The Current - Historian Jill Lepore on the “artificial state”

Episode Date: October 5, 2026

Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Jill Lepore talks about her latest book “The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State,” how technology like AI is having a knock on effect on our democracy and why it's not too late to stop us slipping into an “artificial state.” 

This message comes from Viking, committed to exploring the world in comfort. Journey through the heart of Europe on a Viking longship, with thoughtful service, destination-focused dining, and cultural enrichment, on board, and on shore. With a variety of voyages and sailing dates to choose from, now is the time to explore Europe's waterways. Learn more at viking.com. ABC podcast. Hello, I'm Matt Galloway, and this is the current podcast. We have a choice in front of us. AI can either be more like a new renaissance of creativity and discovery or more like a new

industrial revolution of upheaval and disarray. That's Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, the company behind Chat GPT. He was addressing the UN Security Council in September, calling for that body to put in place international artificial intelligence standards. We've been talking about artificial intelligence for years, but it feels different in recent weeks and months. Rapid model progress has made the timeline feel more compressed, the upside more tangible, but also the stakes and the risks more immediate. In recent weeks, tech executives like Sam Altman have been talking about the need for AI development to slow down and even about the potential for that technology to kill

all humans within the next decade. But for Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Jill Lepore, there are concerns beyond just what AI is capable of. She says that technology writ large is changing how we're governed and how citizens engage with the political process and each other. Her new book, The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State, looks at how we have arrived at this particular moment in time and how we might get ourselves out of it. And Jill Lepore joins me in our Toronto studio. Good morning. Good morning.

You say that this book is inquiry into what human means. What does it mean to be a human being? You know, actually, it's sort of interesting. The idea of the human as a category really dates to the 18th. century really kind of had to do with a kind of new set of ideas about the line between the human and the non-human, the human and the animal, the natural and the artificial and kind of which side is mankind on? Are we like part of the natural world or are we something above it and different from it? You know, ideas that go back to, you know, earliest human thinking and writing

and art, right? You just think about cave art and how people are depicted against the animal world. But we're really living, you know, at the cusp of a really is a truly, different moment in the history of humanity where we have created creatures, machines that can think and talk to us. It causes me a lot of sorrow that it's not a moment of extraordinary excitement about the wonders of these technologies and the marvels that will come to us with new knowledge about the natural world, but is instead one in which we fear growing political repression and the loss of our humanity and our agency, loss of our jobs, loss of our ability to be human with one another in company and connection, and the loss of democracy itself. There are a few different definitions

of what the artificial state is in the book, that it is about severing us from that natural world, but it's also about government without consent. How do you broadly define what the artificial state is? Well, the artificial state is, in one hand, a dream. I think it's a fantasy of a certain small number of extremely powerful men who imagine a life in which we're kind of untethered from the natural world. Our kind of consciousnesses can be uploaded onto computers. We can live off in space. It's a kind of great untethering even from the earth itself. But then it is also something that is being built. It's a digital infrastructure that replaces human forms of interaction with computerized forms of automation. So one place to think about, I think the place where the

infrastructure of the artificial state has been most fully developed. in what used to be called the public sphere, where most people around the world are getting their news from social media platforms that are owned by private corporations that are dominated by bot traffic and not by human traffic, where liberal constitutional democracies

depend on that public sphere, right? We need to kind of gather with one another and deliberate over ideas, find out what's going on in the world, argue about what's best for us going forward. And in lieu of that, public sphere, on which, you know, our very system of consent of the government is based, we have a public sphere

that is almost wholly privatized. It's no longer public, dominated by machines, dominated by corporations that have an interest in collecting information about us rather than supplying us with information. This is a very, I mean, it's a very immediate book, but one of the things that's neat about it is that you look back at how we got here. And one of the things that comes out is that people have been thinking about this idea of taking government away from the people for a long time. What was the technocracy? What is that idea based on?

