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

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**Nilay Patel** (1:59)
Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Nilay Patel, Editor-in-Chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems.
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 25th. 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 strike zone. You build systems by measuring things, gathering information, quantifying it as data, and taking action on it. And Jill's thesis in the artificial state is that this kind of systemic measurement really dehumanizes people. It flattens us and human concerns into something, well, artificial. These artificial structures have grown to touch more and more parts of our lives, not just in obvious places like apps or AI, but all the way up to our politics and governance itself. And Jill's insight here is that telling portrait of the way big tech and its billionaire figureheads have managed to break the very idea of the nation state. You'll hear Jill tell me she wanted to write kind of a 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, in the era she and I talked about the 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 micro-targeting really and truly became possible in commonplace, not only for ads, but 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 was a really great democratizing of access that happened in the late 20th century and into the 21st as people got online. Not all of it was illusory as maybe the great hopes for Twitter after the Arab Spring turned out to be. But as I said, Jill thinks in systems, 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 and where she sees hope for that future. And yes, that includes college kids booing the AI CEOs at graduation ceremonies. Okay, Dr. Jill Lepore on the Artificial State. Here we go.
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.