Karen Hao

And the purpose of technology throughout history has been to improve human flourishing, not to replace people.

And so...

This is like a critical part of my critique of these companies and these scientists that have just adopted this goal and have relentlessly pursued it and have had enormous capital and enormous resources to pursue it is, is this the right goal?

Like, why are we doing this?

Why can't we just build AI systems that do things like accelerate drug discovery and improve people's healthcare outcomes faster?

which are systems that have nothing to do with the statistical engines that they're trying to build to duplicate the human brain.

I think it's because they're driven by an imperial agenda.

And that is why I call these companies empires of AI.

Empire is the only metaphor that I've ever found to fully encapsulate all of the dimensions of what these companies do and the scale that they operate and what motivates them to do what they do.

And there are many parallels that you see between what I call the empires of AI and the empires of old.

They lay claim to resources that are not their own in the pursuit of training these models.

That's the data of individuals, the intellectual property of artists, writers, and creators.

They're land grabbing in order to build these supercomputer facilities for training the next generation models.

Second, they exploit an extraordinary amount of labor.

They contract hundreds of thousands of workers all around the world, including in the U.S., to ultimately make these technologies.

We can talk about that more later.

And they also design their tools to be labor automating so that when the technologies are deployed, it also affects labor rights because it erodes away labor rights.

And this is a political choice that they have.

Third, they monopolize knowledge production.

So they project this idea that