Empire of AI
More importantly that this piece of technology is NOT inevitable as they would have you believe. It’s what they NEED you to believe so you can’t live without and they go on building their data centers and ruining tech workers lives in the global south.
Karen Hao’s thesis through the whole book is clear eyed and she never wavers in her comparison of AI and empire. I know it’s a long one and not for the casual reader but if you want to know more I highly suggest you research about openAI and Kenya. Look up Gebru and Google.
Google and data centers in Chile or Uruguay. The chapter titled “Disaster Capitalism” alone is superb and worthy of its own article.
It’s astounding Altman’s hero is Oppenheimer. But in his pursuit to create the one ring to rule them all he doesn’t care. My only dream is that as the tide turns people continue to understand our collective power.
There is an ethical way to create generative AI models as shown in this book. If only Altman and the rest had a soul.
“Over the years, I’ve found only one metaphor that encapsulates the nature of what these AI power players are: empires. During the long era of European colonialism, empires seized and extracted resources that were not their own and exploited the labor of the people they subjugated to mine, cultivate, and refine those resources for the empires’ enrichment.
They projected racist, dehumanizing ideas of their own superiority and modernity to justify—and even entice the conquered into accepting—the invasion of sovereignty, the theft, and the subjugation. They justified their quest for power by the need to compete with other empires: In an arms race, all bets are off. All this ultimately served to entrench each empire’s power and to drive its expansion and progress. In the simplest terms, empires amassed extraordinary riches across space and time, through imposing a colonial world order, at great expense to everyone else.” -Karen Hao
#ai #nonfictionbooks #empireofai