For a long time, I've been really interested in this seems like kind of such a fringe movement. This organization called Technocracy Incorporated, which was a North American political movement in the 1930s. It was really as much a Canadian movement as an American movement. And its premise seems so goofy today, but actually had a huge falling hundreds of thousands of people. belong to the technocracy movement at a time when, you know, people really wondering, would liberal

democracy survive? Like, was it, you know, during the Great Depression as democracies were falling all over the world, fascism was on the rise in Europe, you know, communism was on the rise around the world, could, you know, could like a democratically elected national leader with his powers restrained, like the U.S. president really manage an economy through the difficulties of the Great depression. And the technocracy movement emerged to say, no, democracy doesn't work, can't work. They also didn't, you know, didn't improve of communism. What they wanted was an elite of scientists and engineers who they thought were the only people who could really understand the machinery of modern society and the nature of a modern industrial economy. They would make all the decisions

for all of the people. We would live in a North American technate, a kind of long-sought-after Union of Canada and the United States. And people would have numbers, not names. There'd be no money, no banks, no politicians, no elections. There'd be kind of this universal unit of energy called the ERG that would determine who got what. It's a little bit like universal basic income. And it fell apart in the U.S. after FDR was elected in 1932 because FDR offered the new deal. It was a new way to kind of, and it very successfully got the United States out of depression.

But it remained super strong in Canada where it was led by this guy named Joshua Haldeman, who was actually born in the U.S. who was born in Minnesota and then he emigrated to Canada. He was a cowboy and an amateur aviator or something in an adventure. He had his farm in Saskatchewan. He lost his farm during the Great Depression. And then he became the national chairman of the technocracy movement in Canada and led it through the 1930s. By the time the Second World War broke out in Europe, Canada decided to ban the technocracy. When it was outlawed in Canada, Haldeman was briefly thrown in prison.

He was denied entry to the U.S. when he wanted to go on a technocracy speaking. tour and after the war he became the leader of this party called the social credit party, which was an infamously anti-Semitic party in Canada. He got into some trouble there as well. And after 1948, when South Africa declared its policy of apartheid, he decided to move his family to South Africa in 1950. So he's really important because you can see so many ways in which the ideas of the technocracy movement in the 1930s remain the ideas of Silicon Valley tech moguls. They have the very same ideas. But he's also important because, Because Joshua Haldeman, the Canadian leader of technocracy, is also the grandfather of Elon Musk.

And there's a direct line, obviously, not just the bloodline, but as you mentioned, the kind of way that Silicon Valley thinks about itself now, you talk about this in the book, the mission statements that they'll often have. We're not just releasing a product, that we have a mission that comes with this product, that we are going to do something larger than just sell you something. Yeah, I mean, you can say, like, you can look at these guys and say, wow, what incredibly dynamic entrepreneurs they are. And many of them are fantastic engineers and inventors. Not all of them. Most of them are really more entrepreneurial. And there's much to admire, right? There's also, like, incredible tools that have come out of that world in the last half century.

But what they're not actually good at is having good political ideas. And there's no reason to expect that they would, except that they have been anointed with a kind of political prophecy. Who is anointing them? Really, if you go back to the 1980s and the 1990s and you look at press coverage, especially of, you know, Steve Jobs and early Bill Gates. You know, they're on the cover of every magazine. They're these sort of golden boys. And there's something about their boyishness that kind of is attractive to, I don't know,

kind of beat reporters. It also intersects in the 80s and 90s with kind of lifestyles of the rich and famous, you know, there's like era when like Dallas was on television and Donald Trump, like, Rich Playboy is like sought after and by People magazine for comments on Monica Lewinsky. And there's just a kind of like the kind of. Reagan and post-Ragan-era fascination with the extraordinarily rich. And then there's a kind of of revenge of the nerds vibe. And, you know, they're all kind of marching around like Zuckerberg with their, you know, their sneakers and their jeans and their t-shirts and their hoodies and

their baseball caps. And it kind of intersects also with a big burst of like Marvel superhero movies. I mean, remember Elon Musk was in one of the Iron Man movies. Rolling Stone called him the real-life Tony Stark. There's a lot of kind of cultural reporting, actually, that elevates them. It's not that hard-hitting political commentators are saying these guys have great political ideas, but they began sort of prophesying offering up their mission statements. And the way they get their venture capital is by saying, you know, I've invented the microphone that will save the world, right? Like everything is somehow the thing that is going to be the future of humanity. It's the hyperbole of the venture capital pitch is something I think they begin to take seriously

in a kind of messianic way. And they're not really called to account. And yet, you know, for all their entrepreneurial genius, their political ideas are the worst, most failed and discredited ideas of the 1930s. Really, they really are recycling the ideas of the technocrats from the 1930s. And yet they boast, I mean, Mark Andreessen, among them, boasts that they're not interested in history. They have zero introspection, and they're not interested in people like you who would say, these are ideas that failed spectacularly in the past. Yeah, no, these are weaknesses. It's a weakness to look to the past, right? It's a weakness to read books to study history. It was sort of interesting that there's a real scramble among some of these frontier model companies now to hire philosophers.

