Book Review: Empire of AI - Inside the Reckless Race for Total Domination

By Karen Hao

In this book award-winning book journalist Karen Hao who has spent a lifetime

researching the growth and evolution of artificial intelligence is now faced with the

unexpected question: How is it possible that this technology that has transformed every

nook and corner of our daily lives and promised abundance and material prosperity

has paradoxically impoverished those very people it was supposed to benefit?

What went wrong?

Was it that this technology was inherently flawed or were the leaders of

the largest companies who controlled the development of AI through their own character flaws and moral lapses are the true culprits?

Two of the world’s greatest proponents of artificial intelligence, Sam Altman and Elon Musk, with their extraordinary knowledge of multifaceted AI pledged to use all the resources at their disposal to grow and develop AI models that would potentially generate limitless wealth and unshackle humanity from the perennial problems of economic insecurity and endow them with lasting prosperity. But there was only one question that remained unanswered:

Would the promised benefits of this technology trickle down to the poorest of the poor

segments of society?

Or the leaders of those giant tech companies simply pocketed all the wealth generated by AI without any regret or remorse whatsoever?

How long could they go on withholding the shares of those poor people who had laboured long and hard to attain this level of prosperity?

Or were there any reasons for changing their vision midstream to benefit the individual at the expense of the collective?

Is it the nature of AI itself and its evolving forms that have drifted in an entirely different

direction and trajectory?

At the start of its evolution, the uses of AI seemed to be thrilling.

Now they could have a robotic companion to chat with, another robot to boost economic productivity and yet another robot for brainstorming to generate new ideas and improve writing skills. However, under this surface layer of boundless optimism, existed yet another layer of volcanic monstrosity that consumed vast amounts of data, computing power, manpower and natural resources. The explosive material and human costs of this phenomenon are adversely affecting large sections of humanity, especially in the global South that are pushing workers and rural people into deeper and deeper levels of poverty hitherto not witnessed even in the centuries-old annals of European colonialism.

This new form of colonial power is exercised by huge tech giants mostly based in the United States with budgets that are larger than the GDP of most developing countries. These tech giants, notably Google and Microsoft, do not use violence or brutality to extract material resources from countries willing to play the American game. These countries hoped that even by losing a lot of their resources, they might get some glimpse of AI and its ability to magically transform the world around it. They would then use it to bring about a radical change in their own countries especially after they had learned all the advanced skills from these tech giants. Their people would now voluntarily seek employment in these tech giants, ever willing to work long hours for a pittance without any provision for leisure or rest.

Yet these people were in this game for the longer term hoping that their sufferings would be temporary and compensation would arrive at a later date and they would make more demands for benefits of the scale that nobody else could expect or foresee. They would also demand compensation for the works and writings of famous artists that were shamelessly appropriated by these greedy capitalist vultures. This loss of indigenous culture would leave their people naked and shameless and these vulnerabilities could then be exploited by distorting them in ways that would escape all accountability. The accumulation of data on the achievements of another indigenous culture could be spun and posted online to make lucrative profits.

Since many workers at the bottom rung of Third World societies strove to move up the

ladder to avail of increased prosperity, they believed that by abandoning traditional methods of labour work, they could get employment with foreign companies in order to get trained with simpler forms of artificial intelligence. This skill would not only reduce the time spent on labour work but also give them significantly more benefits in terms of wages, housing and healthcare.

Since the big foreign companies were always scouting for cheaper labour work in

developing countries became alive to this situation and quickly jumped in with offers of

training these poor people with simpler forms of AI technology that could be mastered easily.

As always, there were no provisions in their contract to indicate any chances of earning

more or by any offers to train with more advanced skills. This bar would not be breached at all so these workers would languish at the bottom with no other prospect in sight for

economic betterment. Indeed, those workers who had obtained higher paying jobs by

upskilling themselves would now do everything possible to thwart those workers from

attaining the mobility that could threaten their own job security. If the higher ranked workers demanded more perks and privileges, the management would have to squeeze the poorer workers harder and harder in order to maintain some measure of corporate peace.

Alarmed and aggrieved by this unsettling situation, the disadvantaged workers assembled together and discussed the possibility of taking collective action to press their demands. If they could prolong their strike for a much longer time frame so as to bend and break the corporation and bring it down to its knees. Yet these measures smacked of proletarian naivete since the management had installed state of art surveillance equipment throughout the organisation including the workplace where the workers had gathered. Striking swiftly and brutally, the assembly was broken up and the individuals would dislodged and separated in ways they could no longer assemble again. Left with no choice, these single workers would compete and fight each to pick up any scrap of work available.

The leaders at the top of the organisational hierarchy feared that this spark of resistance by their workers could not be stamped out easily and possibly lead to a mass insurrection that would result in burning of the company’s property and its offices.

Yet the corporates would not give up their fiefs without taking any counter measures. The first step in coping with this dilemma was to order the shutting down of all factories without giving any advanced notice of this unexpected closure.

Caught off guard, millions of workers were literally fed to the wolves by not having their daily wages on time. They simply did not know when to go or where to stay. They knew little of any market realities that often led to mass dismissals. Indeed they knew little of anything else. Yet their brief stint in a corporate environment where some rudimentary knowledge of artificial intelligence was absorbed made them quite proud since any study of the sciences was valued and gave them a superior status in their own community.

Banking on this unjustified optimism, they would yet accept their lower status

in employment and hoping against hope that with more experience in their line of work, they just might obtain the bigger emoluments. They now felt free to marry and have children with some expectation of getting superior finances in the near future.

On the other hand, their employers were privy to his common mindset and did not deter

them from removing them arbitrarily because these workers with their silly hopes were

disposable trash and could easily be dispensed with. On a more cautious note, to avoid this messy situation created by mass layoffs and the negative publicity and international censure that followed in the aftermath, corporate leaders would simply shift the base of their operations and transplant it into some other impoverished country with similar factories employing workers that would work long and hard and yet not demand frivolous rest periods. The association with their employers would be strictly voluntary and they were free to leave the company after completion of the required period of statutory employment.

However, the larger tech giants such as Google and Microsoft could not get away so easily with these arbitrary mass dismissals because they had to protect their global profile that exuded integrity and ethical consciousness. They were now looking for a safe exit policy from the turbulence they had created and the political and economic implications that led to unstable markets and intolerable job losses.

The CEOs of these companies adopted another failsafe strategy. They publicly announced that they were curbing their output significantly because the product created in their factories was outdated and resulted in falling demand. As a consequence, they had to reduce their workforce and make other economies in order to remain financially solvent. The workers who were slated for dismissal would be given some time to obtain alternate employment and would still retain their wages for that period. Ultimately, the entire operational machinery of the company would have to be phased to eliminate all prospects of bankruptcy and eventual insolvency.

To forestall all other criticism of their enterprises, they would publicly announce their

commitment to devote most of the resources at their disposal to build superior models of artificial intelligence in the hope that the market response would be significantly better. This was one more reason to justify the mass dismissal of employees since they no longer had the superior skills to work in the new hi-tech environment proposed to be developed in the near future.

In any event, these tech giants could always avoid the turbulence generated by their

policies by putting up very sophisticated but patently dishonest coping mechanisms at least for the short term. In the United States itself there was a growing awareness of what was going on in the impoverished countries of the global South particularly in those universities where artificial intelligence had its genesis. Some distinguished faculty members could use their own influence on campus and openly and unequivocally denounce the excesses of inequality created by American tech giants who had plundered unimaginable quantities of material and intellectual resources with alarming impunity.

Surely, these disclosures would have cascading effects throughout the United States where there was a modicum of ethical consciousness among all classes of people. To some extent, this public awareness of the evils wrought by the big time players in the market for artificial intelligence did restrain the overt and visible faces of such exploitation. Unfortunately, much of America’s prosperity did depend on the success of the big tech giants where almost all Americans had a stake.

Moreover, since the United States was the leader in developing AI models for the Third

World, it could not cover the evils committed by its own corporations with the fig leaf of

idealism. Other rising countries such as China and Russia with their own versions of AI no less potent, tore away America’s defenses so that it lay naked and shameless before the rest of the world especially among its allies in Western Europe who now chose to distance themselves lest they were found to be sleeping in the same bed. In that event, the unholy alliance between these powers could come apart at any moment given the shifting nature of geopolitics where more often than not America was relegated to the backseat in global forums.

Now America had simply to redefine its moral purpose to find acceptability just to survive in the race for AI dominance even as its rivals continued to lead ahead because their moral purpose had more credibility than the crudity of American ideas that smelled so overtly of hypocrisy and deceit.