Karen Hao

They amass an enormous amount of value from the labor, but the labor doesn't actually see the proportional value.

Yes, Amazon definitely did that.

And I would consider Amazon to be an empire of AI as well.

But all of the I mean, when you look at the most valuable companies in the world right now, all of them are AI companies.

companies and they are far and above literally any other company from any other industry.

So the degree to which they are extracting and exploiting and amassing and dispossessing that value is unprecedented.

And then the fourth and final parallel that I talk about is this idea that these companies wrap all of this extraction and exploitation in this narrative of

They're on a civilizing mission to bring progress and modernity to all of humanity.

And of course, there's the religious parallel where religion was a very essential feature of empire building.

And they talk about the heaven and the hell.

Yeah, yeah.

And like, it is ultimately this idea of salvation versus damnation.

You know, fashion companies have also been called fashion empires, but no one, no one fashion company was like, if you don't buy our clothing, you're going to be damned to hell.

It's just like, there's such a crazy, yeah.

So that's why I think it's ultimately...

And it's not just about corporate powers, because the way that these companies actually talk about the stakes, how it's going to be civilization ending if we don't allow them to do this is just of a completely different kind of rhetoric than typical companies.

energy in the way that we think about it but water and so on and some of the examples that you talk about which might be worth just describing in terms of how this can literally destroy communities without anybody ever asking or everyone really even noticing yeah i mean i'll give you an even more updated example which is that meta you know is i think a lot of people think oh ai needs data centers but we've had data centers for a while what's the big deal

AI data centers are just fundamentally different to other types of data centers.

Meta, which was a social media company and now an AI company, the kind of AI data center that it's constructing now in Louisiana is nearly 400 times the size and footprint of the first data center that it built to support Facebook, its social media platform.

And that data center is on track to be one fifth the size of Mannheim, and it is on track to use around five gigawatts of power, which is nearly the average power demand of London.