The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State (w/ Jill Lepore) | TCHR

About this episode

As artificial intelligence (AI) becomes more ubiquitous by the day, its alleged dangers are being increasingly discussed by the dominant players of Silicon Valley, who are beginning to call publicly for a slowdown in its implementation. The greatest risk to people is not the technology itself but the military-contracting capitalists behind it such as Sam Altman and Elon Musk, who envision a technocratic future where man and machine merge in a dystopian harmony. Harvard historian Jill Lepore joins Chris Hedges in this episode of The Chris Hedges Report to discuss her new book, “The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State,” where she delves into the forces that shaped the beliefs of the small, but powerful, group of elites from Silicon Valley who are pushing to replace liberal democracy with automated systems that they claim would create “a world of really endless abundance and no labor, where the things that are hard in our lives would be taken care of by machinery.” Lepore looks at their connections to the technocracy movement of the early twentieth century and how their early views were shaped by science fiction and comic books. The psychopathology of these elites, Hedges states