Lewis Goodall

And for that wheel to reinvent itself ad infinitum, creating a world of abundance.

permanent revolution it is a convenient fiction for politicians like bear to cling to a get out of jail free card for something anything to come along and rest us from our political malaise and economic slump and the problem with our treating them that way in talking about them that way is that we don't see them for what they really are and for my guest today the journalist and writer karen howe

What they are are not companies or religions or brain trust.

What they are is empires, something which rises above even the great corporate power that we saw in, say, the railway companies of the 19th century or the.

energy companies in the 20th century or the financial companies of the early 21st, that these firms are accruing and accreting such profound political, financial, cultural and resource power, such a chokehold over knowledge itself that they are best understood otherwise.

as early imperiums.

She believes that the test of the 2020s and beyond for democracy is whether they can be brought back under democratic control to make what they do work for us and not for them.

Her book Empire of AI is out now and seeks to answer that question and more.

A simple proposition at its heart.

We can have AI empires or democracy, but not both.

Why then are our politicians so unwilling to recognise it?

Welcome to The News Agents.

The News Agents.

Karen, welcome to The News Agents.

We've been devouring your book.

I'm going to start by saying I'm going to try and pay you the highest kind of journalistic compliment that exists, which is that, you know, reading your book and then reading some of the things around it.

It's both a wonderful thing and a really slightly irritating thing, which is like you've basically written a book that I have sort of.

for a while thought should exist and even thought if it doesn't exist maybe someone should write it and you thing is you've written it already and you've written it far more brilliantly than anybody else ever could which is basically treating ai companies not as kind of and the sort of ai project if you like not as uh sort of corporate history or sort of starry dewy eyed kind of tech evangelism or sort of uh or the opposite but actually is what they are which is deeply political

Right.

And that is what your book's about.