From ‘The Terminator’ to tech titans: historian Jill Lepore examines the ‘artificial state’

In 1984, moviegoers worldwide packed theaters to see “The Terminator,” the classic sci-fi action flick in which Arnold Schwarzenegger plays a relentless and deadly robot from a future where machines have enslaved humanity.

The blockbuster’s dystopian plot, with its robot apocalypse, came to dominate the science-fiction genre and shape the perceptions of today’s tech titans, Harvard historian Jill Lepore ’95 Ph.D. said during a Yale talk last week as part of the Tanner Lectures on Human Values series.

“Inescapably, it seized the imaginations of the future rulers of Silicon Valley,” said Lepore, noting that Elon Musk, who was 13 when Schwarzenegger’s robotic assassin wreaked havoc on the silver screen, warned in 2023 that people must worry about a Terminator future to avoid a Terminator future. 

Neary two decades after the movie’s release, the movie inspired Swedish philosopher Nick Bostrom to contemplate the consequences of badly programmed superintelligence. In a 2003 paper, he introduced what he called “the paperclip maximizer,” a thought experiment that imagines a future in which humans instruct a machine to maximize the production of paperclips, Lepore explained.

“So, the machine, merely obeying orders, kills all humans, because it reasons that it will be possible to produce more paperclips without any humans around,” said Lepore.

Since 1978, the Tanner Lectures on Human Values have sought to advance and reflect upon scholarly and scientific thought relating to human values. During two separate talks last week, Lepore, the David Woods Kemper ’41 Professor of American History at Harvard University and a staff writer at The New Yorker, explored the rise and fall of “the artificial state.”

Her talks, hosted by the Whitney Humanities Center, were an inquiry into what humans mean and intend in abandoning constitutional democracy and the liberal nation-state for rule by automation and government by machine. She chronicled the rise of the tech-dominated “artificial state,” attempting to reckon with what it has cost the natural world and anticipating its fall.

In the second of her two lectures, titled “What Robots Want,” Lepore questioned how a Hollywood storyline conceived by filmmaker James Cameron came to be taken so seriously as prediction of the future.

“After all, ‘The Terminator,’ if hugely influential, is hardly original,” she said. “Stories of attempts to build an artificial man date to the earliest historical records, from ancient Greece to ancient Egypt to ancient India. Prometheus fashioned humans out of clay. Mechanical automaton made of solid gold appear in ‘The Iliad,’ and artists present a fully functioning wooden man to a king in a Chinese story from the third-century B.C.E.”

Lepore argued that society’s collective fear of a robot apocalypse has less to do with the rise of machines than with the fall of animals.

“It is the manifestation of a threat, a great recoiling and revulsion and abject grief at humanity’s destruction of the natural world and especially of animals,” she said. “Before humans could imagine robots destroying humans — rendering us helpless, hopeless, and without free will — humans had to do these things to animals and to imagine that animals have no free will, no insides, no selves.

“Humans had to deprive animals of personhood before they could imagine that robots will one day do the same things.”

Drawing on literature, philosophy, history, and popular culture — including references to 20th-century American science fiction author Philip K. Dick and 17th century French philosopher René Descartes — Lepore explored the connections between humanity’s exploitation and subjugation of animals and its fears of extinction at the hands of robotic masters.

“And here’s the bizarre plot twist,” she said. “The parable of the artificial state, a cautionary tale about the enslavement of humanity to machinery, became, in the 21st-century, a business plan,” she said. “It made this leap when the merchant princes of Silicon Valley began to subscribe to a philosophy known as ‘longtermism.’”

This philosophy, which places a moral emphasis on humanity positively influencing the long-term future, has led some tech titans to abandon efforts to mitigate climate change in favor of creating an artificial state and envision an interplanetary future where people flee a dying Earth for Mars or other extraterrestrial settlements, Lepore said.

“For longtermers, an indeterminate, imagined, and quite possibly extraterrestrial future always trumps the… suffering of humans and even the fate of Earth itself,” she said.

Four centuries after Descartes tried to prove that men are machines that can think, “vastly consequential decisions about the future of Earth are being made by a handful of machine-owning men based on their colossal accumulation of wealth; their catastrophic misreading of history, literature, and philosophy; and their staggering contempt for ordinary people…,” Lepore said. “They brook no dissent.”

But despite Silicon Valley’s fidelity to its misguided vision, Lepore said, the artificial state is doomed.

“It can neither defy the laws of nature nor escape natural limits,” she said. “The artificial world cannot survive without the natural world, any more than a newborn can survive without milk, or, of course, without sunlight. The artificial state’s dependence on the natural world is the squishy underbelly beneath its Terminator 6000 titanium hard exoskeleton.” 

In conclusion, Lepore provided a roadmap to preventing a machine-driven dystopia.

“[It] will require a new dream, and it will require the inspection of facts, the exercise of reason, the search for meaning, the reading and study of philosophy and art and history and literature, and even learning the lessons of ancient parables and of modern science fiction,” she said. “I believe it also requires thinking about nature and especially about animals.

“In no story ever written about the artificial state is its rise not followed by a descent into disaster: dark, cold, tyrannical worlds through grey polluted skies,” she said. “But there is always a way out. A crack in the door. A key to the lock. These stories teem with lessons.”