Jill Lepore's 'Artificial State' warns tech leaders are bad sci-fi readers

Jill Lepore, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Harvard historian and New Yorker writer, has a provocative theory about Silicon Valley: tech leaders speak like they're forming a new government, not just building products. In her upcoming book, The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State, she argues that companies like Twitter and Facebook have already displaced civic institutions — from distorting the electorate's voice to replacing local news. Now, AI pioneers are taking it further, promising that artificial intelligence can make government more efficient, responsive, or even unnecessary. Lepore calls this an old fantasy in new packaging, and she believes today's AI evangelists are bad sci-fi readers.

On TechCrunch's Equity podcast, Lepore explains the historical throughline from the 1984 Macintosh ad to Anthropic's AI constitution and Sam Altman's comments about an "AI president." She points to E.M. Forster's 1909 story 'The Machine Stops' as the blueprint for this artificial state — a tale that now reads, in her words, like "the diary of a very unhappy YouTuber." Lepore argues that this vision is fundamentally unsustainable, and she questions whether tech leaders who mistake technological advancement for political progress can ever build legitimate governance. The episode offers a sharp, historically grounded critique of AI's most grandiose promises.