Dr. Jill Lepore on why AI backlash is vital for the future

Today, I’m talking with Harvard professor and New Yorker staff writer Dr. Jill Lepore about her new book, The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State , which comes out on August 25.

Jill is one of the best writers there is at identifying institutional patterns in history, and Decoder is a show about systems, so this book could not possibly be more in our zone.

You build systems by measuring things — gathering information, quantifying it as data, and taking action on it. And Jill’s big thesis in the book is that this kind of systemic measurement is really a dehumanizing act, one that flattens human concerns into something, well, artificial.

These artificial structures touch everything — not just in the more obvious places like in apps or AI, but all the way up to politics and governance itself, and Jill’s insights here are a telling portrait of the way Big Tech and its billionaire figureheads have managed to break the very idea of the state itself.

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You’ll hear Jill tell me she wanted to write a “kind of grumpy book,” but in my reading, it’s a pretty dead-ahead look at the last century and a half of technological and social developments and how we got to a place where bots are maybe running everything.

Jill’s idea of the artificial state starts with the very idea of quantification, from the first stabs at taking a census thousands of years ago to the invention of modern political polling in the 1930s. But where she really sees a big pivot — and the era she and I talked about most — is in the 1980s, when we saw the emergence of the Silicon Valley culture we have today, when computers got personal, and when computer-aided targeting and microtargeting really truly became both possible and commonplace, both for ads and for political campaigns.

What Jill and I did disagree about is some of her pessimism about the internet, because the internet is what made jobs and careers like mine — and businesses like The Verge , and shows like Decoder — even possible at all. There really was a great democratizing of access that happened in the late 20th century and into the 21st, as people got online, and not all of it was as illusory as maybe the great hopes for Twitter after the Arab Spring turned out to be.

But as I said, Jill thinks in systems, and so her response, about the way systems of power keep adapting to how people use new technology, was as illuminating as ever.