Karen Hao

And this is the same kind of extractive relationship where they have all of these tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of workers around the world working.

that do things like data annotation, content moderation for cleaning, labeling, and preparing the data that is put into these models, as well as filtering out all of the toxicity from these models, if those workers didn't do what they did, these technologies literally wouldn't exist.

And yet, what kind of value do they see from it?

I talk in my book about the case of Kenyan workers that OpenAI contracted

And they were paid $2 an hour.

And OpenAI is here, you know, about to IPO for a trillion dollars.

So once again, it's this extractive.

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.