EXCERPT The State as Simulation Artificial intelligence is the origin and limit of the genealogy of the state. The concepts of machine and state in their familiar form emerged simultaneously in European thought at the turn of the mediaeval and modern eras, reflecting in each case the ascendant concept of a universe governed by the interaction of mechanical forces. They attained a seminal joint articulation in Thomas Hobbes—at once the definitive theorist of the modern state and the reformulator of reason as calculation. It was his Leviathan, in 1651, that brought to bear a novel materialist theory of the cosmos to provide the first account of the state as a truly independent entity, an artificial person with its own particular machinery and a single will distinct from that of any of its members and its sovereign. To dismiss this as only the invention of a convenient legal fiction, as many political theorists might be inclined to do—that is, as merely a metaphor—is to overlook the substantive nature of Hobbes’s claim. He himself was only once prepared to describe a ‘body politic’ as ‘fictional’, and this was not the commonwealth itself. To understand the intended nature of Leviathan, it is necessary to follow the manner in which Hobbes introduces it. The opening lines of Leviathan condense an entire technological revolution into a single momentous paragraph. Human ingenuity mimics animal life through the construction of ‘Automata’, mechanical ‘Engines that move themselves by springs and wheeles’. ‘Art’, however, ‘goes yet further’; it rises to the imitation of humanity itself, and builds an ‘Artificiall Man’, a thinking monster of many parts: the state. Hobbes tells us that the difference between the two forms of imitated life, the human and the animal, is measured by man’s ‘Rationall’ character. The social technology of the state, like any automaton, relies on its diffuse mechan- ical components, the ‘Joynts’ of its officials, as well as the binding ‘Nerves’ of law. yet just as the human supersedes the animal through reason, so the state has far more to it than this physical substrate: it has at its disposal an ‘Artificiall Soul’ that actuates it and accords it ‘life and motion’; a will and reason of its own; logical objectives (its ‘Businesse’) for the achieving of which it calculates its proper means. The imparting of these characteristics, which transform an inert mechanical system into a ‘mortal god’, is not the result of the vital force that was inherent to the ancient concept of the body politic, nor is it brought about through the occult methods of the earlier Hermeticists, whose concept of divinisation is echoed here by Hobbes. It is an exclusively technical feat, the very literal construction of an artificial intelligence …
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