At the beginning of The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State, historian Jill Lepore recalls Hannah Arendt’s reaction to news coverage of the launch of the first artificial satellite Sputnik 1 in 1957. According to Arendt, reporters described Sputnik’s launch as “the first step toward escape from men’s imprisonment to the earth”. Arendt found this language astonishing.
Throughout the remainder of Lepore’s deeply intelligent, insightful and humane analysis, she recounts how what was for most of human history a nightmare scenario has today become a fever dream pursued around the world with messianic zeal.
That fever dream is for humanity, through the development of ever more advanced robotics, human cryogenics, AI and space technology, to become “free” from entanglement not only from place – village, city, nation, Earth – but also free from the constraints of our physical bodies, with our minds uploaded to cyberspace allowing us to “live” forever.
The insanity of the project and the terror that this is indeed the path we are on are just two of the visceral wake-up calls in this important and courageous book. Lepore traces the origin of this journey, from nightmare to 21st-century technological arms race, back to the rise of science.
Beginning in the 16th century, the scientific age introduced two radically new ideas into the governance of human affairs. The first is mechanical philosophy, the idea that everything is a machine that operates according to deducible laws, rules subject to quantification, calculation, and prediction. The second is technological determinism, the idea that technological development, despite its tendency for “creative destruction”, inevitably leads to betterment and progress.
Today these pseudoscientific dogmas everywhere shape our world. They can be seen in our belief that the more machines a country has, the more developed its people; in China and India’s breakneck “development” aimed at not only having more machines but also becoming the world’s leader in machine manufacture; in the United States’ use of its economic might to try to ensure that it remains the world’s number one machine nation.
Lepore charts the dire consequences of our machine age, including changes to the Earth’s climate, pollution, deforestation, and the eradication of wildlife species and habitats. In describing the adverse impacts on democracies, she quotes political theorist Langdon Winner, writing as far back as 1988, that so far “current developments in the information age suggest an increase in power by those who already had a great deal of power, an enhanced centralisation of control by those already prepared for control, an augmentation of wealth by the already wealthy”.
‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’: 40 years on
Part 2 takes an inspired and inspiring turn to literature to reawaken us to a deeper reality. Lepore begins by reminding us that the idea of creating an artificial man dates back to the earliest historical records and to humanity’s earliest stories. Prometheus fashioned humans out of clay. Mechanical men made of pure gold appear in the Iliad. And a wooden man created as a gift to a king appears in a Chinese story from the third century BCE.
Today these stories are found mainly in science fiction, to which we will return. But Lepore places another genre of literature, in which animals have the human abilities to speak and think, as a precursor to science fiction. Mark Twain’s A Dog’s Tale, Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty and Hugh Lofting’s Dr Dolittle are all examples of this genre. All were written, Lepore reminds us, as rejoinders to the then scientific orthodoxy that animals are essentially machines.
Escaping the artificial state will not simply require progress in science and greater machine ‘intelligence’. It requires that we imagine a different future
Lepore then charts how science fiction took up the mantle. In her overview she is at pains to point out that the stories contained therein were more often than not cautionary tales warning against hubris rather than fantasies of a better future.
She describes, for example, how Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy punctures techno-optimism’s galactic conceit with humour. The novel’s anti-hero Zaphod Beeblebrox is the only human ever to have survived entering the Total Perspective Vortex. Entering the vortex gives you a total perspective on your place in the universe whereby you discover you are galactically insignificant. But not Beeblebrox, who discovers himself “to be the most important being in the entire universe, something he had hitherto only suspected”.
The fall of the artificial state is, Lepore believes, fore-ordained. “The artificial state can neither deny the laws of nature nor escape natural limits: an artificial world cannot survive without the natural world any more than a newborn can survive without milk or a forest without sunlight.”
But escaping the artificial state will not simply require progress in science and greater machine “intelligence”. It requires that we imagine a different future, Lepore urges, by listening again to the stories once whispered by firesides and read together at bedtime.
Ian Hughes is a senior research fellow at the Sustainability Institute, University College Cork. He is author of Disordered Minds: How Dangerous Personalities are Destroying Democracy