The Uncertainty Boom

Dear Aventine Readers,

AI is upending the financial markets, disrupting education and remaking our lives. Add to that political polarization, economic turmoil and international conflict, and the result is a world in which no person or institution has any confidence in what comes next. 

To understand these times better, we interviewed five experts, including a neuroscientist, an economist, a retired US Army general, a historian and a research psychologist on the subject of uncertainty itself — how it affects our thinking, our actions, the economy and how we might thrive under such chaotic circumstances. 

We begin with Jill Lepore, the Harvard historian and staff writer for The New Yorker. Her new book, “The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State,” published this month, examines the growing influence of technology on liberal democracy. Her previous book, “We the People: A History of the US Constitution,” won the Pulitzer Prize for History in 2026. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Thanks for reading,

Danielle Mattoon
Executive Director, Aventine

You write in your introduction that historians tend to shy away from the present. So what made you write “The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State”?

It troubled me that there isn't a name for what's going on and I think people have a kind of experience of disorientation, like everything's changing. I was asked to give the Tanner Lectures on Human Values at Yale, and I thought, “Oh, I have this idea of the Artificial State. And people really found the nomenclature helpful. 

What do you mean by the artificial state?

In the United States today, we live in a liberal democratic constitutional nation-state and many people around the world live under similar arrangements. This is a historical development. The nation state itself is a fairly recent vintage, and it's unclear whether the liberal nation-state will last. 

I'm trying to give a name for a new form of nation-state — well, not even really a nation-state — but a new kind of state that appears to me to be emerging first in the United States and is spreading around the world. In some ways, it’s a possible successor to the liberal nation-state and I call that “the artificial state.” It's not a perfect name, but it helps associate this turn with the rise of artificial intelligence with which it is related, even though it precedes it. By the artificial state I mean a privatized state in which corporations have taken over more and more of the functions of democratic governance without the consent of the governed. 

Some kind of maybe obvious examples of that would be the ways in which tech companies use the language of democratic institutions to describe what they are doing, which is running companies to make profit. Facebook, after the criticism it received in the aftermath of the 2016 election given the role of fake news on Facebook and possible influence of Facebook on democratic processes, established a “supreme court” to decide whether or not to take down posts. Last year, Anthropic produced and published a constitution for Claude. Not that long ago, Sam Altman of Open AI talked about how much better an AI president would be than a human president. These are, in some ways, symbolic examples, but I try to demonstrate in the book just how many of the functions of a liberal democracy really have been subsumed by multinational corporations based in the United States. 

Another example is the public sphere, which was something that emerged in the 18th century. It has a very particular and frankly quite inspiring history, relating to the role that printers played in establishing the freedom of the press, and thereby the freedom of speech that undergirded the development of American democracy. But what we now have by way of a public sphere is a series of online platforms that are owned by private corporations, and they are dominated not by humans, but by bots. There are more bots on all social media platforms and more bots online on the internet in general than there are humans. And they have many motivations. Some of them are funded by states. Some of them are funded by stateless actors or some of them are funded by terrorists or run by criminals. Some of them are agentic AI doing business for you. But I don't think we can in any way confidently assert that when robots have taken over public discourse we still have freedom of the press and free speech and a free deliberative democratic public sphere.

I'm interested in the kind of immediate effects the artificial state seems to be having on people, a huge rise in uncertainty and anxiety, particularly over artificial intelligence. Are there parallels in the history of the US where people felt this way?

If you talk to historians, historians are going to say it's not that new. People have always been worried about doom, right? How uncertain is childbirth before really the middle of the 20th century? I think we have a very presentist and narrow view of what uncertainty really feels like in a world of just tremendous security unseen in history, certainly in the West, in the United States. The kind of security with which we live has never been seen before in human history. That makes the uncertainty that we experience maybe a little bit more paralyzing. 

Maybe what I'm reacting to then is people who thought they were safe. We just wrote about mathematicians who are upset that AI is solving proofs that they've worked on for decades. Whether deserved or not, isn’t that a source of anxiety or uncertainty? 

I can go on about ways in which I think economic precarity has devastated a lot of people's lives. That AI stuff touches on a kind of precarity for white-collar workers is also concerning. Relative to you having like a 60 percent chance of dying in childbirth, that your math proof work is going to be superseded by an AI, they're just very different categories of difficulty.

This is a total offshoot, but there’s interesting scholarship on parental anxiety. People used to not be so anxious about their children because their children died all the time. You know, the infant mortality rate, the childhood mortality rate and obviously the childbirth mortality rate was so high that really, you know, if you were going to worry, the thing you were worried about was death. Parents are unbelievably anxious about their children and have been since the 1950s, which is really when you see childhood mortality rates plummeting. Why are people worrying? Parents are not worried about death anymore, but they worry about everything else. And because they are secure, relatively secure in the knowledge that their children are not going to die, accidents loom much larger. So I would have said that the fetishization of uncertainty in our world today is actually about our prosperity and our safety.

You write that one of the ideas supporting the artificial state is technological determinism. Has there been another period in American history where people looked at technological advances and said, “We want to slow this down”?  

