역사학자 질 레포어는 최근 인터뷰에서 민주주의 국가의 역할이 점차 빅테크 기업들과 알고리즘으로 대체되고 있다고 경고했습니다. 특히 실리콘밸리 지도자들이 왜곡된 SF 장르에 기반해 국가의 역할을 침식하려 한다고 비판하며, 기술 발전과 민주주의의 균형을 되찾아야 함을 강조했습니다.
번역된 본문
애플 팟캐스트 및 스포티파이에서 청취하세요.
출간 예정인 그녀의 새 책 《인공 국가의 흥망성쇠(The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State)》에서 질 레포어는 기술 기업들이 민주주의 정부의 기능을 점점 더 대체하고 있다고 경고합니다. 그녀는 이러한 변화가 "알고리즘과 기업, 기계에 의한 통치라는 형태로 전제정치와 미신으로의 회귀"를 의미한다고 말했습니다.
최신 TechCrunch의 Equity 팟캐스트 에피소드에서 나는 레포어와 "우리가 기계에 의한 통치나 인공 국가 아래에서 살아야 한다는 개념"의 발전에 대해 대화를 나눴습니다. 그녀는 하버드대 역사학자이자 최근 미국 헌법에 대한 역사서로 퓰리처상을 수상한 뉴요커의 전속 필자입니다.
"나는 반기술론자가 아닙니다."라고 레포어는 강조했습니다. 대신 그녀는 "나의 불만은 민간 기업이 국가의 기능을 점점 더 떠맡고 있는 방식에 있다"고 덧붙였습니다.
레포어의 책은 수세기 전으로 거슬러 올라가는 기술관료제적 철학을 조명하지만, 그녀는 실리콘밸리의 "매력적이거나 그렇지 않은 지도자들"(특히 일론 머스크)이 잘못 해석된 통속 SF(SF)와 코믹북에서 따온 미래를 열어가고 있는 것처럼 보인다고 주장했습니다.
"하지만 머스크에 대해 재미있는 점은, 그가 좋아하는 것들이 실제로는 그의 모든 정치적 신념을 완전히 패배시키고 무시한다는 것입니다."라고 그녀는 말했습니다.
우리의 대화에는 애플의 유명한 매킨토시 "1984" 광고, 트위터를 디지털 타운홀(광장)이라고 부르는 것이 왜 황당한 일인지, 그리고 현재 데이터 센터에 대한 반발 등도 다루어졌습니다. 내용과 명확성을 위해 편집된 주요 대화 내용은 다음과 같습니다.
Q: 이미 여러 번 설명하셨겠지만, 말씀하시는 "인공 국가(Artificial State)"가 무엇을 의미하는지 설명해 주시겠습니까?
인공 국가라는 것은 미국과 전 세계의 자유민주주의 민족 국가를 대체하는 일종의 국가를 의미합니다. 그것은 실제적인 구성물이자 개념이기도 합니다. 따라서 이 책 《인공 국가의 흥망성쇠》에서 나는 우리가 기계에 의한 통치나 인공 국가 아래에서 살아야 한다는 개념이 어떻게 대두되었는지 그 기원을 추적합니다. 또한 이것이 불가피한 실패이며 인공 국가는 결코 살아남을 수 없다는 개념을 추적하며, SF를 통해 그 아이디어를 살펴봅니다.
Q: 어느 지점에서 당신은 인공 국가의 부상이 수세기에 걸친 민주주의와 평등한 권리의 종말을 의미하며, 이는 "알고리즘과 기업, 기계에 의한 통치라는 형태로 전제정치와 미신으로의 회귀"라고 말했습니다. 왜 이렇게 단호한 시각으로 보시는지 조금 더 설명해 주실 수 있나요?
