Wednesday, February 4, 2026 | 4:30 pm
Humanities Quadrangle (HQ)
L02
Lecture 1 | Government by Machine
Jill Lepore’s 2026 Tanner Lectures on Human Values are an inquiry into what humans mean and intend—to think what we are doing—in abandoning constitutional democracy and the liberal nation-state for rule by automation and government by machine. Much in history is headlong but few grand transformations have been more precipitate or more heedless than the rise of what Lepore calls the Artificial State. Yet little seems more inevitable than its eventual fall. These two lectures, richly illustrated with visual material, chronicle the rise of the Artificial State, attempt to reckon with what it has cost the natural world, and anticipate its fall.

The Artificial State is a digital communications infrastructure with which governments and private corporations organize and automate political and other public discourse by way of everything from direct mailing and robocalls to predictive algorithms, bots, social media campaigns, and artificial intelligence. It is the reduction of politics to the digital manipulation of attention-mining algorithms, the trussing of government by corporate-owned digital architecture, the diminishment of citizenship to minutely message-tested online engagement, drones in place of the demos. Where did it come from? And how did it happen? Lepore traces the long and mostly accidental history of the automation of the state.

Thursday, February 5, 2026 | 4:30 pm
Humanities Quadrangle (HQ)
L02
Lecture 2 | What Robots Want
These lectures are an inquiry into what humans mean and intend—to think what we are doing—in abandoning constitutional democracy and the liberal nation-state for rule by automation and government by machine. Much in history is headlong but few grand transformations have been more precipitate or more heedless than the rise of what Lepore calls the Artificial State. Yet little seems more inevitable than its eventual fall. These two lectures, richly illustrated with visual material, chronicle the rise of the Artificial State, attempt to reckon with what it has cost the natural world, and anticipate its fall.

If the Artificial State is government by machine, drones in place of the demos, deducing its laws and anticipating its behavior requires inquiring into not only the infrastructure of automation—servers, networks, data centers, and programs—but also the real and especially the imagined replacements for humans in the future body politic—drones, cyborgs, androids, and bots. What is the history and theory of robotic politics? What are the laws of the Artificial State? What are its ends? What, in short, do robots want?

Lepore will argue that the fear that robots will one day render humans extinct or reduce them to the status of animals is the manifestation of a dread, a great recoiling and revulsion and abject grief at humanity’s destruction of the natural world and, especially, of its ravaging of animals.