There are plenty of huge technological leaps that have had vast consequences, including for the landscape, in the way that, say, the data center buildout has. You would think of the railroad or the superhighway, maybe telegraph wires, which are related to the railroads because they use the same lines. But there were the obvious benefits of the railroad and the telegraph. It was pretty clear to people. You could be Henry David Thoreau sitting in your cabin at Walden Pond in 1845 and say, “I hate that my beautiful rural woodsy retreat is interrupted by the whistle of the train coming by every day.” But even Thoreau would recognize what the advantages were of the railroad. 

I think what's distinctive about this moment is that a lot of people, especially younger people, say, “I don't even want this. What does this give? I don't want any of these things. You know what I want? I want record stores back. You know what I want? I wish we had bookstores still. You know what I want? I wish that we had printed newspapers.” They’re obsessed with the time before there was the internet, because they don't know what that was, and it just seems better to them. I think that's really different.

It’s probably worth saying I'm not a Luddite. I’m not opposed to technological change. There are all kinds of instances in which you can see the insertion of improved technologies as really important for effective functioning of a 20th- and 21st-century government. Certainly, the social welfare state requires all kinds of collection of data for the provision of benefits. Think about the Veterans Administration. Think about the way the census works. Tabulating machines were really first devised for counting the US census in the 1890s. The first commercial general-purpose computer, the Univac, which was an offshoot of the ENIAC, which was developed by the US military during the Second World War, was built for the US Census Bureau.

One of the things the book chronicles is the kind of slow accretion.  All right, well, this was a good idea. Maybe that was a good idea. These people had a good notion. Then it gets to a point where people should say, “Wait a minute. Some of this is actually going to be bad.” 

There is an existential question, which you tease out in your book. If machines can do what we do — if not better, certainly more cheaply and faster — then what does it mean to be human? 

I think that is a deep anxiety. A deep cultural anxiety. It's about our eradication.  Anthropologists call this annihilation anxiety. It really dates as a specific theory. You first see that idea in fiction in 1826 when Mary Shelley writes “The Last Man,” eight years after she writes “Frankenstein,” in which she imagines the extinction of the human race due to a plague. A global pandemic. Humans began thinking about that in the 19th century. They've only just recently learned that other animals can become extinct. Then they learn we have sometimes been part of what's making another species become extinct. And then, “Oh, what if we become extinct?” And then the next thing is, “Oh, what if we invent machines that annihilate us? And that's why we become extinct?” It would be like payback for what we have done to all these other species. There's just a kind of deep meta story in there.

You write a little bit about Covid in your book, and I'm wondering how much you see Covid as a factor in the current mood. 

I think we were really only just beginning to understand how to measure the effect of Covid. I had written a history of the United States, a book called “These Truths” that came out in 2018, and last year I was asked to add a new chapter that would run from 2016 to 2026. I was told I could have eight illustrations. I asked everybody I knew, “If you had eight photographs to illustrate the last 10 years, what would they be?” To a person, no one suggested a photograph that had anything to do with Covid. No masks. Nothing. I was really struck by that. There's this weird sort of erasure from people's memory of such a painful, odd time. 

There are really interesting ways to think about that and measure it but at the cultural level, I think it obviously contributed to people's loneliness and the decay of community, a sense of alienation. And it also tethered people differently to their computers. It made it possible for people to say, “Oh, I don't need to go to my office and be there. I can just Zoom in today.” Made instructors say, “Oh, I'm not going to go to office hours. I just have Zoom office hours this week. I don't want to go there.” Chipping away at more of what brings people together in community is bad for civil society. And you need civil society to have a functioning democracy. 

Did you have a moment yourself that gave you that sense of uncertainty? 

 [In “The Artificial State] I talk a lot about Hannah Arendt and her book “The Human Condition,” which she wrote in response to Sputnik in 1957. ChatGBT in 2022 was, for people around the world, a kind of Sputnik moment. OK, my computer can now talk to me. Decades of research and natural-language processing and machine learning and now I can actually talk to a machine. That's crazy. And it did feel huge. I find it crazier that people want to talk to their computers. Nothing interests me less, but most people have sort of jumped in with both feet in a way that I find very distressing. But that might be me. 

Do you feel any personal anxiety that AI might change your profession?

I would say not personal, like  “Oh, I'm going to be in a bread line.” But ultimately in the sense of what is going to happen to the study of history, the study of literature. I feel extremely worried about those things. Do I worry about my students? Entirely, strenuously and desperately.

Also in this series:

Nicholas Bloom, an economist at Stanford University, talks about economic uncertainty, what it is and how it affects companies, countries, investors and consumers. 

Jack Nitschke, a clinical psychologist and neuroscientist, discusses uncertainty’s effect on our brains and why it makes us less prepared for the future.

George W. Casey, a retired four-star US Army general, discusses leadership under uncertainty and the lessons he learned taking over the multinational forces in Iraq in 2004.

Kate Sweeny, a research psychologist, studies how uncertain outcomes affect our behavior and sometimes prompt poor decision-making.