Karen Hao

Like they are, you know,

we have democratic elections that allow us to pick representatives that lead us, and they are supposed to represent the will of the people because they are supposed to be an extension of what we want.

These companies can make decisions that influence far more people in the world than

nation state leaders in modern day.

And we don't get to elect them.

We don't get to oust them if they do a bad job.

We don't get to install someone new with a different agenda.

There's no campaigning.

It is true to an extent, but the scale of these companies makes it, I think, a different kind of problem than just a different scale of problem because they now operate across all territories.

They operate in ways that are more powerful than governments themselves.

Traditionally, companies are not

more powerful than governments.

And that's how you're able to counterbalance their power is that there's still regulation from the government level.

that is meant to represent what people want, right?

But these companies have consolidated an extraordinary amount of economic and political power to the point that they basically call the shots for a lot of governments around the world.

Yeah.

And this is by design.

These companies, like one of the parallels of empire that I talk about in the book is the degree of information control and monopolization of knowledge production, right?

that these companies exert.

So they over the past decade, the AI industry has come to bankroll most AI researchers in the world.