They need, well, we need some ethics. So none of us know what that even is. So we'll bring in some philosophers. It's kind of weird. It's the one form of humanistic inquiry that they're interested in. This message comes from Viking, committed to exploring the world in comfort. Journey through the heart of Europe on a Viking longship. With thoughtful service, destination-focused dining, and cultural enrichment, on board, and on shore.

With a variety of voyages and sailing dates to choose from, now is the time to explore Europe's waterways. Learn more at viking.com. Oh, hey, Canada. How are you doing? Honestly, how are you doing? Because if you're exhausted from reading all the news, I have the perfect solution for you. It's the weekly podcast, Because News, a show where I quiz my funniest friends about all the latest. headlines. Think of it as like group therapy for the news. This week we're chatting about Alberta's confusing referendum questions. We'll check out CBC's new Hockey Night in Canada lineup and

discover a brand new use for zombies. Comedians Andrew Fung, Jan Carwana and Alice Moran, join us in the studio this week. Subscribe to Because News Now on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or anywhere you download podcasts for free. You live on a farm and you wrote this, and I always say that because you wrote this book, as you say, in the woods, surrounded by, sheltered by trees, serenated by birdsong, and in the company of dogs, cats, sheep, chickens, ducks, and one old rickety dying goat. How did, and I hope the goat. No, the goats, the goat.

I went out to the barnyard one day, and there he was. I'm sorry to hear about the goat. But how did the contrast between where you were writing this book and what you were writing about hit you? I mean, I ended up writing far more in this book about animals and trees than I expected to. really the whole second half of the book is really about the way robots kind of slot in the human imagination into the space once occupied by animals. And that that goes quite far back in which people expect that, you know, even the very beginning of the industrial revolution, machines are getting faster and faster and more and more powerful. They're expecting that one day machines will be able to think and talk.

And also the 19th century, of course, sees the emergence of the idea of evolution. and people begin thinking kind of just as a thought experiment, well, if the machines keep getting faster and better, and then they can think they're going to be smarter than we are, why will they continue to be our slaves? Like, won't they treat us the way we treat animals? And so there's this kind of weird sort of slotting in of we will, humans will one day be to machines,

what animals are now to humans. You talked about, you did a piece in the New Yorker in which you mentioned Yuval, nor Harari, talking about how we will be to artificial, intelligence, what horses are to humans. Yeah. I mean, it's a very creepy thought, right? But like that idea is, it's not just his, right? People talk about dogs as well.

But it goes way, way back. But they, you know, what he sort of like, horses live within our world of systems. And their lives are determined by our laws about land use, about animal cruelty, environmental regulation, the system of finance, global finance, property boundaries. And they have no understanding of any of those systems. Not only that, they don't even know that those systems. systems exist, and yet they define the course of their lives. And Harari's point is, like, in the very near future, we will be the horses.

Machines will be engaged in systems that control our lives, and not only will we not understand those systems, we won't even know that they exist. Sometimes people offer that up as a frightening dystopia, but honestly, there are people who think that sounds great. Like, that would be the natural next state of human affairs. My sense is you are not one of those people. one of those people. What do you make of the fact that some of the warnings about AI are coming from inside the house now? That it's, you know, Sam Altman's and others who are saying, we need to figure

out what to do with this. Do you think they're genuine? Do you think, why are they saying this? I find it very difficult. It's really, really hard to listen to. And it's not new, right? They've been saying this for a long time and the same time as they've been building these things. You know, if it's Tuesday, AI is going to solve poverty and we're all going to live in a delighted, abundant, jobless joy. And if it's Wednesday, well, I'll be dead, you know, by Thursday. I think they are two sides of the same view, which is that the future of humanity is held in the hands of people like Sam Altman. And I think that's what both views have in common, right? And one of the things about the artificial state, as I described here is it presents itself as above the nation state, right?

