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Harvard Professor Issues Alert: Tech Elites Are Pushing AI ‘Factory Farming of Humans’

August 27, 2026

Reported by: SlayNews

A world-renowned Harvard University professor is sounding the alarm about an emerging AI-driven system that threatens to strip ordinary people of their autonomy and hand unprecedented power to unelected tech corporations.

Historian Jill Lepore warns that powerful elites are constructing what she calls an “artificial state,” a system in which critical decisions once made by citizens and accountable governments are increasingly surrendered to machines controlled by corporations.

Lepore has previously described the transformation in chilling terms as the “factory farming of public life.”

Speaking on “The New York Times” podcast “Hard Fork,” Lepore warned that the traditional nation-state, particularly constitutional democracy, is being steadily displaced by technology that removes human beings from the decision-making process.

Government under such a system would operate “not by the consent of people but by machines that are making decisions,” Lepore said.

And those machines belong to corporations.

‘They’re Not Interested in What the People Want’

Lepore stresses that the “artificial state” has not completely arrived.

However, she warns that its infrastructure is already being constructed around the public.

Meanwhile, influential elites are openly envisioning a future in which their technological systems wield powers traditionally reserved for governments accountable to voters.

“The rhetoric that comes out of this particular historical moment is really about the evanescence of modern liberal democracy, constitutional democracy,” Lepore said.

According to Lepore, the people pushing that vision aren’t “interested in what the people want.”

“Because actually, what the people want is not to have AI and not to have data centers,” she continued.

“So that’s the crisis.”

Lepore expands on the warning in her upcoming book “The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State.”

Her investigation began with a deceptively simple question about the increasing replacement of human interaction with automated systems.

“Who decided this is a way we should be living?” Lepore asks.

‘Factory Farming of Public Life’

Lepore argues that society is undergoing a profound transfer of power as corporations increasingly control the infrastructure through which Americans communicate, obtain information, and participate in public life.

News, political information, election coverage, and even information about candidates increasingly reach voters through privately controlled digital platforms.

AI is now accelerating that transformation.

Lepore previously described the emerging system in an article for The New Yorker as the “factory farming of public life, the sorting and segmenting, the isolation and alienation, the destruction of human community.”

The warning points to a society in which human beings are increasingly separated from one another while algorithms mediate their relationships with institutions, businesses, information, and eventually government itself.

Instead of interacting with another person, Americans increasingly encounter chatbots.

Instead of discussing political questions with neighbors, officials, or experts, voters are beginning to ask AI chatbots whom they should support.

Political communications are increasingly being generated with AI, while government officials are using the technology to assist decision-making.

Meanwhile, AI-powered systems are making mass surveillance dramatically easier by processing enormous quantities of information collected about ordinary citizens.

Silicon Valley Pushes AI as ‘Inevitable’

Lepore also takes aim at one of the most powerful arguments coming from Silicon Valley: that the AI revolution cannot be stopped.

The public is repeatedly told that artificial intelligence is inevitable and that governments must get out of the way or risk falling behind.

Lepore rejects that fatalism as a “bogus premise.”

Central to the argument, she says, are claims that government regulation inevitably destroys innovation and that technological advancement inherently strengthens democracy.

Lepore warns that neither proposition should simply be accepted.

The same promises accompanied previous technological revolutions.

“So now, the AI people come back with the same argument that was made about the internet — the personal computer, the internet, and social media,” she said.

Machines Are Moving Deeper Into Human Decision-Making

The stakes are now significantly higher because AI is not merely another communications technology.

The machines are increasingly being inserted directly into decisions that once required human judgment.

AI systems are influencing what people read, what information they encounter, how institutions communicate with them, and how governments and corporations process enormous quantities of personal data.

Lepore’s warning is ultimately about who controls those systems and therefore who controls the decisions they increasingly make.

Under constitutional government, political power is theoretically derived from citizens who can hold elected officials accountable.

Under the “artificial state” Lepore describes, that relationship begins to break down as algorithms controlled by enormously powerful corporations assume functions once exercised by people and public institutions.

The result is the chilling system she describes as the “factory farming of public life,” where citizens are sorted, segmented, surveilled, and increasingly isolated from one another while machines quietly assume greater control over their lives.

And Lepore’s most disturbing question remains unanswered:

“Who decided this is a way we should be living?”