How to maintain ‘an informed citizenry’ in the age of AI

As the United States marks its 250th birthday this year, Jill Lepore has been a prominent voice in the public conversation about the nation’s origins. Lepore, a professor of history and law at Harvard University and a longtime writer for The New Yorker, had already gained a lot of attention last year with the publication of “We the People,” her sweeping account of the creation of the U.S. Constitution.After commanding a large stage as an explorer of the American past, Lepore looks to its future in her new book, “The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State.” As the Orwellian title suggests, Lepore is deeply worried about what lies ahead, though she isn’t without hope.Taking its cue from “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” a 1951 work in which philosopher Hannah Arendt speculated on how widespread automation and totalitarianism could go hand in hand, Lepore draws a similar parallel between today’s rise of Big Tech and threats to democracy. Her concerns involve the pernicious algorithms and dark distortions of social media, but Lepore’s primary worry is that artificial intelligence will disconnect our species from the very things that make us human. In a world run by machines, she argues, the ability of free people to chart their own destinies is in danger. Why We Wrote This Jill Lepore, a historian of the U.S. Constitution, examines the future of democracy, as artificial intelligence tests the foundational values that have guided America. “The breadth of her historical knowledge and gift for anecdote,” our reviewer writes, gives her narrative “the brightly arresting feel of an odyssey through a curio cabinet.” Lepore defines the “Artificial State” as:... an unfinished digital communications infrastructure with which governments and especially private corporations organize and automate political behavior and public discourse by way of everything from direct mailing and robocalls to predictive algorithms, social media campaigns, AI agents, and bots (programs that mimic and often pass as humans). Within the Artificial State, nearly every element of public and democratic life – civil society, representative government, an informed citizenry, equality of rights, freedom of thought, freedom of expression, and faith in elections – is vulnerable to subversion through the reduction of politics to the digital manipulation of attention-mining algorithms, the trussing of government by corporate-owned digital architecture, the diminishment of citizenship to minutely message-tested online engagement.That’s a lengthy bill of indictment for AI and its related technologies, and it doesn’t even include Lepore’s broader alarm about how AI development might damage the planet. “Between 2025 and 2030,” she tells readers, “AI was expected to drive a power increase for global data centers of as much as 200 percent. And, given the pace of the race, the power used by data centers was far likelier to draw on fossil fuels – especially coal – than the power used by other industries.” "THE RISE AND FALL OF THE ARTIFICIAL STATE," by Jill Lepore, Liveright, 336 pp. The concerns raised in Lepore’s book are not new; one can find similar critiques of Big Tech on just about any recent op-ed page or public affairs podcast. What makes “The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State” worth reading is what makes any Lepore book worthwhile – namely, the breadth of her historical knowledge and gift for anecdote, which often give her narratives the brightly arresting feel of an odyssey through a curio cabinet.Where else would we learn, for example, that counterculture writer Richard Brautigan championed ecology by handing out packets of seeds with his poems? Or that ancient Chinese census-takers developed a special category for babies with teeth? “A Sicilian priest invented an ingenious voting machine in 1897,” readers learn in a quick tutorial on data collection, “though it appears to never have been adopted.”Lepore notes that innovations such as algorithmic prediction and machine learning “have made possible and will continue to make possible astounding and invaluable advances in scientific research. ... But their effects on political discourse, representative democracy, and constitutional government have been almost wholly malign.”“The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State” is vague about how public policy should sort out the good from the bad in its stewardship of these new technologies. It concludes with a general exhortation for citizens to reconnect with their own sense of agency. “The defeat of the Artificial State,” Lepore writes, “will require the inspection of facts, the exercise of reason, the search for meaning, the reading and study of philosophy and art and history and literature, and even learning the lessons of ancient parables and of modern science fiction.”Lepore makes the case that the human mind, in all its bright variety, shouldn’t be sidelined by an artificial replacement. Her own intellect, ceaselessly surprising in its turns of compassion, humor, and curiosity, seems like a prime example of the values she’s fighting to preserve.