Can Democracy Survive the Age of AI? With Jill Lepore

**SPEAKER_1** (0:01)
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**Mia Sorenti** (0:41)
Welcome to Intelligence Squared, where great minds meet. I'm senior producer Mia Sorenti. As artificial intelligence plays a growing role in the decisions that shape our lives, what happens to democratic power? And when the company's building these technologies rival governments in their reach and influence, who gets to decide what our future looks like?
On today's episode, Jill Lepore, historian, Harvard professor and staff writer at The New Yorker, joins Mythili Rao to discuss her new book, The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State and how technology is changing the relationship between citizens, corporations and the democratic state. Let's join our host, Mythili Rao, now with more.

**Mythili Rao** (1:21)
You're listening to Intelligence Squared. I'm Mythili Rao.
My guest today is Harvard historian and New Yorker staff writer, Jill Lepore. Jill, welcome to the show.

**Jill Lepore** (1:31)
Hey, thanks so much for having me.

**Mythili Rao** (1:32)
Jill, as someone who's followed your work for a long time, I was very excited when I first got a galley of this book.
The artificial state, you write, is a fantasy about humans, machines and the earth, which threatens to dismantle constitutional democracy and the liberal nation state in favor of rule by automation, government by machines and replacement by artificial intelligence. We are clearly at a moment of profound transition. Things are changing fast, almost faster than we can understand. And here you are with a book to help us start to think clearly about what's happening. When did you start working on this book? And in the beginning, what specifically were you responding to? Where you felt, I need to address this.

**Jill Lepore** (2:15)
Yeah. I mean, I'm chiefly an American political historian, although I write a lot about the history of technology. And I've written a lot of essays on the history of technology for the New Yorker over the years, like the last 20 years or so.
I'm not an anti-technologist. I like to follow what's evolving and why and who's doing it.
So this book, in that sense, has a long arc behind it of my interest. In 2021, I did a podcast series for the BBC about Elon Musk. And that began to sort of...

**SPEAKER_6** (2:54)
It was fantastic. I recommend it to people all the time. It was really fun.

**Jill Lepore** (2:58)
I updated it last year. It's called X-Men, the origin story of Elon Musk, but focused a lot of attention for me on Musk. The time before I knew it was really paying attention to Musk.
So there's actually turns out to be a lot in this book about Musk. But I really hadn't thought anything about writing, about emerging technologies, or situating the present moment within a longer historical context until the release of ChatGPT in 2022, which really was a monumental moment. You could be critical of the Silicon Valley hype about it, so it's a new era in the history of humanity. But in a way, it really was, right? It's the first time we could talk to another creature. You could talk to machines.
Using natural language, using our own languages was really tremendously exciting, really quite thrilling. And then at the same time, utterly maddening, because it really wasn't celebrated as a new era and how we might think or solve problems or work together or how we might advance scientific inquiry. It was really kind of about the commercial rollout of this thing so that you could ask it, you know, what should I cook for dinner tonight? Or should I slap my kid? Or should I date this guy or not? Like it just like the way it sort of went from this kind of revolutionary scientific achievement to crap like a new toaster, like just drove me a little insane. But it also made me think a lot about the Sputnik moment in 1957, when the Soviet Union launched the first artificial satellite, which had elicited a kind of worldwide kind of excitement, enthusiasm, also panic because of the Cold War. In the United States, in particular, people really freaked out like, oh, no, they've got they'll have missiles in space soon. And it really was a kind of before and after with Sputnik. So I started thinking about this beautiful book that Hannah Arendt had written really in the throes of the Sputnik moment called The Human Condition. And she was using, you know, her expertise as a political philosopher to engage with that moment. And I just kind of thought maybe I really should as a historian try to reckon with this moment.