Historian Jill Lepore (The Deadline) pulls no punches in The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State. From the first sentence of the preface, she clearly defines her bold claim--that humans must resist being ruled by automated systems or risk the destruction of democracy and the natural world--and her willingness to defend it. She also proves her facility at doing so; she is assertive without being strident and builds her case methodically and without undue dramatics. But the case she builds is not without its own fireworks, and Lepore is unafraid to point the finger at the "very small number of staggeringly powerful twenty-first-century merchant princes" responsible for what she calls "a new fantastical form of tyranny: the Artificial State."
Though The Rise and Fall seems at first to be merely an antitechnology screed, Lepore takes pains to elucidate the present and potential good of recent technological advances, particularly in artificial intelligence. "But," she continues, "their effects on political discourse, representative democracy, and constitutional government have been almost wholly malign." Readers familiar with Lepore's If, Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future and her other work will recognize parts of the first section, where she chronicles the rise of automation and government by data analytics. Part two turns to literature, arguing that "reading science fiction is crucial both to understanding the rise of the Artificial State and to anticipating its fall." A technocracy is not an inevitability, Lepore insists. However, "escaping the world imagined by the architects of the Artificial State requires imagining a different future," one that considers the cautionary tales from countless fiction writers and learns from the disasters they foretold. --Sara Beth West, freelance reviewer and librarian