology companies signed an agreement on artificial intelligence. U.S. President Donald Trump called the accord “morally binding”. But it isn’t legally binding – it’s essentially a pledge from the world’s biggest tech companies to police themselves.Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Jill Lepore has a name for this: the “artificial state”. A world run not by democratically elected governments, but by the billionaires who control technology companies.Lepore’s new book, The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State, explains how we got here, why she thinks it can’t last, and how the public can push back.  Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts 

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This is a CBC podcast. Hi everyone, I'm J.B. Poisson. In late September, U.S. President Donald Trump invited the heads of some of the biggest tech companies in the world to have lunch at the White House. We had a very, very good meeting, very productive, extremely friendly. On one side of the president sat Mark Zuckerberg and Jensen Wong, the CEO of Envidia. On the other, Elon Musk and Sunder Pichai, the head of Google. These are the most brilliant people in the world. and the job they've done is unbelievable.

We have a very big lead, and we're going to keep our lead. After lunch, the CEOs, along with Anthropics, Dario Amadeh and Open AIs Great Brockman, signed a morally binding, but not legally binding, agreement on artificial intelligence. And the biggest people in the world signed that, and I signed it as president, and it really is a form of protection. President Trump said it was almost like a constitution. But if it's a constitution, it's one that nobody voted for and that only the tech companies themselves can enforce. Jill Lepore has a name for this, the artificial state, a world run not by democratically elected governments, but by the people who own technology companies.

Lapoor is a Pulitzer-winning historian at Harvard and a staff writer for The New Yorker. Her latest book is The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State, and she joins me now. Jill, hi. It's great to have you here. Oh, thanks so much for having me. I want to start with this AI Constitution. You want a Pulitzer for a book about the U.S. Constitution. So I'm actually just curious, what did you make of this one? So it's not a constitution for one thing.

And it reminds me a little bit of the way that tech companies have really used the language of liberal democratic institutions as a cover for their amassing of extraordinary unprecedented amount of power. both within the U.S. and around the world. So in 2015 after Brexit and then the 2016, Trump election, Facebook was under a lot of pressure to deal with the Cambridge Analytica scandal, the fake news, Russian interference allegations. And they said, don't worry. Don't worry. You're pretty little heads about it. You democratically elected governments. We've decided to start our own Supreme Court. Facebook unveiling details of its independent oversight board is kind of a Supreme Court of Supreme Court of. sorts for Facebook content decisions. Like, that's not a Supreme Court.

Like, a judiciary is answerable to the executive that appoints it, to the people that elect the executive that appoints it. Supreme Court justices can be impeached. Like, that is not a corporation cannot have a Supreme Court in lieu of being answerable to a government of laws, to the rule of law itself. Sam Altman of OpenAI a few years ago said he thought an AI president would be better than a human president? I'll tell you something I love about that.

The fact that it can go around and talk to every person on Earth, understand their exact preferences at a very deep level, and then optimize for the collective preferences of humanity or of citizens of the U.S., that's awesome. And then, of course, earlier this year, Anthropic released a Constitution for Claude, which is also not what a constitution is any more

than this so-called agreement is a constitution, right? A constitution, which is one of the great inventions of modernity, constitutions as they emerge in the late 18th century have like several key requirements. One is that they are drafted by special conventions whose delegates are specially elected by the people to represent their interests in enacting fundamental law that protects the safety and advances the happiness and the tranquility of a people. And that once drafted, those documents are returned to the people for their inspection, for ratification. And even if the people, and even if the people, ratify such a constitution, the people retain the ability to alter or amend or abolish those

constitutions. It's not just a word you throw around like, you know, you and I could decide that, you know, we're going to agree, you know, to be vegan for the next month. And we'd call that a constitution. A constitution. It's just like, our vegan constitution. But also, please, let's not agree to that. Fair. So I want to get into your book in a minute. But of course, this all comes on the heels of a bunch of stories that called into question the safety of our current AI tools. In the last few weeks alone, we've learned that OpenAI's models hacked a government health portal in Australia and potentially infiltrated dozens of other organizations too. According to Axios, OpenAI and Anthropic are investigating tens of thousands of instances

