Drilling Deep: Karen Hao on How Big AI Is Gambling with the Planet’s Chips
3/17/202653 min
What is “artificial intelligence”? Is it a fancy technology? A management consulting buzzword? A PR effort to inflate corporate share prices? A political project designed to shape the world more to the liking of the billionaire class? A way to replace needy human workers with machines?
Perhaps it’s all of that—and more. In her groundbreaking book Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI, award-winning journalist Karen Hao argues that AI—and the profit-driven infrastructure that surrounds it—is a colonial project. What OpenAI boss Altman and his fellow ideologues in Silicon Valley are pur...
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First 90 secondsAmy Westervelt· Host0:00
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Speaker 20:03
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Amy Westervelt· Host0:21
[bright music] Pushkin. [upbeat music] Hello, and welcome back to Drilled. I'm Amy Westervelt. Today, we're bringing you another installment of our ongoing series, Drilling Deep, where we speak to authors of recent books that are either about climate or about things that intersect with climate in a big way. Today is a super timely one. We're gonna talk about AI. Specifically, we're gonna talk about Karen Hao's new book, Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI. In this episode, Adam Lowenstein interviews journalist Hao, who argues that AI and the profit-driven infrastructure that surrounds it is a colonial project. What OpenAI boss Altman and his fellow ideologues in Silicon Valley are pursuing, Hao says, is not just corporate power,