In this extract from her new book, historian Jill Lepore argues that Elon Musk, Sam Altman and other Silicon Valley billionaires are building what she calls the "Artificial State" – a vision of society freed from democratic government and national borders, drawn largely from science fiction they read as boys but, in her view, fundamentally misunderstood. She contends these tech leaders treat cautionary sci-fi tales as blueprints rather than warnings, using dramatic predictions of AI-driven existential risk to justify accelerating development and attracting investment, while abandoning earlier promises of democratic oversight or global governance structures for the technology.

Lepore highlights specific examples: Musk's plan to use AI to generate a "historically accurate" version of Homer's Odyssey even as AI firms destroy books to harvest data, and Altman's 2025 remark that data centres might eventually cover most of the Earth's surface, or even be moved into space. She notes Altman's fondness for the novel "We Are Legion (We Are Bob)", in which human consciousness is uploaded to serve an AI-run government, and that he – like Peter Thiel and Marvin Minsky before him – has arranged to have his body frozen after death in hopes of future revival, which Lepore frames as a literal, uncritical reading of speculative fiction as an instruction manual.