of their models misbehaving. And earlier in September, of course, a researcher named Jacob Coxon left Anthropics saying the people building AI earnestly believed that it could kill us all, by the end of the decade. Explain this in the simplest terms. You truly believe that AI could kill us all in less than a decade? Yes, I do. And it's not just me. Many people working in the industry, including people, executives, senior researchers,

all genuinely believe that there is a substantial probability that this technology could kill everyone. It is hard to know which stories are hype, which ones we should take seriously. But you're a historian and you're thinking about these things over a much, longer arc than I think the rest of us are. And when you see this constant barrage of headlines, how do you figure out which ones actually matter? Yeah, I think it's very difficult to figure that out. I think we should take seriously that these people who are issuing these warnings, which they have been issuing for years now. It's not a new thing. I mean, more than a decade,

these warnings have been issued by the very people who are building these tools. But I think, honestly, the thing that I think matters and is worth attending to in response to those alarm bells is how vulnerable countries around the world are to the consequences of the political dysfunction in the United States. Because the reason those people are now making those calls is that not just AI, but social media, the internet, the personal, back to the, you know, emergence of the first personal computers in the 1980s, have been left by American legislatures to lie beyond the power of the law. And like, we can trace that history back to the election Ronald Reagan in 1980,

who came to office on a promise to deregulate the economy. Implementing a Milton Friedman style, like the free market will solve all problems. What we need to do is roll back all the environmental regulations of the 1960s and 70s. Regulation stifles growth in innovation. And the biggest possibility for growth in innovation in the American economy at the time was the electronics and computer industry coming out of California. which had been Reagan's home state. And so that was really what Reagan enacted in his eight years in office

was really the deregulation that gave American corporations a kind of economic and political power and a status above the law that may have had many advantages for those companies, but you carry that down decades down the line. And you see it lies behind a kind of libertarian commitment in the 1990s that the Internet will lie beyond the power of the law. It'll be in Wild West. Like, that's why social media is unregulated. That's why we have the social media that we have.

So by the time you get to the release of AI stuff, it's those same people. It's that same culture, like they, as corporations, have understood that their technologies lie beyond the power of the law, partly because of that political philosophy, their commitment to kind of Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman, but also because members of Congress don't do the work to even understand the tools that they're building.

The Internet is not something that you just dump some. something on. It's not a big truck. It's a series of tubes. We believe that we need to offer a service that everyone can afford, and we're committed to doing that. If so, how do you sustain a business model in which users don't pay for your service? Senator, we run ads. Finsta is one of your products or services. We're not talking about Google or Apple. It's Facebook, correct? Finsta is slang for a type of account.

Okay. It's not a product. It's not a product. we, I'm not sure to understand exactly what you're asking. AI is kind of a fancy thing. First of all, it's two letters. It means artificial intelligence. You kind of fast forward down to 2026, and these guys look, well, we actually, these tools turns out are lawless. They're answerable to no law.

You know, I wrote a piece of further New Yorker last week in which I argued that we ought to understand robots as outlaws. Like there is a way in kind of legal doctrine to understand what, you know, know, AI, AI agents, humanoid robots, androids, chatbots, the whole class of things that I call robots, are essentially outlaws. And that's true around the world, in spite of other national legislatures, or, you know, the EU enacting laws, they really can't go far enough to control these U.S.-based companies. So in a way, it's sort of like it's that American politics doesn't work, that Congress hasn't taken its responsibility seriously.

has repercussions all around the world now for these technologies have a global reach. I mean, are you ultimately saying that the problem is a political one, not a technological one? I do think the problem is a political one. There's every reason to think these tools can be used for all kinds of magnificent achievements. And yet you see that people just kind of surrender to their inevitability and to a kind of reckless headlong adoption of them. I mean, just think this is to moves outside the ambit of my book by many, many, many degrees.

