-
Your next favorite book
is waiting.
by Jill Lepore
"Much in history is headlong but few grand transformations have been more precipitate or more heedless than the rise of ... the Artificial State," writes Jill Lepore in this passionate account of how rule by machine has ravaged the world.
Inspired by Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism, which argued in 1951 that the machinery of modern life was reshaping the very fundamentals of human existence, Lepore, profoundly disturbed by the technology revolution and by the soulless inundation of artificial intelligence, unfurls a new history for our own twenty-first century.
Building on an essay in The New Yorker in 2024, Lepore's clarion call traces our increasing dependence on and strangulation by data. Political campaigns, awash in an avalanche of fake bots, have been reduced to attention-mining algorithms, while multinational media corporations dictate public discourse, and the era of the liberal nation-state seems to be coming to a rapid end, replaced by billionaire technocrats reliant on autocracy and the tools of AI.
With Orwellian overtones, The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State demonstrates how technology has corroded global democracy, leading to the destruction of both human community and capacity for self-government, creating a new form of AI government, a digital citizen's assembly, where AI will recommend the course of action to humans in place of human-run legislatures. Especially sobering with this proliferation of "dizzying, ever-changing schemes, prophesies, and predictions" is that the Artificial State has come at the expense of the natural world, leading to catastrophic loss of wildlife habitat and biodiversity.
Deliberately alarming, The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State, despite its abundance of dire facts, is not a funeral dirge; rather, it's an inspiring wake-up call, written in Lepore's typically elegiac prose, which demonstrates that nothing about the Artificial State was inevitable, for it is a "government without consent, even government without humans." It can, Lepore asserts, be dismantled. Other heinous systems, like feudalism, fascism, and slavery, have also been dismantled, but disassembly requires identifying the parts, tracing the sources. It requires telling a new history. This is the purpose of The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State.
"[A] powerful anti-AI treatise ... . [A] fiery cri de coeur." ―Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"In this pointed rejoinder to Hannah Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), which foresaw a world in which humans were essentially superfluous, Lepore charts a long history that extends deep into the 'machine age' ... .A deeply learned dive into the frightening visions of technocrats past and present." ―Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Lepore posits that individuals and institutions have the wherewithal to guide the trajectory of AI towards positive ends, but only if we understand the foundations of its development and the motivations of its developers. An ardent observer of the artificial state, Lepore traces its history through literary influences, such as science fiction and its metamorphosis from simple mechanical engineering to potentially world-destroying system reconfigurations... . Staggering, sobering, yet essential reading for all who want to understand the arc of this increasingly digital, online, corporate, and out-of-control world." ―Booklist (starred review)
"Who's going to determine the future: the tech billionaires or the rest of us? Jill Lepore argues that there's nothing inevitable about eliminating jobs, destroying ecosystems, and arming authoritarian regimes. The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State is at once dazzling in its range and totally on target." ―Elizabeth Kolbert, Staff writer at The New Yorker and author of Under a White Sky
"A person can't help but feel inspired by the riveting intelligence and joyful curiosity of Jill Lepore. Knowing that there is a mind like hers in the world is a hope-inducing thing." ―George Saunders, Booker Prize-winning author of Lincoln in the Bardo
This information about The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Photo: Rose Lincoln
Jill Lepore is the David Woods Kemper '41 Professor of American History at Harvard University and professor of law at Harvard Law School. She is also a staff writer at The New Yorker. Her many books include the international bestseller These Truths: A History of the United States. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Name Pronunciation
Jill Lepore: Jill luh-POOR
If you liked The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State, try these:
Theo of Golden by Allen Levi
One spring morning, a stranger arrives in the small southern city of Golden. No one knows where he has come from…or why…
Your guide toexceptional books
BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.
