The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State

There are times when a historian is absolutely necessary for understanding the future–this is one of those times, and Jill Lepore is the perfect person for the job. A fascinating, perceptive and completely timely account of how we got to artificial intelligence and how we might get past it – Bill McKibben * author of Here Comes the Sun *
An amazing book – entertaining, revelatory, utterly original, exquisitely researched. Lepore uses her fierce intelligence to show us who and what we are, and this feels like a true act of love – George Saunders
Who’s going to determine the future: the tech billionaires or the rest of us? Jill Lepore argues that there’s nothing inevitable about eliminating jobs, destroying ecosystems, and arming authoritarian regimes. The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State is at once dazzling in its range and totally on target – Elizabeth Kolbert
Lepore is our best scholar of the culture of governance, and our most vital historian. Here she repudiates the prospect of AI as a replacement for democracy. This is the issue of our times, and Lepore is the voice of sanity – Jaron Lanier
Superb. The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State is the best account I’ve ever seen of how the owners and controllers of data technology have changed and are changing us in ways we are only just beginning to grasp. Lepore seems to have left nothing out, and the result is a history that is richly informed, a view of human progress that is wise and balanced, and a timely and terrifying warning – Philip Pullman
Lepore’s concept of the Artificial State is capacious … Intriguing, jewel-like stories are Lepore’s hallmark, and The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State sparkles with them * Guardian *
Urgent and wide-ranging… an entertaining exploration tracing Silicon Valley’s self-image to the science fiction on which its architects grew up * Times Literary Supplement *
Engaging… a book that casts its intellectual remit so wide… Lepore… wants us to insist that machines should never have the final say * Telegraph *
The book’s extraordinary historical range… is its real distinction… Lepore shows convincingly how literature is a better guide to politics and power than the technocrats’ mathematical models… At a time when the humanistic study of languages, literature and history is under intense pressure, Lepore’s howl of refusal to accept the fate that engineers have ordained for her intellectual craft still has a stirring dignity about it * New Statesman *
Inspired and inspiring … Deeply intelligent, insightful and humane * Irish Times *

Jill Lepore is the David Woods Kemper ‘41 Professor of American History at Harvard University and Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. She is also a staff writer at The New Yorker. Her many books include the international bestseller These Truths: A History of the United States. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

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