Empire of AI
Karen Hao
Penguin Press | $32
For those who’ve been following the meteoric rise of synthetic intelligence within the final decade, you might have learn articles by tech journalist Karen Hao within the Atlantic, the Wall Road Journal or MIT Expertise Assessment. In her debut e-book, Empire of AI, Hao employs her experience to analyze the cutthroat world of AI. The result’s a jaw-dropping indictment of an trade that operates with little verify.
The e-book chronicles the modern-day race to develop AI, the breakneck tempo of which has largely been set by the rise of OpenAI, the Microsoft-backed startup behind the chatbot ChatGPT. From the start, OpenAI deems itself as a conscientious steward of AI in contrast with rivals like Google and Chinese language tech corporations. OpenAI begins out as a nonprofit, vowing to share its analysis for the collective advantage of humankind fairly than to chase business hotcakes. However underneath the management of CEO Sam Altman, whom Hao depicts as a robust and morally grey determine, the corporate succumbs to the temptation of chasing revenue over the upper beliefs of constructing AI out there to all.
Immediately, in pursuit of supremacy amongst its rivals, OpenAI has reneged on its founding commitments to share its analysis and preserve transparency in its operations. However the firm nonetheless believes that its quest is noble. By insisting that growing AI can result in a greater future, it justifies bending moral norms and working roughshod over its staff. As Hao writes, “a greater future for whom?”
OpenAI isn’t the one AI firm with this method, although its business success set the tone for different corporations to observe. Hao makes it clear that AI itself isn’t the issue. As a substitute, it’s the tradition of growing new AI capabilities first and in any respect prices, which is spearheaded by OpenAI and an unique clutch of corporations with the monetary energy and political affect to make sure regulators don’t look too carefully at its operations.
Hao likens this modus operandi to that of a modern-day empire. Simply as a colonizer ravages its colonies to feed its personal growth, tech megacorporations obtain their targets by trampling over marginalized communities in its sphere of affect. The collateral harm of AI’s growth consists of the depletion of pure assets in growing international locations to feed the AI beast, in addition to Venezuelan and Kenyan staff who slog away at annotating coaching information and moderating content material for scant compensation. All through the e-book, Hao emerges as a welcome voice of readability and objectivity in stark distinction to tech corporations’ obsession with dominating the trade.
However it’s doable for AI to be much less colonial and extra democratic, Hao argues. As an example, she factors to a small, Indigenous-driven effort in New Zealand to make use of AI to revive the dying language of the Māori individuals. To realize this humble utopia, Hao contends that we should revolt towards the empire. This implies educating the general public on AI, tightening laws so builders are extra clear, and inspiring researchers to discover completely different paths towards AI, away from the dominance mannequin. The roadmap is a little bit rudimentary, but it surely’s an excellent begin. In spite of everything, Hao writes, the embers of revolution already burn in us: They arrive from our sense of neighborhood and humanity — one thing that AI will likely be hard-pressed to know.
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