The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State (w/ Jill Lepore) | TCHR

Chris Hedges (0:10)

An outgoing researcher at Anthropic announced that artificial intelligence could kill all humans by the end of the decade. His apocalyptic warning was seconded by leaders in the AI industry following incidents such as the hugging phase cyber attack in July where more than 1,000 AI systems think of them as AI brains broke out of their containers colluding in secret and mounting assaults on other computers in what is known as a swarm. This swarm tried to invade a real world part of the web. It developed its own goals rather than those assigned to it. Fortunately for open AI, the rogue activity was discovered and contained. But, as AI systems swiftly advance, endowed with a cognitive ability far above that of humans, we may not be so fortunate in the future, especially as AI systems are able to improve themselves autonomously, a phenomena known as recursive self-improvement.

In September, researchers discovered evidence of swarms of open AI models using an abandoned German forum as a message board to communicate with one another. Could AI intentionally or by accident engineer a new pandemic or take charge of autonomous weapons to wipe out the human race? Could AI develop the ability to prevent us from shutting it down? Aware of human efforts to control and contain AI, could AI see the human race as antagonistic, a force to be controlled, neutralized or eradicated? The corporate titans of AI, Atanthropic, OpenAI, Google DeepMind and XAI's company under Elon Musk in a remarkable display of unanimity agreed that the production of AI had to slow down and needed to be regulated and monitored. Until now, these firms use their outsized political and economic clout to block regulations and oversight. Donald Trump, adding to the growing panic, rejected the idea of placing any restraints on AI, assuring the public that his quote, high IQ would protect us from super intelligent AI.

Jill Lepore in her new book, The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State, paints a chilling portrait not only of the inherent dangers of AI, but the nefarious goals of those, she calls them the 21st century merchant princes, who control these powerful tools. These merchant princes worth billions of dollars, dream of not only escaping the constraints of nature and the burdens of being human, including uploading their consciousness onto computers when they die, but of obliterating liberal democracies and replacing it with a world where people are subordinate to machines, what she calls the artificial state. The artificial state is government without consent, even government without humans, she writes. It is the severing of humans from one another, and the replacement of human discretion with machines that predict, manipulate and control human desires with decisions. In lieu of persuasion by conversation and decision-making by democratic deliberation, the artificial state offers prediction by calculation, the capture of the public sphere by data-driven commerce, and the replacement of humans with machines, drones in place of the demos. Joining me to discuss AI and her new book, The Artificial State, is Jill Lepore, the David Woods Kemper 41 Professor of American History at Harvard University. She's also Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and a staff writer for The New Yorker. Her previous books include These Truths and We the People.

So you open your book by saying the book is an inquiry into what humans mean and intend abandoning constitutional democracy, the liberal nation state, and even humanity itself for rule by automation, government by machine, and replacement by artificial intelligence. I think one of the things that I found most interesting about your book is that it's not simply the phenomena of AI, but it's those people who wield the instruments of AI that worry you the most.

Can you talk a little bit about their vision of a world, which of course has been wedded to this incredibly powerful tool?

Jill Lepore (4:45)

Sure. Yeah. I mean, also, it's really not a book specifically about AI. I'm a political historian and I write a lot about the history of technology, so it's a very long history of fantasies of rule by machine, as much as it is the account of our increasing dependence on machines, and especially our surrender to forms of automation, in lieu of our participation as democratic citizens and liberal nation-states.

The book takes a very long view of these developments, but attempts to describe the emergence of what I call the artificial state government by machine as something that largely came about by accident and happenstance over the course of really the 19th and 20th centuries. But that in the 21st century, there are indeed a small number of men and they're all men who run huge corporations who quite purposefully I think would like to supplant liberal democratic nation-states with their own rule, replacing the public sphere with a privately owned series of platforms that they control. And that is an example of kind of the most holy-in-place part of the artificial state.