We’re racing towards a future where AI enables the “factory farming of humans,” a Harvard professor warns — if tech elites get their way, at least.
In a new episode of The New York Time’s “Hard Fork” podcast, the historian Jill Lepore discusses her idea of an “artificial state” that’s supplanting the traditional nation state, and particular constitutional democracy, with one that erases human autonomy.
In this emerging world order, government is conducted “not by the consent of people but by machines that are making decisions,” she explained on the podcast. And those machines, of course, are owned by corporations.
We aren’t living in the artificial state quite yet, Lepore stresses, but it’s something that’s being built and realized around us. And crucially, it’s also a fantasy held by certain influential elites who believe their power should supersede the actual government and the voters who decide how it’s run.
