Tanner Lectures at Yale: Whitney Humanities Center: Government by Machine Jill Lepore
Two Lectures:
Feb. 4, Government by Machine
Feb. 5, What Robots Want
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.
Humanities Quadrangle (HQ) (L02)
“The Tanner Lectures on Human Values is a multi-university lecture series in the humanities, founded in 1978, at Clare Hall, Cambridge University, by the American scholar Obert Clark Tanner. In founding the lecture, he defined their purpose as follows:
I hope these lectures will contribute to the intellectual and moral life of mankind. I see them simply as a search for a better understanding of human behavior and human values. This understanding may be pursued for its own intrinsic worth, but it may also eventually have practical consequences for the quality of personal and social life.
It is considered one of the top lecture series among top universities and being appointed a lectureship is a recognition of the scholar’s “extra-ordinary achievement” in the field of human values.”
