Liveright
Review by Walter Cummins
In her latest book, Jill Lepore presents her analysis of how we have reached the creation of the Artificial State where machines set the guidelines and priorities for human society, culminating in the potential domination of AI. She judges such a state to be a tyranny that threatens humanity, an autocracy that is “… something nonhuman, something beyond human, something inhuman: the rule of humans by machines manufactured by corporations.”
With the invention and development of computers in the twentieth century, many in the field believed these devices would soon solve problems that had long befuddled humans and result in an increasing number of communication opportunities that would enhance the goals of democracy. Instead, people soon discovered that governments also could use these tools “to silence protest and suppress dissent.”
Lepore covers the phenomena accumulated over many centuries that have led to this immediate danger where citizens will become trolls. The Artificial State turns people into numbers and numbers into data, using that knowledge to shape oppressive systems of government.
While in the closing chapters she gives emphasis to the estrangement of humans from nature, most of the book’s discussion concerns questions about the relationship of humans with machines and non-human entities.
One fundamental historical transition is Rene Descartes’ 1646 argument that animals are, in effect, automatons lacking the consciousness of humans. Some who followed him denied that animals possessed emotions and even did not feel pain. Although animal sensibilities soon had defenders, the question of what was human and what was other became studied and debated in the following centuries, especially as invented machinery became an increasing presence in the world.
With the Cartesian notions of the disembodied mind and a natural world made up of machines operating by laws of motion much attention in the mechanized world turned to attempts to manufacture simulations that emulated human movements and even speech, including an artificial man operated by magnets. While functioning devices like the Prague Astronomical Clock succeeded, the imitation man never happened, but the concept lay behind the growing interest in robots.
The human imagination turned to fictions about robots. A key author was Isaac Azimov and his I Robot stories. Azimov set three laws for robot behavior: robots will never hurt humans, robots will obey orders, and robots will protect their own existence if that doesn’t conflict with laws one and two.
A present concern in this time of AI is whether massive networks of linked computers will obey these rules. Can they be controlled by equivalent regulations or will they create their own interactions beyond human management? But even if they can be tamed, will their control over information and ideas result in domination over those of us of flesh and blood, telling us what to do and having us submit? Legal scholars have even begun to debate the personhood of artificial intelligence, which would support its authority.
Those directing the organizations in charge of AI in their search for greater and greater profits now argue that achieving such a goal can justify destroying the planet. Lepore provides statistics to demonstrate that this “apocalypse” is underway by citing the percentages of animal extinction, the mushrooming production of industrial robots, and the fact that many humans are spending ninety percent of their time indoors. In addition, some of the billionaires behind the earth’s AI doom are openly discussing relocation to other planets.
In the book’s epilogue Lepore predicts, as her title suggests, a fall of the Artificial State. That argument turns out to be speculative, much more of a hope than a certainty. She does support her prediction by positing that the Artificial State is “poorly resigned and badly built,” that it has not given people safety and happiness but rather a prison of glowing screens, and that a majority of Americans want more control over AI. To escape the Artificial State we will have to imagine a different future by gaining more knowledge of the past in a search for meaning. Of course, powerful forces want to deny that and turn us into servile automatons.
