Beyond Elon Musk's interpretation of, Silicon Valley leaders have often misunderstood classic books like and . Why does anyone care what Elon Musk thinks of Homer's, or Christopher Nolan's? Musk is promising to use AI to generate a "historically accurate" version of the --turning epic poetry into atrocious slop--even as AI companies are literally destroying books to ingest them as data more cheaply. Meanwhile, Musk and other Silicon Valley billionaires are building a world they read about, as boys, in the pages of books they failed to understand. I think of that world as the Artificial State.

"Jacob Javits of New York is the first United States senator to become fully automated," the Chicago Tribune announced in 1962 from the Republican state convention in Buffalo, where an electronic Javits spat out slips of paper with answers to questions about everything from Cuba's missiles ("a serious threat") to the Cubs' prospects (dim). Javits also harbors thoughts on medical care for the elderly, Berlin, the communist menace," and more than a hundred other subjects, the Tribune reported after an interview with the machine. Javits may have been the first automated American politician, but he wasn't the last. Since the nineteen-sixties, much of American public life has become automated, driven by computers and predictive algorithms that can do the political work of rallying support, running campaigns, communicating with constituents, and even crafting policy. In that same stretch of time, the proportion of Americans who say that they trust the U.S. government to do what is right ...