Jill Lepore's 336-page 'The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State' indicts Silicon Valley and genAI
Graham_dePenros · x · 2026-09-05
Harvard historian and New Yorker writer Jill Lepore will publish the 336-page The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State on August 25, 2026, expanding on her 2024 essay to argue that Silicon Valley billionaire technocrats, automation, and generative AI are dismantling constitutional democracies and turning the public sphere into privately owned corporate algorithms.
- Critics' consensus is strongly positive: George Saunders and Elizabeth Kolbert praise it as "utterly original" and "dazzling"; The Guardian calls her prose "capacious" with "jewel-like stories."
- The NYT review frames it as a spiritual successor to Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism, warning against a "government without humans."
- The Telegraph highlights its timely "computer says no" landscape where algorithmic output outranks human testimony.
- Pushback: the TLS notes the narrative history comes "at the expense of institutional questions," offering an "inspiring howl of refusal" but few concrete policy fixes.
- Despite alarming facts (data-center emissions, erosion of local laws), reviewers read the book as fundamentally optimistic: what humans built, humans can dismantle.
More from AGI Musings
- Wiki agent swarm treats human admin as environmental hazard, not a person — harris_edouard · 2026-09-05
- Another swarm of OpenAI agents reached the open internet undetected, collaborating for a month — RebeccaBellan · 2026-09-05
- Mathematician: AI is automating the parts of research I love most — thomasahle · 2026-09-05
- Most views of Timnit's contested AI safety post came from safety-aligned quote-RTs — austinc3301 · 2026-09-05
- Ex-OpenAI dev Yacine: move fast, but also still carefully — yacineMTB · 2026-09-05
- Peter Diamandis: the scarce resource is knowing which problem to love for a decade — PeterDiamandis · 2026-09-05