Dr. Jill Lepore

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433 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 20 Jul

Dr. Jill Lepore’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Decoder with Nilay Patel · Dr. Jill Lepore on why the AI backlash is vital for the future · 20 Jul 2026 podcast

And I think it has a long history.

But the acceleration of these developments in the age of artificial intelligence is really considerable.

So you could say here, I'll give you two examples that kind of maybe stretch out across a century.

So 1930s, the 1930s, the invention of so-called scientific polling.

George Gallup starts the American Institute of Public Opinion Research in 1935.

What polling does gradually over the middle decades of the 20th century is replaces the kind of door to door precinct walking that, you know, campaigns would need to do.

Right.

If I want to I'm running for election in some neighborhood, I got to go talk to people going to go to baseball games.

You're going to go to basketball games, going to go to the public library.

But increasingly, it became less necessary for political campaigns to do that because they could subcontract out political polling.

Right.

But you can find out what political opinion is in a neighborhood if you want to run a campaign.

by just drawing down, just by doing data mining and data analysis.

So it might sound great, well, that makes politics so much more efficient, right?

Like those campaigns can more efficiently use their money and they can get their message out to the right people.

But if you think about each one of those conversations that people used to have, right?

I'm a campaign volunteer and I'm gonna go and I'm gonna sit in on some PTA meeting, or I'm gonna go to a basketball game in some neighborhood and like talk to the parents who were there.

All those conversations are kind of the civic glue that kind of holds a civil society together.

And so replacing those just kind of like chatting by the side, you know, under a street lamp about what do you think about this guy with just extracting data, which is where we are now.

It's just it's a much more artificial politics than we have had before.

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