Why does anyone care what Elon Musk thinks of Homer’s The Odyssey, or Christopher Nolan’s films? Musk is promising to use AI to generate a “historically accurate” version of the epic, turning it into something he calls ‘atrocious slop’. Meanwhile, he and other Silicon Valley billionaires are building a world they read about in poorly understood books, mirroring their dreams of escape through artificial intelligence.

The Artificial State is less a state than a dream of being without one. It’s the severing of humans from both nature and each other. Musk and his peers envision life in outer space, immortal life, and colonizing other planets all as part of this dream. They see democracy and nation-states as obstacles to marshalling resources towards AI development, which they hope will eventually free them from Earth.

For a time, these tech millionaires paid lip service to democratic structures but built nothing. Instead, they used science fiction to argue for accelerating AI development at any cost. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, has signed up for head freezing and consciousness upload, inspired by a novel about dead humans’ consciousness being uploaded to an AI system.

Elon Musk read The Foundation series as a child but failed to grasp its true lessons. He missed the point that collective action shapes the future more than individual ambition, and that computer predictions are likely to become tyrannical. His interpretation of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, written by Douglas Adams who despised science fiction, also misread the text.