네, 저는 이에 대해 상당히 부정적인 시각을 가지고 있습니다. 인공 국가와 기술 자체, 즉 기술의 방식을 구별하는 것이 중요하다고 생각합니다. 나는 반기술론자가 아닙니다. 남편이 컴퓨터 과학자입니다. 나는 지금 우리가 겪고 있는 온갖 종류의 지적 혁명에 대해 정말 기대하고 있습니다. 그것은 내가 불만을 갖는 부분이 아니죠. 나의 불만은 민간 기업들이 점점 더 국가의 기능을 떠맡고 있는 방식에 있습니다.
아무도 그것에 동의한 적이 없습니다. 이는 전 세계 많은 민족 국가가 작동하는 방식에 대한 점진적이고 대체로 우연적인 변화였으며, 이러한 현상은 미국에서 가장 먼저 발생했습니다. 정부의 운영에 새로운 기술을 도입하는 이러한 혁신들은 대개 매우 좋은 의도에서 비롯되었다고 생각합니다. 이들은 효율성, 속도, 비용 절감에 대한 관심에서 출발했죠. 그리고 지난 20~25년 정도에 이르러서야, 이러한 결정들이 민족 국가의 역할을 찬탈(가로채기)하려는 의도적이고 고의적인 것으로 변했습니다. 그리고 이것은 나의 추측이 아닙니다. 아주 유명한 기술 기업가들이 민족 국가의 시대를 넘어서고 싶다고 말하는 것을 많이 듣게 됩니다. [...] 90년대의 많은 미래학자들은 자유지상주의자(Libertarians)였으며, 인터넷의 발전과 그에 따른 연속적인 혁신을 민족 국가를 뿌리 뽑기 위한 수단으로 사용하는 데 특별한 관심을 가졌습니다.
Q: 한편으로는 기술 자체에 대해, 그리고 그 기술 뒤에 있는 철학과 기업이 점점 더 많이 맡게 된 역할에 대해 이야기하셨습니다. 우리가 이들을 어느 정도까지 분리할 수 있는지 궁금합니다. 실제로 우리가 분리해 낼 수 있을까요?
Listen on Apple Podcasts Listen on Spotify In her upcoming book “The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State,” Jill Lepore warns that tech companies are increasingly replacing the functions of democratic government. This shift, she said, marks “a return to tyranny and mystification in the form of rule by algorithms, corporations, machines.” On the latest episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast , I spoke to Lepore — a Harvard historian and New Yorker staff writer who recently won a Pulitzer Prize for her history of the U.S. Constitution — about the development of what she described as “the idea that we should live under an artificial state or government by machines.” “I’m not anti-technologist,” Lepore insisted. Instead, she said, “My beef is the ways in which private corporations have increasingly taken on the functions of the state.” While Lepore’s book examines technocratic philosophies that go back centuries, she argued that many of Silicon Valley’s “charismatic or not-so-charismatic leaders” — especially Elon Musk — seem to be ushering in a future pulled from misread pulp science fiction and comic books. “But what's funny about Musk is, the stuff he likes actually completely defeats and defies all of his political beliefs,” she said. Our conversation also covered Apple's famous "1984" Macintosh ad, why it's "bananas" to call Twitter a digital town hall, and the current data center backlash. Keep reading for highlights, edited for length and clarity. So you’ve probably had to do this a lot already, but can you explain what you mean by the “artificial state”? By the artificial state, I mean a kind of state that is replacing the liberal democratic nation-state in the United States and around the world. It's both a real thing, a construct, but it's also an idea. And so, in this book “The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State,” I trace the rise of the idea that we should live under an artificial state or government by machines. I also trace the notion that this is an inevitable failure, that the artificial state cannot survive, and I trace that idea through science fiction. At one point, you say the rise of the artificial state marks the end of centuries of democracy and equal rights, and it's “a return to tyranny and mystification in the form of rule by algorithms, corporations, machines.” Can you just say a little bit more about why you see it in such stark terms? Yeah, I do have a pretty negative view of it, and I think it's important to distinguish the artificial state from technology itself or modes of technology. I'm not an anti-technologist. I’m married to a computer scientist. I'm really excited about all kinds of intellectual revolutions that we're in the midst of right now. That's not my beef, right? My beef is the ways in which private corporations have increasingly taken on the functions of the state. No one consented to that. This has been a kind of gradual, largely accidental transformation of how many nation-states around the world work — it's happened first in the United States. I think often these innovations in bringing new technologies to the operations of government have been extremely well intentioned; they originate with an interest in efficiency and speed and cheapness. And then, I think, only in the last 20, 25 years or so have these decisions been purposeful and deliberate as a kind of usurpation of the role of the nation-state. And that's not my speculation. You hear a lot of a lot of very prominent tech entrepreneurs talk about wanting to move beyond the era of the