Lecture 2 | What Robots Want
These lectures are an inquiry into what humans mean and intend—to think what we are doing—in abandoning constitutional democracy and the liberal nation-state for rule by automation and government by machine. Much in history is headlong but few grand transformations have been more precipitate or more heedless than the rise of what Lepore calls the Artificial State. Yet little seems more inevitable than its eventual fall. These two lectures, richly illustrated with visual material, chronicle the rise of the Artificial State, attempt to reckon with what it has cost the natural world, and anticipate its fall.
If the Artificial State is government by machine, drones in place of the demos, deducing its laws and anticipating its behavior requires inquiring into not only the infrastructure of automation—servers, networks, data centers, and programs—but also the real and especially the imagined replacements for humans in the future body politic—drones, cyborgs, androids, and bots. What is the history and theory of robotic politics? What are the laws of the Artificial State? What are its ends? What, in short, do robots want?
Lepore will argue that the fear that robots will one day render humans extinct or reduce them to the status of animals is the manifestation of a dread, a great recoiling and revulsion and abject grief at humanity’s destruction of the natural world and, especially, of its ravaging of animals.
Jill Lepore ’95 Ph.D. is the David Woods Kemper ’41 Professor of American History at Harvard University and Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. She is also a staff writer at The New Yorker. A prize-winning professor, she teaches classes in evidence, historical methods, humanistic inquiry, and American history. Much of her scholarship explores absences and asymmetries in the historical record, with a particular emphasis on the history and technology of evidence. As a wide-ranging and prolific essayist, and winner of the PEN prize for the Art of the Essay, Lepore writes about American history, law, literature, and politics. She is the author of many award-winning books, including the international bestseller, These Truths: A History of the United States (2018) and The Deadline, a collection of essays (2023). Her latest book is We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution (September 2025).