Historian Jill Lepore on the “artificial state”

At Vrbo, we understand that even the best of plans sometimes need a little support, so we plan for the plot twists. Every booking is automatically backed by our Vrbo Care Guarantee, giving you confidence from the very start. Whenever you need help, it's ready, before your stay, through the moments in between, and after your trip. Because a great trip starts with peace of mind, and maybe a good playlist. But we've got the peace of mind part covered.

[music] This is a CBC podcast.

Hello, I'm Matt Galloway, and this is The Current Podcast.

We have a choice in front of us. AI can either be more like a new renaissance of creativity and discovery, or more like a new industrial revolution of upheaval and disarray.

That's Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT. He was addressing the UN Security Council in September, calling for that body to put in place international artificial intelligence standards.

We've been talking about artificial intelligence for years, but it feels different in recent weeks and months. Rapid model progress has made the timeline feel more compressed, the upside more tangible, but also the stakes and the risks more immediate.

In recent weeks, tech executives like Sam Altman have been talking about the need for AI development to slow down, and even about the potential for that technology to kill all humans within the next decade. But for Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Jill Lepore, there are concerns beyond just what AI is capable of. She says that technology writ large is changing how we're governed, and how citizens engage with the political process and each other. Her new book, The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State, looks at how we have arrived at this particular moment in time, and how we might get ourselves out of it. And Jill Lepore joins me in our Toronto studio. Good morning.

Good morning.

You say that this book is inquiry into what human means. What does it mean to be a human being?

You know, actually, it's sort of interesting. The idea of the human as a category really dates to the 18th century. It really kind of had to do with a kind of new set of ideas about the line between the human and the non-human, the human and the animal, the natural and the artificial, and kind of which side is mankind on. Are we, like, part of the natural world, or are we something above it and different from it? You know, ideas that go back to, you know, earliest human thinking and writing and art, right? You just think about cave art and, uh, how people are depicted against the animal world. But we're really living, you know, at a, at the cusp of a, really is a truly different moment in the history of humanity where we have created creatures, machines that can think and talk to us. It c- causes me a, a lot of sorrow that it's not a moment of extraordinary excitement about the wonders of these technologies and the marvels that will come to us with new knowledge about the natural world, but is instead one in which we fear growing political repression and the loss of our humanity and our agency, uh, loss of our jobs, loss of our ability to be human with one another in, in company and connection, and the loss of democracy