nation-state. […] A lot of futurists in the '90s were libertarians, and they had a specific interest in using the advance of the internet and the successive innovations that followed as a means to eradicate the nation-state. You talk about, on the one hand, the technologies themselves, and then also the philosophies behind them, the role the corporation has increasingly played. I'm curious to what extent we can separate them. Can we actually have a version of the internet and of social media that doesn't necessarily lead to this future that it seems like we're [currently] hurtling towards? Absolutely. I'm a historian. I'm not a tech writer. I'm not a tech journalist. I'm not a computer scientist. I'm a historian, and I'm chiefly a political historian, though I'm also a literary historian. And so, one of the things that I'm really interested in unraveling for readers in this book is all the what-ifs, all the alternatives, the paths along the road that were not taken and why. There was, of course, a really avid discussion in the 1990s about what the internet should look like when it was opened up, and what we ended up with, the 1996 Telecommunications Act — I think, a lot of people would say [that] just was a mistake, not an act of sinister intent, right? But it was a product of a particular political moment, really was deeply influenced by Newt Gingrich and his Contract with America, and it's been very difficult to revisit. I think it's worth thinking about what were the alternatives that were in play at the time. And you could say the same thing about the personal computer. So to the degree that we can locate an origin point for the promise that better computer technology would make for better democracies, I think the moment you would first look to would be January 1984, that Super Bowl ad that Apple ran for the release of the Macintosh, with the the sort of George Orwell, 1984 [theme]. Apple was really big on the idea that mainframe computers represented totalitarianism. They were trying to dismantle the giant gray IBM machines, as in representing them in that ad as a totalitarian state. And the lithe, beautiful, quick, adorable, personal Macintosh would be the ax that would destroy that machine and would usher in a new era in which “1984 would not be ‘1984.’” That was clever advertising. I doubt that anybody at Apple really believed the personal computer was going to be an instrument of personal liberation. I mean, it was going to make possible a lot of cool things. I remember when I got my first Macintosh — it certainly wasn’t 1984, but it was really cool, it was really fun, it was really exciting, I did a lot of things on it. It would never occur to me that it was improving my capacity for citizenship or my ability to function better in civil society. It was a cool tool. But if you wind the reel forward in time, down to 2026 — stops along the way include the 2016 election when Facebook News, in response to its critics, establishes a Supreme Court . You get to last year, when Anthropic hired a moral philosopher to write a constitution . You get to recently, when Sam Altman was on Joe Rogan and said [in response to a question from Rogan], "Oh, an AI president would be a great idea.” In some ways, they're silly examples. But you see the ways in which these corporations, these tech companies from Silicon Valley, and especially their charismatic or not-so-charismatic leaders, are just taking on the trappings of the nation-state and the functions of democracy. They're not people with a sophisticated political philosophy, but it's like a cartoon version of that 1984 Macintosh ad, except that it takes itself so seriously. And these companies have so much power. But that said, the book doesn't begin in 1984. I just think that's a good example of our modern era and the way a fun advertising campaign turns into a kind of delusional fantasy on the part of people like Sam Altman. You [also] talk about the promise of the quote-unquote “Twitter revolution,” and this idea that it would bring democracy everywhere. I can't help but let that color the way I [react] when Sam Altman or some other AI CEO now says that AI is going to bring all these incredible gifts — and therefore, if you stand in the way, you're standing in the way of progress, in the way of history. To what extent should we just dismiss all these claims out of hand, or are there ways that it might come true?