--- David Runciman, in his lecture Arendt on Action, 15 May 2021, objecting to Arendt's critique of Hobbes
[38:23] It's not Arendt's version of action -- she thinks the thing that ultimately lasts is the story -- but you could say, among the other things that Hobbes was doing, that he was telling a story of the modern state. The fact that that book, Leviathan, is so metaphorical and allegorical is because it's a story. It's meant to fire our imaginations.
[38:48] But it's also true that it makes a huge difference to say that the state is an artificial version of us, rather than to say that we are artificial versions of the state. Because if the state is an artificial version of us, and if the state is well built, then the state will have a life of its own, and the state will be capable of telling its own stories. And these stories could be imaginative, creative, empowering, fulfilling -- they could also not, they could be terrible, and stupid, and crass, and cruel. Anything is possible when a person tells a story, even an artificial person telling a story, because storytelling, for Arendt, is the most creative thing of all. So if what Hobbes was trying to do was to build something that was capable of mimicking human action [as Arendt defines it], then he was adding to the world of action something that he thought would make more action possible. He may have been wrong - it's possible that that may have been a quixotic enterprise because in the end these artificial versions of the human are always reductive, and they're not convincing. And that the stories that the state tells, this state that Arendt so feared because of its ability actually to consume human beings into unthinking mindless functionaries [like Eichmann], that this state was dangerous, because . . . .
...
[41:58] But there is in Arendt's argument, I think, a mistaken assumption. The assumption being that the modern state, the Hobbesian state, because it's a machine, will inevitably side with the other machines; that in the age of Artificial Intelligence, the mechanical state will do what the robots want, because the robots will be able to infiltrate its systems, because its nothing but a machine. [But] Hobbes's state is more than a machine, it's a kind of person. It's meant, at some level, to mimic, not mechanical action, but human action. It's actually meant to be on our side. It's the machine that we built, to control the machines. It's the machine that we built, to take our side against mindless, heartless, robotic forms of action and politics.
[42:58] So actually I think there's another question we could ask, and it doesn't necessarily produce Arendt's answer. I don't know what the answer is, but at least it's possible that in the age of Artificial Intelligence, in the new machine age in which we live, the state is not on the machines' side. The state could be on our side. Indeed, it's even possible to say that the state is the only instrument we have, because it's the instrument we built to be like us. It's the only instrument we have to take on the machines.
