The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State

AI 絕非命運：科技、權力與民主的考驗

普立茲獎得主、哈佛歷史學家吉兒・勒波爾全面審視我們走向科技主導治理體系的歷史進程，追溯科技、資料與演算法如何改變民主與治理，揭示「人工國家」的崛起。從AI、資料中心到伊隆・馬斯克，她揭示科技擴張對自然環境的代價，並提醒我們：塑造未來的不是機器，而是人、社會、文化與思想。

「歷史上的許多變革都來勢洶洶，但鮮少有像『人工國家』的崛起這般急速且不假思索。」勒波爾在這部激情之作中，深刻剖析了機器治理如何摧殘這個世界。受到漢娜•鄂蘭（Hannah Arendt）1951年著作《極權主義的起源》啟發——該書主張現代生活的機器體系正在重塑人類存在最根本的條件——勒波爾對科技革命與毫無靈魂的人工智慧氾濫感到無比不安，因而為我們的 21 世紀展開一幅全新歷史畫卷。

延伸自勒波爾 2024 年發表於《紐約客》的文章，本書如一記警鐘，追溯了我們對數據日益加深的依賴與被其箝制的過程。政治競選活動淹沒在鋪天蓋地的虛假機器人帳號之中，逐漸被簡化為攫取注意力的演算法；跨國媒體企業則支配著公共論述；自由主義民族國家的時代似乎正迅速走向終結，取而代之的，是仰賴威權主義與人工智慧工具的億萬富翁科技官僚。

帶有歐威爾式寓言色彩，本書揭示了科技如何腐蝕全球民主，導致人類社群與自我治理能力的雙重毀滅，並創造出一種新的 AI 政府形態——一個由數位公民組成的議會：AI 將代替由人類運作的立法機構，向人類提出應採取何種行動的建議。尤其令人警醒的是，在這些「令人暈眩、持續變動的計畫、預言與預測」不斷增生之際，人工國家的崛起竟以自然世界為代價，造成野生動物棲息地與生物多樣性的災難性流失。

儘管充斥著嚴峻的事實，本書並非一曲輓歌，而是鼓舞人心的號角。它證明了人工國家絕非不可避免，因為它是一種「沒有人民同意的政府，甚至是一個沒有人的政府」。勒波爾主張，這樣的體制是可以被拆解的。歷史上其他令人髮指的制度——封建制度、法西斯主義與奴隸制度——同樣曾經被拆除；然而，要拆解一個體系，就必須辨認它由哪些部分組成，追溯這些部分從何而來。因此，我們需要講述一段全新的歷史——這正是這本書存在的目的。
Longlisted for the Financial Times Business Book of the Year
Best Books of August: Barnes & Noble, Goodreads
A New York Times New and Notable Title

“Lepore is our best scholar of the culture of governance, and our most vital historian. Here she repudiates the prospect of AI as a replacement for democracy. This is the issue of our times, and Lepore is the voice of sanity.” ―Jaron Lanier, author of You Are Not a Gadget

“Much in history is headlong but few grand transformations have been more precipitate or more heedless than the rise of... the Artificial State,” writes Jill Lepore in this passionate account of how rule by machine has ravaged the world. Inspired by Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism, which argued in 1951 that the machinery of modern life was reshaping the very fundamentals of human existence, Lepore, profoundly disturbed by the technology revolution and by the soulless inundation of artificial intelligence, unfurls a new history for our own twenty-first century.

Building on an essay in The New Yorker in 2024, Lepore’s clarion call traces our increasing dependence on and strangulation by data. Political campaigns, awash in an avalanche of fake bots, have been reduced to attention-mining algorithms, while multinational media corporations dictate public discourse, and the era of the liberal nation-state seems to be coming to a rapid end, replaced by billionaire technocrats reliant on autocracy and the tools of AI.

With Orwellian overtones, The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State demonstrates how technology has corroded global democracy, leading to the destruction of both human community and capacity for self-government, creating a new form of AI government, a digital citizen’s assembly, where AI will recommend the course of action to humans in place of human-run legislatures. Especially sobering with this proliferation of “dizzying, ever-changing schemes, prophesies, and predictions” is that the Artificial State has come at the expense of the natural world, leading to catastrophic loss of wildlife habitat and biodiversity.

Deliberately alarming, The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State, despite its abundance of dire facts, is not a funeral dirge; rather, it’s an inspiring wake-up call, written in Lepore’s typically elegiac prose, which demonstrates that nothing about the Artificial State was inevitable, for it is a “government without consent, even government without humans.” It can, Lepore asserts, be dismantled. Other heinous systems, like feudalism, fascism, and slavery, have also been dismantled, but disassembly requires identifying the parts, tracing the sources. It requires telling a new history. This is the purpose of The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State.