But like, when my kids were in school, suddenly everybody had a Google Chromebook and kids all had to have Facebook accounts in order to play sports. And a lot of parents were like, we don't actually want our kids on screens all day. And we don't want our kids to have a Facebook account. But the school is like, you know, it's this urban public school. This is what we're doing. We have a contract with Google. Isn't it so great that they've given our school district these free computers?

Like, well, no. Because it's actually like, where's it? Like, where's the empirical evidence that this is going to improve their education? We can't wait for the empirical evidence. Isn't it so great that these corporations are giving us these tools? And, you know, those very schools now have gotten rid of all their Google Chromebooks. Kids are no longer allowed to have social media accounts. They can't even have their phones at schools and turn around.

And now what's happening in those schools? Well, but every kid has a Claude account and we have a certain token. Like at my, I teach at Harvard, our students are given the option of a $2,500 a month token budget to use Claude. at a time we're like laying off staff and we have research fund crisis. So it's, it's, it's, it's not just the U.S. Congress that has failed to say, is this the right thing for us now? People just kind of get like wild-eyed with like, wow, isn't that so great? As opposed to evaluating it. Is this, you know, maybe it is great. Maybe this is be a great tool for X, but not for Y. Maybe it's a great tool only for Z. We don't know. Like, let's find out. And I think that

headlong quality, the kind of aura of inevitability of this, you know, historians refer to this as the technological sublime. Like the idea that like technology will solve all problems. It does a great disservice to the tools themselves. Like I, a source of

real sorrow for me is that I think artificial, the kinds of things that artificial intelligence can do in fields from public health to oceanography to astronomy is and ought to be truly tremendously exciting. And yet people like, you're being asked to, like, get these tools so you can ask, Claude, what to name you new puppy?

And that's going to require a data center in your neighborhood. Like, it's a kind of crazy-making misuse of the possibility of technological change. You write in your book that what they're trying to do is build a, quote, future in which humans are ruled and many replaced by machines owned by corporations owned by Silicon Valley billionaires. I just wonder if you could lay out for me some of the evidence of how they're trying to do that. Yeah, so I spend a lot of time trying to be careful to say like when I talk about this artificial state that most of it was just kind of by accident. Like people, people who are building personal computers and wiring up the internet and developing web protocols or

new apps, like, they're not out to oppress humanity. Like, I think it's really important to say that. I don't have, like, a conspiratorial worldview here. But I do think there kind of came a turning point in the 20 teens with the kind of new political power that social media was revealed to wield that a small number of these tech moguls, like, really, we're talking like six, seven, eight people began to think that. think about global and even extraterrestrial power. And the kind of bogus PR crap that they said to venture capitalists for years like,

our new app will change the future of work. Our new apple, change the future of whatever. Like that they kind of came to believe their own messianic pap. I mean, I think of Zuckerberg in this way. Like when he talks about, you know, last year, META announced that their new mission was to build a personal superintelligence for everyone. A lot has been written about the scientific and economic advances that AI can bring. And I'm really optimistic about this.

What I think an even more meaningful impact in our lives is going to come from everyone having a personal superintelligence that helps you achieve your goals, create what you want to see in the world, be a better friend, and grow to become the person that you aspire to be. As opposed to their old mission, which was to connect all of humanity and really end more, the messianic nature of those messages, I think they came to themselves believe and consider themselves to be prophets. And because they also believe the tools they were building were existentially dangerous to humans as a species, they then came to understand themselves as the guardians of civilization. And that's delusional. But, you know,