They're not really answerable to national governance, not answerable to the United Nations. You know, they're not answerable to any human laws, these corporations. And that's because of the way corporate power has been amassed in the United States. United States, but, which has consequences for everyone around the world. But they also, they have for so long, in this messianic way, described their tools and their power over these tools as global and really like extraterrestrial, right? Like, that's a lot of the interest in space is about extending the scope of their power beyond the planet itself. A lot of them subscribe to this philosophy known as long-termism where, like, you don't have to worry about the people who are existing on

the planet and shouldn't make any decision. about the 8 billion of us who are alive right now and whether we're thriving or not thriving, because they're in it for the long term for the millions of years in the future and the untold billions of future humans. And so that is why they must build this artificial intelligence, because it will be what allows us to escape the prison of the planet and for untold generations to travel the stars. And so they will put aside any concerns about, you know, the near-term suffering of people who might, you know, lose their jobs, lose their children, whatever kind of suffering. because they have this kind of different time scale in mind.

And I think to some degree that explains why they both think they must build it, but that it could kill us all. But that's a risk we must take. But Sam Altman, and I only mention him because you quote him, and I can't use the language because we're a family program. But essentially he says if he wasn't in on AI, he would wonder why these people, like him, would get to decide what happens to all of us. Yeah, it's so interesting because.

Like it's a tell. It's a tell. It's a tell. Yeah. Like you see the true self now and again. I mean, there are plenty of tales, right? Like one of the things that someone like Musk will say is we must build AI because it will solve poverty or it will solve climate change. I mean, the first thing that Musk did when he got into the U.S. government in Dardos wished to dismantle USAID, which, you know, was one of the few things that was actually addressing global poverty. So that's kind of a long-termist thing.

But you see, like obviously, like solving poverty means something very different to someone like Musk. I think you also see the lip service given to democracy. Like when Altman says that, he's like, well, actually, you'd think, I understand, most people think they ought to have a say in their future or the future of the human speech or the future, you know, of their neighborhood. But he doesn't think so. That's not how his company is proceeding. And yet there's the lip service takes like really interesting forms. I mean, when people will remember in 2015 with Brexit and then with the Trump's election in 2016, there was the Cambridge Analytica Facebook scandal.

And there was a real call. This is when they were hoovering up all your data. The UK hoovering up the data, the kind of roll of fake news. There was a real call in the UK for some kind of accountability in the U.S., much less so. And what Zuckerberg's Facebook did was they started their own Supreme Court. Okay, so that's a name for something that is not a Supreme Court, right? A Supreme Court is a judiciary that is given power by an elected government that is answerable to the people, whether the judges are appointed or elected, right? They are accountable.

They can be impeached. The people that appoint them can be impeached. They can be voted out of office. It's like we have power over the judiciary, even if it is an indirect power. It was such a weird, like, here's a sop to people who think there should be democratic structures involved in the oversight of AI. We'll call our thing a Supreme Court. Or earlier this year when Anthropic released a Constitution for Claude, it's chatbot that was largely written by Claude and a moral philosopher that had been hired by Anthropic. And on the one hand, it's kind of a serious.

On the other hand, that's not what a Constitution is. A constitution is drafted by delegates elected by the people to represent their interest and devise a government of fundamental laws for their promotion of their safety and happiness and domestic tranquility. It is sent to the people for their review and ratification. It remains amendable by the people. Something that a chat bot writes to say, I promise I won't kill you all, is not a constitution. But like using that language is this weird way of saying, we understand you people might think that it's too bad you don't have any ability to influence what's going to happen to your own lives. I mean, we're already, to your point, getting many of us, getting our news from social media, the algorithm steers where people go and what people think.

You have midterms that are about to happen in the United States. How worried are you about the role of the artificial state now in liberal democracy, in what's going to happen in your country over the next few weeks? I mean, I'm worried about it. I also think that, you know, this is not a foreordained future. It's a big part of the culture of Silicon Valley to present technological change as inevitable and unstoppable. and that's, you know, one of the myths of Silicon Valley. Things are stopped all the time. We don't do human cloning. We, you know, chemical warfare has been banned. We do not build atomic. We don't,

you can't build an atomic bomb in your backyard. We, you know, every other realm of research science, you know, physics, chemistry, biology, you can't do, you know, you'd have to go to a human subject review board if you want to do experiments on humans. Like, we have codes of ethics and biology, physics, chemistry, genetics. We don't have them in computer science. And that's because of the power of these companies and because their work has been done outside the realm of universities. But that doesn't not say that we can't establish rules and regulations and systems of ethics. And I think that in this case, it's going to have to come from voters. It's not coming from our elected officials.

