Jill Lepore traces AI's 'artificial state' from 1984 Mac ad to Altman's 'AI president'

Tech leaders promising AI will make government obsolete are not peddling a new vision. They’re running a very old playbook. That’s the central argument historian Jill Lepore makes in her forthcoming book, The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State, which she discussed on TechCrunch’s Equity podcast.

Lepore draws a straight line from Apple’s iconic 1984 Macintosh commercial — which framed IBM as a totalitarian Big Brother — to today’s AI manifestos. She points to Anthropic’s public-facing AI constitution and Sam Altman’s musings about an ‘AI president’ as modern expressions of the same impulse. The pitch is always seductive: technology will make governance more efficient, more responsive, maybe even unnecessary. For Lepore, this fundamentally mistakes technological advancement for political progress. It’s a category error with real consequences, as platforms like Twitter and Facebook have already distorted the electorate and gutted local journalism.

The historian finds an eerily prescient blueprint in E.M. Forster’s 1909 story ‘The Machine Stops,’ which she says now reads like ‘the diary of a very unhappy YouTuber.’ The tale describes a population living in isolated pods, utterly dependent on a vast apparatus they no longer understand. It’s a century-old warning about the fragility of systems that promise comfort while dissolving human agency. Lepore sees the same hubris in today’s tech leaders who talk openly about replacing the nation-state without grappling with what that would actually mean for democratic accountability.

Ultimately, Lepore argues the artificial state is unsustainable — a brittle structure bound to crack under the weight of its own contradictions. Reining it in will require more than regulation, she suggests. It demands a renewed civic vocabulary that tech’s soaring rhetoric has spent decades eroding. The question her work leaves hanging is whether that vocabulary can be rebuilt faster than the systems designed to render it obsolete.