AI as the New Empire? Karen Hao Explains the Hidden Costs of OpenAI’s Ambitions

Kendra Pierre-Louis: For Scientific American ’s Science Quickly , I’m Kendra Pierre-Louis, in for Rachel Feltman. In 2022 OpenAI unleashed ChatGPT onto the world. In the years following generative AI has wormed its way into our inboxes, our classrooms and our medical records, raising questions about what role these technologies should have in our society. A Pew survey released in September of this year found that 50 percent of Americans were more concerned than excited about the increased AI use in their day-to-day life; only 10 percent felt the other way. That’s up from the 37 percent of Americans whose dominant feeling was concern in 2021. And according to Karen Hao, the author of the recent book Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI, people have plenty of reasons to worry. On supporting science journalism If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing . By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today. Karen recently chatted with Scientific American associate books editor Bri Kane. Here’s their conversation. Bri Kane: I wanted to really jump right into this book because there is so much to cover; it is a dense book in my favorite kind of way. But I wanted to start with something that you start the book on really early on, [which] is that you are able to be clear-eyed about AI in a way that a lot of reporters and even regulators are not able to be, whether because they are not as well-versed in the technology or because they get stars in their eyes when Sam Altman or whoever starts talking about AI’s future. So why are you able to be so clearheaded about such a complicated subject? Karen Hao: I think I just got really lucky in that I started covering AI back in 2018, when it was just way less noisy as a space, and I was a reporter at MIT Technology Review, which really focuses on covering the cutting-edge research coming out of different disciplines. And so I spent most of my time speaking with academics, with AI researchers that had been in the field for a long time and that I could ask lots of silly questions to about the evolution of the field, the different philosophical ideas behind it, the newest techniques that were happening and also the limitations of the technologies as they stood. And so I think, really, the only advantage that I have is context. Like, I have-I had years of context before Silicon Valley and the Sam Altmans of the world started clouding the discourse, and it allows me to more calmly analyze the flood of information that is happening right now. Kane: Yeah, you center the book around a central premise, which I think you make a very strong argument for, that we should be thinking about AI in terms of empires and colonialism across history....

Preview: ~500 words