They, they have, you know, for some years now, talked about, again, I'm talking like a very small people, but talked about their power and the tools that they were building as beyond law, beyond the nation state, and not answerable to democracy. I mean, there's this kind of telling moment where Sam Altman said in an interview, like, if I weren't in on this, I'd be like, why do these people get to decide what happens to me? but he is in on it. He's in on it with like six other guys who have a very odd vision of a future, the fantasy that they have for the future, I think is not one that most people living today find attractive. I wonder if you could say more for me

on the examples or the evidence you see that they're trying to like rule and replace humans. I think there's a lot of kind of cultural stuff that you could point to that's more like Bellwethers. I don't remember that like Billboard campaign in San Francisco where it was like Don't Hire Humans was the slogan of this company. A kind of willful,

kind of joyful sense that the tools that this or the other company was offering up will make it possible to reduce your human workforce and replace humans with AI. You know, there was this telling interview that Bill Gates gave, I think last year, you know, when he was asked.

I mean, will we still need humans? Not for most things. You know, we'll decide. So, and I don't think Gates wishes for that. I mean, Gates has recently been writing that he thinks what we need are human reserves. The idea here is that you would decide in advance that things like child care or elder care or some portion of medical care, some portion of education, although you could have some AI enhancement,

that you would maintain the employment and call those things human reserved. So I think he's one of the people, actually, he's kind of reeling and kind of trying to turn away from a notion that it's a great thing to be able to replace humans. But, you know, you could say, and I would entirely agree,

there's an extraordinary body of evidence that most of what these, most of what people who are working in tech forms are hoping to do is, improve people's lives, right? Like make it easier for a doctor to read test results more quickly with the use of AI and with the greater accuracy and discrimination and communicate more quickly and more accurately the results of those tests to people living and really, like, that's the kind of

thing that most people are doing. Yeah. And so I think it's really important not to be like, oh, my God, everybody who's developing a technology is a monster. That's absolutely, absolutely just empirically, not the case. I'm talking about the political manifestos of a small number of people. This ascent isn't for everyone. You need grit to climb this high this often.

You've got to be an underdog that always overdelivers. You've got to be 6,500 hospital staff, 1,000 doctors, all doing so much with so little. You've got to be Scarborough. Defined by our uphill battle and always striving to war. It's new heights. And you can help us keep climbing. Donate at lovescarborough.cairbo.ca. I almost bailed on brunch this morning.

I opened my banking app before leaving, saw a few unexpected expenses, and just felt that instant wave of stress. I hear you. Money stress is real, and it's exhausting when it feels never-ending. Yeah. It feels like every time I get a handle on things,

three unexpected bills hit at once. I'm just trying to get to a point where managing money doesn't feel so overwhelming. Honestly, just being open about it helps take away some of that pressure. You're definitely not alone in feeling that way. Thanks. It really does help to just talk it through and hear how other people are handling it. Money is a big part of life, but you don't have to navigate the conversation alone. If you're looking for real stories, an open dialogue, check out, count us in.

web series where host Michelle Spina sits down with members of Gen Z to share real perspectives and experiences on money, life, and what comes next. Paid content with Desjardé. Now streaming on CBC Gem. Dario Amade, the CEO of Anthropic, has said that he thinks AI could cure most major diseases

in the next five to 10 years create a world of abundance and empowerment and ushering a renaissance of democracy and freedom. Do you think he believes that? I do think he believes that. I mean, on the other hand, I would maybe point to Alex Karp, who's the CEO of Palantir, who wrote a book a few years ago called The Technological Republic, which makes some of the same claims largely with regard to the West,

which is what Karp is concerned with. But that displays, like, there's nothing in the technological republic that actually displays any real interest in republicanism like lowercase R is a form of government. He really means something in which technology has a greater capacity to more accurately inform governments about how best to be to run. I do think that the Anthropical eye really means that I think there's something quite sincere there. And I think you can spend a lot of time looking at the different ways that Anthropic and Open AI have addressed what some years ago was called Democratic AI. and what within Anthropic was for a time called constitutional AI?

