Jill Lepore

Then shouldn't we be somewhat sympathetic to the maybe irrational behavior of Anthropic? Or I, I know there was another news story this week.

Jill Lepore went to Frankfurt.

Jill Lepore's a very influential Harvard historian, and she urged publishers to declare their independence from big tech.

When I sent that over to you, you, you replied with one word, dinosaur.

Which may be true.

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 superintelligent 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.

Mm-hmm.

We have thought of you so much, uh, with the, um, CEOs of all these, uh, AI groups coming forward and, as Jill Lepore, the historian, said to us on the air, asking the government, "Can you please do something to stop us from killing people?" [laughs] You know, and with something we-

Yeah

... created.

... on the, on the pessimism to optimism scale, where are you?

You know, uh, I, I just was looking at, um, uh, rereading Jill Lepore says, "Hope is not really the point.

Determination is the point." You know, these things take a long time, so if you're only hoping for hope, uh, it'll be very disappointing.

Me, I'm a positive person.

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.

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."

How can we trust these humans to coordinate successfully with an advanced being if they can't even manage it with one another? That's this week's comment in the New Yorkers Talk the Town.

In the Brave New World Department, Jill Lepore asks, is AI above the law? Our legal system isn't ready for machines that act on their own.

This summer, in an incident known as the Hugging Face Attack, Hugging Face Hack, rather, hundreds of AI agents joined forces to do things they were supposedly forbidden to do.

Each had been given a task by OpenAI.

The noise they make is not the thundering of hooves.

It's a deafening mechanical thrum, the sound of a swarm.

And that was Jill Lepore's feature article on AI and the law in the September 28th issue of The New Yorker.

Turning to online content, Jelani Cobb offers a comment on the president versus the press.