The technology industry's most powerful executives are treating science fiction as a corporate strategy document, according to a WIRED book excerpt by Jill Lepore. In the excerpt, Lepore argues that Elon Musk and other Silicon Valley billionaires are "building a world they read about, as boys, in the pages of books they failed to understand." The result, she writes, is the "Artificial State" — a dream of escaping democratic government, the natural world, and other humans.
The Artificial State
Lepore describes the Artificial State as "less a state than a dream of being without one." It is a vision that combines:
- Life in outer space
- Immortal life through uploaded consciousness
- Colonizing other planets
The underlying logic, as Lepore reports, is that "democracy and the liberal nation-state have to be abolished to free corporations from the restraining force of any government." That would allow companies to marshal the planet's resources toward accelerated AI development, which in turn would make it possible — and necessary — to escape Earth.
From Science Fiction to Corporate Strategy
The excerpt cites Musk's pledge to use AI to generate a "historically accurate" version of Homer's The Odyssey. Lepore describes the project as "turning epic poetry into atrocious slop," even as AI companies are "literally destroying books to ingest them as data more cheaply."
OpenAI's Sam Altman, the excerpt reports, claimed to be a devotee of science fiction. He was particularly enchanted by the Canadian novel We Are Legion (We Are Bob), in which war has destroyed humanity and the consciousness of dead humans is uploaded to an AI system to do a new government's bidding.
Altman, along with Peter Thiel and Marvin Minsky, has signed up to have himself frozen after death, with the possibility of having his consciousness uploaded onto a computer. Lepore notes that this idea "comes from a story published nearly a century ago in a science fiction magazine for boys."
The architects of the Artificial State told astounding stories, straight from the pages of science fiction, about existential threats from artificial intelligence that could only be avoided by accelerating its development, all for the sake of driving investment in their corporations, even to the cost of catastrophe for the planet.
No Governance Structures Built
Despite promises that ordinary people or democratically elected governments would have a say, Lepore writes that "none of the promised democratic or constitutional structures were built." No world-governance board was established, and no AI constitutional convention was held. In 2025, Altman speculated that "pretty soon most of the surface of the earth would be covered in data centers," before mumbling, "maybe we put them in space."
Cautionary Tales as Instruction Manuals
Computer scientist Stuart Russell once compared the problem of an AI doing exactly what you tell it to the King Midas situation — Midas was ruined by getting precisely what he wanted. But Ted Chiang observed that this is "not actually the moral of the Midas parable," according to the excerpt.
What Technology Leaders Should Watch
For enterprise technology decision-makers, Lepore's account highlights a governance vacuum. The leaders driving rapid AI development have, according to the excerpt, established no democratic oversight, no world-governance board, and no constitutional convention. Instead, Lepore writes, they have told "astounding stories, straight from the pages of science fiction, about existential threats from artificial intelligence that could only be avoided by accelerating its development, all for the sake of driving investment in their corporations, even to the cost of catastrophe for the planet."
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