We came up with this idea of constitutional AI, which is training AI systems to follow a set of principles. This allows you to get up, say, you know, in front of, you know, Congress and say these are the principles according to which we trained our model. But I also think these people are not political philosophers, and they're not political theorists. And so, again, like, just calling it democratic or using the word constitution does not make it so.

One of the, I think it was anthropic, one of the anthropic experiments involved crowdsourcing the writing of a constitution for Claude by having, like, a very large number of online contributors respond to and volunteer lines of texts for such a constitution. I don't think the people that were engaged in that project had bad motives. They were actually trying to do an experiment. But it just reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of how the drafting of a constitution works.

It's not that you couldn't, that couldn't be a piece of the process, right? Some kind of crowdsourced input. But actually, a democracy does require people to sit in a room together and deliberate face-to-face and to go through multiple drafting processes. and you can't always scale up the human capacity for conversation, for compromise, for deliberation, for argument, for friction, for coalition building. So, I mean, I guess to answer your question, like, I think it is important to recognize that it's not some kind of grand conspiracy. But if we were to say, okay, well, they do, they are actually interested in building a

that is better than the kind of way, the way that we live now, I think we'd have to really ask ourselves, do we think as a people, say, the Canadian people or the American people, that having an AI president would be better than a human president? That's actually a decision that we're supposed to make, that these companies are not supposed to make. And that's why it's, I think, important to say, they are increasingly making these decisions. And I just want to ask you this straight. I mean, you don't think that this will lead to more prosperity. Oh, I don't know. I mean, I think I, who knows?

I mean, I think there's some of these claims that are palpably untrue. So that we need AI to solve climate change is just not true. Like, we know how to solve climate change. We just actually don't have the political will to do it. Many people have written about that. And in fact, the AI buildup, of course, which has involved all of these companies abandoning their net zero. carbon emissions, 2030 goals, and building fossil fuel-powered data centers is obviously worsening the climate change. So, like, there's some places you can just kind of call

bullshit. But, you know, I don't know. I don't know. I mean, but I think what's really important is to recognize much of what is presented as a benefit is about the reduction of cost and the speed and the increase of speed and of efficiency of transactions that are mediated by a machine. And what's never really reckoned with or quantified are the losses. So, you know, I mean, an example that, you know, I was speaking here in Toronto the other night, and I gave this example, which has nothing to do with politics. But like, I have green tomatoes on my vines, and I do not know what to do. I'm a terrible gardener.

I hate green tomatoes. I don't want to eat them. Like, if I just let them rot, well, it might be what I have, like, some kind of problem in my soil. If I have to pick them, what should I do with them? Could I just wait a few more days and see if any of them become? What should I do? And I could ask quad. And I would get a really good answer.

Like, I would get actually an excellent answer and be instant. And it would, to me, seem to cost me nothing. But what I could do instead is go knock on my next door neighbor's house. She probably has green tomatoes too and be like, what are you doing with your green tomatoes? Do you have any advice? And then we might sit down and have a cup of coffee together. And I might find out that, like, her granddaughter's been sick and she really wants to visit her granddaughter and help her daughter out, but she can't because who's going to take her

of her dog? Well, I could take care of her dog. And we could end up spending a half an hour talking. And it's not just that one time. It's the every time that you go to the machine for what you used to get from a friend or a family member, maybe that's a political conversation. Maybe it's like, what do you think about the library budget in town? I'm not sure if we should vote for that.

Like, what, you know, what are, what are you feeling about that? Like, that those daily interactions with people in your neighborhood and your community and your city, the more and more we replace them with asking a machine, like, it's like it's not surprising that there's a loneliness epidemic and a mental health crisis and people don't trust government and feel alienated. And I get it. Like, like, some days I just would really rather ask Claude. I don't have a half hour to go gab. But like, we, the, we do have to ask ourselves what we're surrendering. And that's not, that's not the fault of the tech companies, right? That's on us. Yeah. So I mean, regardless if this leads to prosperity or, I guess, existential risk, whatever, you seem to be very clear that it's driving us away from each other. Yeah, I think that's indisputable. Like, and there is a whole body of empirical research. And that's not about AI. Like, that's as much about social media and, like, DoorDash and Amazon as it is anything else. I want to ask you about Canada specifically here. We don't have the same massive tech companies, but we do use most of the same technology.

