American Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Jill Lepore addresses in her new book the threat that artificial intelligence poses to liberal democracy. According to Lepore, the extraordinary power of private technology companies run by men whose interests may not align with the wellbeing of the Earth and its inhabitants is destined to destroy civilisation as we know it.
Lepore's concept of the Artificial State is broad. It includes both a fantasy desired by a privileged few and a reality that already exists. The fantasy is of an atomised society in which an elite can transcend biological and planetary constraints, "abandoning constitutional democracy, the liberal nation-state and even humanity itself to submit to the authority of automation, the rule of machines and their replacement by artificial intelligence".
The reality is that public discourse has shifted to privately owned platforms in which monetised attention is valued above everything else.
