Dr. Jill Lepore on why AI backlash is vital for the future

Today, I’m talking with Harvard professor and New Yorker staff writer Dr. Jill Lepore about her new book, The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State , which comes out on August 25.

Jill is one of the best writers there is at identifying institutional patterns in history, and Decoder is a show about systems, so this book could not possibly be more in our zone.

You build systems by measuring things — gathering information, quantifying it as data, and taking action on it.

And Jill’s big thesis in the book is that this kind of systemic measurement is really a dehumanizing act, one that flattens human concerns into something, well, artificial.

These artificial structures touch everything — not just in the more obvious places like in apps or AI, but all the way up to politics and governance itself, and Jill’s insights here are a telling portrait of the way Big Tech and its billionaire figureheads have managed to break the very idea of the state itself.

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You’ll hear Jill tell me she wanted to write a “kind of grumpy book,” but in my

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  Dr. Jill Lepore on why AI backlash is vital for the future