21 August 2026

Historian Lepore warns of tech billionaires building undemocratic 'Artificial State'

• Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Jill Lepore argues that a small group of Silicon Valley billionaires, including Elon Musk and Sam Altman, are consolidating power through AI and automation in ways that threaten democratic governance.
• Lepore identifies two forms of the 'Artificial State': a fantasy of elite escape from planetary and biological limits, and a present reality where private social media platforms manipulate public discourse through algorithmic feeds that spread polarizing content.
• The book traces how science fiction from the Cold War era, intended as cautionary tales, has instead been read by tech leaders as instruction manuals for building autonomous systems that could eventually rule without human oversight.
• Lepore contends the core problem is not AI technology itself but the absence of democratic public strategy for developing and controlling it, leaving decisions entirely to unelected billionaires whose priorities may not serve broader human welfare.

Reported by The New York Times, The Guardian