Karen Hao

And Google realized that was their competitive advantage.

If they can lean into the technology that extracts more value out of large quantities of data, they're going to win.

And so they really indexed heavily on it.

And then, of course, once Google moved into it, then Microsoft moved into it, then all the tech giants moved into it.

But modern day, the AI boom or the post-ChatGPT AI boom was

isn't just about profit which is what's so fascinating and why I use the empire analogy is it's this fusion of profit and ideology because actors like OpenAI who are the new generation of companies coming onto the scene they are motivated by this original conception of the field this idea of recreating the human mind and this belief that if you could recreate the human mind it is somehow going to unlock the next era of civilization

That is exactly how I describe it.

I do think it's quasi-religious.

When you think about the narratives that the AI industry now uses to describe what they're doing, it's actually the oldest stories that we've ever told ourselves, which are found in religion.

This idea of something having a heaven and a hell.

And what you do in this moment either gives you access to that heaven or that hell.

And so the companies say...

if we create AGI, as in we, you allow us, the good guys, to create it, we will give you access to utopia, to this heaven, because it's going to solve cancer, it's going to solve climate change, eradicate poverty.

And

If you don't allow us to do it, a bad actor is going to do it instead, and it's going to decimate humanity.

So this is Jack Clark's camp, is that they use these double myths, the heaven and the hell, the carrot and the stick, to ultimately justify why they are doing what they're doing.

And to justify that they should be allowed to, on behalf of billions of people around the world,

develop and advance this technology in a deeply anti-democratic way where they're not actually accountable to any of those people.

Why do you think they're anti-democratic?

Because there's no mechanism by which, formal mechanism by which people can actually provide input to a technology that is fundamentally going to shape people's future, right?