Are you encouraged by, I mean, I was just down in the States and TV ads are just filled with people yelling about AI, both sides of it. But this person takes money from artificial intelligence. They want to build data. Does that encourage you? You know, I think like the data center backlash is very interesting because I do think it's quite earnest and it has been so far non-potterrism. Obviously, the people promoting A have a lot more money than the people who are opposed to it. The people who want to build a

data centers have a lot more money. So in the U.S., because we have just almost no campaign spending limits at all and the few limits we have are just really not enforced. It's hard to have a whole lot of confidence about that. And the interest that people who want to promote AI will have is in making the issue a partisan. And that's not, unfortunately, not hard in the U.S. So I'm worried about it. But I think that people all over the world are worried about. They're worried about deep fakes and ads in political in political ads. They're worried about people asking their chatbots, how to vote. The kinds of possible computational propaganda or I guess what's the new word for it, sloppaganda. You know, those are real dangers. And it's very difficult for governments to respond to them quickly enough. You say in this book, historians shy away from the present and shudder at the rawness of the news. We prefer our meat cooked. Why did you decide to set aside your, what do you call it, historian's timidity?

And talk about this moment in time. Yeah, I mean, historians are intellectually pretty cautious in the sense that, you know, we know that when people talk about the present and the future, they almost always get it wrong, right? Like, that's just what, like, you watch, no offense to the CBC or whatever. But, you know, you listen to political commentators and like, wow. If you went back and read the column of your favorite op-ed columnist from a year ago, you'd be like, wow, it's amazing what the hit rate is. It's pretty low.

We don't like to get things wrong. We're much more confident that we can get things right in how we interpret the past. And the danger of writing about the present from the vantage of the knowledge that you have in the past, you try to justify your own position. So, yeah, I think there are real good reasons for historians to be cautious about writing in the present. And I take those seriously. But at the same time, I actually think the vantage of history is really, really important here. This is not a book that starts in, you know, 2022. It's a book that

starts in Mesopotamia to try to sort of understand the relationship between technology and the authority of a state and how we know when we've crossed a line there. I did feel really a great sense of urgency about that. You sound angry in the book. Like there's an urgency, but there's an anger, like, pay attention to this. Yeah. And I mean, I guess I did it have something to offer. I mean, my last book was a history of the U.S. Constitution. And, therefore of the emergence of the modern liberal constitutional democracy. And for all of its flaws, you know, in the kind of Winston Churchill sense is, you know, the best system excite, you know, it's the best that we can offer. And I just feel that it's vulnerability we've chronicled in so many ways.

Oh, the rise of authoritarianism, democratic backsliding. But I don't think people really have given a name to the surrender of democracies and of citizens' individual capacity to exercise their rights and obligations within a democracy. to machinery. And that's not inevitable. That can still be stopped. People, we can still decide to not tweet about something and instead go to your city council to go to your town meeting. There are still institutions that are very healthy that are still available for people to participate in and to sort of stop surrendering yourself. You end the book with that kind of hopeful note. And can I get you to read? Like there's the little thing here. This is almost like a manifesto. Is that a wrong word? I'm not sure. But you end.

it with this kind of, it's like a call to arms in some ways. Yeah, so the second half of the book is really the fall of the artificial state, and it's a reading of science fiction and science fiction stories in which actually the people stop the robots from taking over. And so this is a little bit of a manifest, but each one of these sentences is a reference to a work of science fiction that I've written about earlier in the book. Don't tether yourself to a computer. Unplug. If you cut down all the trees and kill all the animals. You will die. Using robots to wage wars will always backfire. One day, they will wage war on you. If you discover an intelligent species of noots, don't enslave them. It's best not to

build something. You can only unbuild by inventing a time machine. Never build a wall between yourself and the natural world, but if someone else does, clamber over it. Do you think we're up for that? Yeah, I do. I do. I mean, when I wrote this book last summer, I sort of fictionalized that, because I was writing the book in the past tense, and I wrote about, oh, there would be all these objections to the data centers. And I wrote those sentences in the past tense. People began rising up against the data centers and claiming that they were, you know, and it turned out that was a good call because then that started to happen. By the time the book was in galleys, you know, and I'm proofreading the typeset pages, that had begun to happen. And that was really a marvel and a wonder to me, the human capacity

to say, you know, there are things we care about more than the convenience of being able to order food from your phone. It's always a pleasure to talk to you. Jill Lepore, thank you. Thank you so much for having me. Jill Lepore is a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and the author of number books, including the rise and fall of the artificial state. Shoes with me in our Toronto studio. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca.ca slash podcasts.