And Canada now has an AI strategy that largely revolves around building up our sovereign AI capacity and encouraging AI adoption. Do you think Canada is an artificial state? No, I don't really think like any place is an artificial state right now. Like I think this is, it's largely a fantasy and also something kind of half built, which is, you know, why I wrote the book when I wrote the book. because I think it's important to say, like, actually, we don't have to just kind of sit back and wait for these U.S.-based tech firms to decide how we're all going to live. Like, people can make their own decisions. Countries can make their own decisions. Communities can make their own decisions.

And so I think it's worth saying, like, well, what have I surrendered? What has my province surrendered? What is the Canadian government looking at surrendering? And where are the advantages here? How close is your country, you think, to becoming an artificial state? I think that it's really the communications infrastructure that's most vulnerable in that, you know, a modern liberal democracy depends on a free and open public sphere where people get together to deliberate. They read the newspaper. They listen to the radio. They watch the news on television. But they go to town meetings. They go to city council meetings. We have obligations in a democracy to deliberate with one another, to participate.

And the way that for many people, social media works, especially, you know, like TikTok for younger people, is like, you're getting your news on platforms that are dominated by bots, on platforms that are owned by corporations that, you know, this is a very old story now. And those corporations' interests in your engagement and your outrage, not in you being a well-informed citizen. And so I think that the privatization, automation, and kind of radicalization of the public sphere, that is the artificial state. That's where it's kind of most holy in place. And that's where I think people have kind of an obligation to really kind of unplug. You've said a few times now that the artificial state is a fantasy. I just want to get some clarity around that. Like what exactly is that fantasy?

Yeah. So, I mean, I think I say in the book, I offer many, many different definitions for the artificial state. And I sort of relieve myself of the obligation of being entirely consistent and bounded there in the way that artificial intelligence has no real stable. definition either. It kind of works totemically. And in a way, I'm trying to work totemically here as well. Because I also mean it in a state, not in the sense of a nation state, but in the sense of the condition in which one lives, right? I spend a lot of time on research about how much time people spend indoors. This is unprecedented, of course,

and there are consequences for people in modern industrial, post-industrial economies, spending, you know, well more than 90% of our time indoors. So I mean it in distinction from the natural state, like from people inhabiting the natural world. And there's a great deal of literature on that as well. And I think by that fantasy, I mean, you know, at the extreme, being reminded that a number of these tech mobiles speak with great enthusiasm about having their their heads removed at death and their brains in some future better world uploaded onto a computer so their consciousness can live eternally. Is it true that you're signed up to be cryonically preserved when you die so that you might

be brought back to life in the future? Yes, but think of it more as an ideological statement. So it's true. Sure. There's a lot of fantasy about life extension and immortality. It's part of the kind of cult of, like at the very extremes of Silicon Valley. Whereas I think for many people, the idea of having your consciousness uploaded to a computer to live immortally is weird at best. Is a nightmare and not a dream.

But there are people who have signed contracts with these cryogenic companies. Well, Sam Altman wants his brain frozen, right? Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, I just think it's an example of a way of living that that could be a fantasy is, I think, a yardstick of like the distance between a life that I find appealing or, you know, I think many people feel. and something that is like, wow, that is a very different way of imagining what it is to be you or to be alive that gets beyond human. And I, like, that's a very extreme position. But I think there's a kind of, there's a kind of person who finds not having to do with other people very, very attractive.

