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 then if you kind of project ahead to.

I mean, there's been kind of great coverage lately of emerging trends for the 2026 election in the U.S.

and around the world, where a lot of people report that even in these primaries, you know, that have been going on over the spring and summer, they'll ask ChatGPT, like, how should I vote in the primary?

Meanwhile, the campaign messages that you're getting have many of them been crafted by artificial intelligence, right?

And the fact that you are getting them is a decision made by artificial intelligence.

So in a way, it's like...

It's like AI versus AI in these upcoming elections or even in elections that are already transpiring.

You can see how you could fall into that like step just sort of just going downhill on skis.

But I kind of wanted to write a kind of grumpy book to say, well, let's pause for a minute.

Like when does what was at the bottom of that hill?

Like, is that an icy pond and we're going to just go through the ice and like we're all going to drown in there?

Or is that like a beautiful new political world?

And I think it looks pretty perilous.

Like, it's kind of a big thing starting in the 30s to imagine a future in which the president of the United States is chosen by a machine.

There are a bunch of examples of this from the 30s, you know, where people are really worried about totalitarianism and the dehumanizing of people.

And that kind of is a consequence of the machine age.

But there's also a lot of it in the 1950s.

So there's, for instance, like a classic story by Isaac Asimov that I think is 1955 called Franchise.

It's set on the days before Election Day 2008, November 4th, 2008, the day Obama won the presidency.

And in that imagined future, that Asimovian future, there's this machine called a multivac machine.

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