In her first contribution to this website, Kathleen Isenegger, my wife and an assistant professor of computer science at California State University, Chico offers a review of The Empire of AI by Karen Hao – a chilling chronicle of the AI industry’s rapid growth.
If you read one book this year, I think it should be this one. Karen Hao is a superbly talented journalist who has been reporting on the tech industry since 2018. In a world where more and more of our everyday lives are being dictated by the money-hungry tech oligarchs, it is easy to feel powerless and simply wonder how we got here today.
Karen Hao offers us a deeper understanding of how the grotesque actions of men like Elon Musk and Sam Altman paved the way for our current reality. And let me tell you- it is a fucking doozy.
I got this book through my university library’s interlibrary loan program (yay libraries!), along with a bunch of other AI related titles, to help me prepare for a class I was teaching. The book centers on one company in particular: Sam Altman’s OpenAI, but don’t worry, all your favorite villains from Google, Microsoft, Meta and so forth make an appearance, as none of them can resist sticking in their little grubby paws.
In my view, Sam Altman does really deserve the spotlight, being perhaps one of the most deplorable humans among us (although, I’m sure plenty of other tech oligarchs have their own closet full of skeletons and have just been lucky enough to keep them hidden– for now). Plus, compared with his peers, it is arguably most important for the public to know Sam Altman, given OpenAI’s influence on the entire AI industry and ChatGPT serving as a genericized trademark for all AI agents.
Maybe you know some stuff about AI, and maybe you know jack shit. Either way, this book is for you. Hao, likely from her years of tech reporting, has mastered the art of explaining technical computing concepts in a way just about anybody can understand. Likewise, maybe you have strong feelings about AI already- or maybe you’re perfectly neutral. I can almost guarantee that at the end of this read, you will at least be questioning (if not fully hating) how large language models (the technical name for systems like ChatGPT) have been integrated into our world.
As someone who was already very critical of these models, Hao’s book gave me a more nuanced and globalized conception of the dangers at hand.
How does AI hurt the environment? What’s the deal with data centers? Who is responsible for that Waymo that killed a cat? Will AI become more powerful than humans? Why is some AI racist a little bit of the time and other AI (Grok) racist all the time? Hao answers these questions and more through the stories of individuals across the world whose lives have been deeply affected (usually for the worst) by the growth of the AI industry. She thoughtfully connects the current harms of AI companies to historical impacts of colonialism in African and South American countries, showing how this is not a wholly new phenomenon, but rather a continuation of an ongoing world order.
And at the helm of it all is Sam Altman, a deeply disturbed, abusive narcissist, who is seemingly willing to do whatever it takes to make his dream of living out the movie Her in real life a reality.
While I wouldn’t say this book ends on a particularly hopeful note, it does invoke optimism in the sense that it, perhaps, isn’t too late to change directions. The story we are hearing is happening now, and the end is not yet inked. In writing Empire of AI, Karen Hao seems to be at least one believer in that idea: that if more of us knew what was happening right under our noses, we could do something about it. I sincerely hope that too.
I haven’t made it this far in life to let some little freak’s pathetic fantasy upend the last bits of good we have left in the world. So, if you or anyone in your life needs another reason to put down the ChatGPT and think for yourself, make sure you add this one to the top of your reading list.
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