Like, even to the difference of like, I do not like going to the self-checkout lane. Like, I would rather go talk to the cashier, even if it's going to. to be like an annoying cashier. It's going to be unpleasant conversation. I just feel like that's just a person that I am in the world. And that's at maybe that's an extreme. I don't know. That seems to me like an average way of being in the world. I think a lot of people are like, and I think COVID was a great test of that, right? Like what those daily interactions at the butcher shop or at the fishmonger gave you. Yeah. How much you've been a sense of loss? It's energy. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But you know, I recognize there are people who would be like they just don't want to even want to go to the grocery store. I want to order on and they want to deliver.

That's fine. That's great. Like, you know, Vive la de Ferris. But like, those people don't get to decide we never get to go to the grocery store anymore. Though I think the average person listening to this is going to feel like they don't have much say in what that future looks like, right? Like three and five Canadians think AI is a threat to humanity and half want to slow it down. And yet we're being told that we need to build it anyway, either because we don't want China to get there first or because the entire economy is largely dependent. dependent on it working. The latest projections of the U.S. alone have the U.S. spending more than $10 trillion on the AI buildout between 2025 and 2032. So in the face of all that, like, how does the public assert some agency in all of this? Yeah, I mean, I do think looking at how we got here is important again. And like, that's why I wrote the book. And it's also important to not be bamboozled into the idea that, like, if you're not sure this is the way you want things to be

going, that somehow you're a leaded and you're, you know, you're simplistic. And, you're, you know, and you don't even understand it. Poor you, you're so stupid. Because people were begging for electricity, right? People were begging for access to the radio. Like earlier technologies that kind of were kind of networking technologies that made available connections to sources of power and sources of knowledge, people didn't say no. You know, when you asked you someone in 1928 in a rural Canadian town, would you like to have electricity

here? Would you like to be connected to an electrical good? Would you like to have running water? Like, people wanted those things. So that public opinion is against this. That makes this different. It is different. It's not just that it's not that people are stupid or that people don't understand it. It is a different thing. And I think that's kind of empowering to realize. So that's why we mentioned that. And in the U.S. you see the opposition to data centers, which seems as far as I can tell, to still be growing and to be not a partisan, movement is a way that people are trying to say, make it stop. Yeah. You know, it may not be going to stop. And maybe that people like decide, you know, it should go ahead. But like it actually does devolve to the people to make that decision and through their elected

representatives, right? Like it is still, there's still plenty of time to say to the people that you elected and put into office to represent your interests, this is not what we want. This is not what our community wants. this is not where the direction our province wants to go in. We are very open to finding ways that these tools could be great. We think there should be some data centers, but we think there should be some guidelines. We think there should be some ethical guidelines about the adoption of these tools in schools. We think whatever it is in your community that you care about, maybe it's

your kid's school. You know, maybe it's the university where, for me, it's the university where I teach. I think there are real issues around the adoption of these tools in pedagogy. So I think there are all kinds of ways for people to be in their workplace to say, you know, people are, a lot of atolls being kind of crammed down people's, you know, it's a little, reminds me a little bit of, you know, the elephants and Thailand that are used to, to knock down the forests and which are the habitat of the elephants. Yeah. You know, you can say, we don't think this is best for our company right now. You know,

you can band together and have a meeting about that and say, like, we, we don't mean to say, this is off the table, but like we think there should be a conversation about it. And is that why you write on the first page of your book that little seems more inevitable than the eventual fall of the artificial state because you believe in people? Actually, because that has to do with my reading of science fiction and what I call the parable of the artificial state, like some of the very earliest science fiction. It's like they're all stories about one day the machine. get smarter than us and they don't want to be our servants anymore and they decide to rule over us

and how those parables of the artificial state always go. It's like eventually the machine stops because the machines using the resources of the natural world, which are finite. And so the artificial state in every science fiction story always falls. It's just a question of whether humans manage to stop the machine before the natural world is entirely destroyed. Dilliport, thank you so much for this. Thank you. All right, that's all for today. I'm Jamie Poisson.

Thanks so much for listening. Talk to you tomorrow. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca.