Historian Jill Lepore: Silicon Valley Is Building an 'Artificial State' by Misreading Science Fiction

The book traces the idea of government by machines from E.M. Forster’s 1909 story “The Machine Stops” through contemporary AI companies. Lepore said she is not anti-technology, but objects to private corporations taking on the state’s role without consent. “No one consented to that,” she said. She argues that this transformation has been gradual and often accidental, but that in the last two decades it has become a deliberate usurpation of the nation-state.

Lepore says many tech leaders read science fiction as instruction manuals rather than cautionary tales. She points to Elon Musk, who said he drew from Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series the lesson that he should try to prolong civilization. But Lepore argues the series actually warns against relying on predictions of human behavior and shows that power corrupts. Musk also cited Douglas Adams’s “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” as influential, a book that is a spoof of Foundation.

OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Lepore notes, was especially taken with the novel “We Are Legion (We Are Bob),” in which dead human consciousnesses are uploaded to an AI system to serve a new government. Altman, like Peter Thiel and Marvin Minsky, signed up to have his head frozen after death in hopes of future reincarnation. Lepore cited this as an example of taking science fiction too literally, and of reading cautionary tales as plans to execute.

The artificial state, as Lepore describes it, is a dream of severing humans from one another and from the natural world. In its extreme form, tech tycoons dream of space colonization, immortality, and uploading consciousness to computers. The underlying logic, she writes, is that democracy and the liberal nation-state must be abolished to free corporations from government restraints, so they can marshal all resources toward creating advanced AI that will both enable and require escape from Earth.

Despite promises of democratic oversight, Lepore says none of the promised governance structures were built. No world-governance board was established, no AI constitutional convention was held. Instead, she writes, the architects of the artificial state told stories, drawn from science fiction, about existential threats that could only be avoided by accelerating AI development, driving investment even at the risk of planetary catastrophe. She notes that Altman in 2025 guessed most of the Earth’s surface would soon be covered in data centers, adding “maybe we put them in space.”

Lepore also revisits earlier tech mythology, including Apple’s famous “1984” Macintosh ad and Twitter’s old self-description as a “digital town hall.” She called the town hall comparison “bananas,” arguing that such platforms give a distorted picture of public opinion and displace local news. The book examines paths not taken, including the 1990s debates over the internet’s future and the 1996 Telecommunications Act, which she says was shaped by Newt Gingrich’s “Contract with America” and has proven difficult to revisit.

Lepore says the artificial state is ultimately unsustainable, and she draws on science fiction to trace its inevitable failure. The book, due out next year, is both a historical account and a warning about what happens when private corporations assume the functions of democratic government without accountability.