EMPIRE OF AI : Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s AI by Karen Hao (Penguin Books, 2018)
“AI can only exist by devouring the totality of the world’s information and then the world itself.” – Shoshana Zuboff
What began as a trickle has become a deluge. The AI tsunami is now a seemingly unstoppable force. We are drowning in its effects. Open AI started as a non-profit altruistic initiative but has morphed into something that produces enormous benefits to the wealthy elite whilst exploiting and depriving the rest of civilization.
While smaller AI models are more likely to improve health care and education or to potentially slow down the impact of climate change, the danger now is that most seem to believe that bigger is automatically better. At the root of the problem is the fact that what is good for society is not necessarily good for business. Sam Altman’s holy grail of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) for all is now blithely defined as “highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work.” So much for the benefits to mankind!
During an interview with Naomi Klein, Hao commented that, when she began writing her monumental book, the feelings towards all the latest technological breakthroughs were more likely to be positive. By the time the work was published after conducting over 300 interviews, the mood has shifted and her underlying scepticism towards its potential benefits is now widely shared. Part of this fear lies in the unknown. As Hao writes: “Technology’s advancement is headed towards an unknown objective, with no foreseeable end in sight.”
While reading this book, I was constantly struck by the thought that the full consequences of what is being unleashed has not been fully thought through. Take for example the term “iterative deployment” which refers to the way imperfect models are released into the public domain despite it being known that there being many unresolved issues. The reasoning is that any adjustments can be made later based on user experience and feedback. We are the guinea pigs in other words. In the case of ChatGPT, this means that, prior to corrective measures, ‘conversations’ are much more likely to include negative stereotypes relating to gender, race and faith.
With hindsight, the warning signs over AI were evident from the start. John McCarthy invented the term Artificial Intelligence as a snappy shorthand term for what was brazenly perceived from the outset as little more than a crude marketing tool. Then, as now, there is no scientifically agreed-upon definition of intelligence. As the timely documentary Ghost In The Machine (Valerie Veatch, 2026) shows, this made the technological goals easy prey for proponents of eugenics who are constantly seeking ways to ‘improve’ the genetic composition of the human race.
Some negative reviews of Karen Hao’s ‘Empire of AI’ accuse her of bias and negativity. This is to wilfully disregard her assertion that she did not set out to diminish or dismiss the potential of AI. In the closing chapter she writes: “The critiques that I lay out in this book of OpenAI’s and Silicon Valley’s broader vision are not by any means meant to dismiss AI in its entirety. What I reject is the dangerous notion that broad benefit from AI can only be derived from – indeed will ever emerge from – a vision for the technology that requires the complete capitulation of our privacy, our agency, and our worth, including the value of our labor and art, towards an imperial centralization project.”
What she is calling for, quite rightly in my view, is for greater transparency on how the world’s data is accumulated (or “devoured” as Shoshana Zuboff puts it). Knowing the sources allows for the possibility of identifying and averting potentially dangerous outputs. Hao notes out “science is a process of consensus building” but if key information is deliberately hidden or withheld, this process becomes impossible.
Without tighter controls and stricter governance of the mega-technology, the power will inevitably remain firmly in the hands of profiteers. Any hint of a shift back to the common people is the stuff of pipedreams but must be fought for since it is not exaggeration to say that the very future of humanity is at stake. The closing words of Hao’s book should be a universal rallying cry: “Empires are made to feel inevitable. But history has shown us: When people rise, empires always fall.”
