The chilling truth about the AI industry
Tony Blair says we have no choice but to let AI into our lives. Journalist and author Karen Hao says he’s wrong, and we should be more concerned about the industry’s unchecked growth.
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What’s the story?
According to Tony Blair, the dominance of Artificial Intelligence in our lives is such an inevitability that the sooner we embrace it the better.
The former PM now leads the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, a think-tank part-funded by – you guessed it – the founder of an AI company. Larry Ellison of Oracle AI, in this instance.
American author and journalist Karen Hao, a specialist in the AI industry says Blair's claims are largely incorrect, and undemocratic.
"Everything that Blair said is, I think, absolutely not true," Hao tells Lewis Goodall.
"Mr. Blair has successfully continued to propagate this idea that no one has agency in this, which is deeply anti-democratic.
"The entire premise of democracy is that we are able to shape our future, and if someone is saying you cannot stop one of the the forces that will come to shape how the future looks, then what's even the point of democracy after that?"
And while she admits he is right that AI could improve public services, the call for people everywhere to passively accept it without question, is dangerous.
Blair's words, she says, echo those of the tech bros and super-rich who own and profit from the AI industry.
‘These people are shaping our future – and no one gets a say in how’
Hao says the AI industry is pushing a “quasi-religious” narrative onto the global population about its benefits, making claims about curing cancer, solving climate change or eradicating poverty.
But at ground level, what we’ve seen most is pornographic deepfakes and the alleged cause of mass layoffs at the world’s biggest entertainment companies.
She says current AI leaders are making these grand promises under a “heaven or hell” scenario, claiming they are the “good guys”, and if they’re not allowed to continue development, someone worse will take the reins.
"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," she says.
"And to justify that they should be allowed – on behalf of billions of people around the world – to develop and advance this technology in a deeply anti-democratic way, where they're not actually accountable to any of those people."
Undemocratic, she adds, because there is no mechanism in which people can input to a technology which seems set to shape all our futures. That privilege lies solely with the tech-bros and super-rich developing the AI.
"We have democratic elections that allow us to pick representatives that lead us, and they are supposed to represent the will of the people, because they are supposed to be an extension of what we want," she says.
"These companies can make decisions that influence far more people in the world than nation-state leaders in modern day, and we don't get to elect them, we don't get to oust them if they do a bad job."
The shocking use of power and resources for AI data centres
Alongside ethical concerns surrounding AI, the environmental impact cannot be understated – with data centres requiring enormous amounts of energy to run, as well as huge volumes of water to keep temperatures low.
Hao estimates Meta’s new data centre in Louisiana is more than 400 times the size and carbon footprint of Facebook’s first centre, will be 1/5 the size of Manhattan, and have the same power demand of all of London.
"This is just one facility for Meta," she says.
"We're talking about extraordinary amounts of resource consumption, and where are these facilities being placed? They're being placed in communities where real people live."
And these communities tend to be more working class areas, with an Elon Musk project in Boxtown, Memphis, where the X and Grok owner is accused of polluting Black neighbourhoods.
"Musk didn't want to wait for a grid connection, he didn't want to wait around to have the data centres plugged into the actual grid."
"He just wheeled 35 methane gas turbines, unlicensed, to the site and plugged them in to start powering Colossus, and that those methane gas turbines started funnelling an enormous amount of methane into the air."
A global exploitation industry?
Similar exploitation has been seen across the globe as the AI industry has boomed.
Kenyan contractors working to process the data fed into OpenAI’s systems were reportedly paid just $2 an hour for their work – for a company now worth an estimated $1 trillion.
Hao believes the true goal of AI companies is to simply accrue value and scale their corporations – capitalism, pure and simple.
The difference here is they are laying claim to “resources that are not their own” – the intellectual property of writers and creators.
"They are taking those resources, they're not actually paying anything comparable to their value, and then they amass that value to themselves," she says.
"They use that to train their models that they can then sell as products and services. They don't actually pay anyone for it.
"They don't even ask anyone for it, and then they exploit an extraordinary amount of labour."
How AI companies ensure no one can stop their progress
Perhaps most concerning of all is how AI companies are controlling the narrative about the apparent benefits of their systems.
"Over the past decade, the AI industry has come to bankroll most AI researchers in the world," Hao adds.
"You could imagine if most climate scientists were bankrolled by the fossil fuel companies, we wouldn't get a clear picture of the climate crisis."
She says the industry is monopolising that expertise to "censor and control" what information is made public.
"They also can then go to a policy maker, go to the public and say, 'You don't know what you're talking about, because we're the only ones that can see what's actually happening'."
"This is a crucial lever of power that they use to ensure that there continues to be no democratic checks on their continued expansion."