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Title: Democracy vs Digital Infrastructure: Pulitzer-Winning Journalist
Charts 'The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State'

Link: https://news.slashdot.org/story/26/09/20/2023...

The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State ultimately asks the question, "How
did we cede control of our democracy to the machines, and can we get it
back?" according to the Harvard's Arts and Sciences site, FAS Current: The
new title finds Lepore, who used to teach a course at the College titled "The
Rise and Fall of the Machine," charting the ascent of what she calls the
artificial state: the digital communication infrastructure by which
governments and private corporations automate and ultimately control public
discourse. Following her Pulitzer Prize win for "We the People: A History of
the U.S. Constitution" (2025), "I wanted to think about whether liberal
constitutional democracies can survive this moment in time," Lepore shared in
a phone interview... [In the "current ChatGPT moment"] Lepore found herself
asking: "Who are the people who are clamoring to be replaced by machines, to
have movies made by machines, and novels written by machines?" And who, she
continued, is pushing for our government to be determined by these machines?
In the book, Lepore notes that technological tools are increasingly
influencing elections around the world... However, she sees the 2026 U.S.
midterms as an inflection point. In a recent piece in the Financial Times,
Lepore wrote, "This year marks the first AI election. Voters are asking
chatbots how they should vote. Campaigns and activists are using AI to
analyze the electorate, send micro-targeted messages, produce tailored ads
and even deepfakes...." Lepore stresses in the book that "nobody should trust
historians to make predictions," but she believes it's possible for
democratic citizens to wrest back control. Referencing proposals such as New
York's data center moratorium law, Lepore ends by describing a "growing and
increasingly noisy tech backlash." "It's not foreordained. This isn't
inevitable," she said during the interview. "In the book's epilogue Lepore
predicts, as her title suggests, a fall of the Artificial State," writes the
California Review of Books. "That argument turns out to be speculative, much
more of a hope than a certainty." [Lepore] does support her prediction by
positing that the Artificial State is "poorly designed and badly built," that
it has not given people safety and happiness but rather a prison of glowing
screens, and that a majority of Americans want more control over AI. To
escape the Artificial State we will have to imagine a different future by
gaining more knowledge of the past in a search for meaning. Of course,
powerful forces want to deny that and turn us into servile automatons. The
Guardian adds that "While Lepore interprets much classic sci-fi, such as
Isaac Asimov, as cautionary, she observes that "the architects of the
Artificial State seem to have read these stories, unironically, as
instruction manuals, guides for how to build robots that would one day rule
the world". (The Atlantic writes that "What one gathers from these
misreadings is not so much that science fiction itself is nefarious, but that
arrested development might be..." But The Indian Express writes that despite
the author's bleak conclusion, "Lepore is not a pessimist. Because the
Artificial State is a construct, neither alive, nor truly indestructible, she
argues it is still possible to take it apart... [T]his is a clear-eyed
reckoning rather than a doomsday tract. It is not an easy read, but an
essential one for anyone unsettled by the pace of the AI wave."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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