Drilling Deep: Karen Hao on How Big AI Is Gambling with the Planet’s Chips
Drilled
Pushkin Industries
4.6 • 2.4K Ratings
🗓️ 17 March 2026
⏱️ 55 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
What is “artificial intelligence”? Is it a fancy technology? A management consulting buzzword? A PR effort to inflate corporate share prices? A political project designed to shape the world more to the liking of the billionaire class? A way to replace needy human workers with machines?
Perhaps it’s all of that—and more. In her groundbreaking book Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI, award-winning journalist Karen Hao argues that AI—and the profit-driven infrastructure that surrounds it—is a colonial project. What OpenAI boss Altman and his fellow ideologues in Silicon Valley are pursuing, Hao says, is not just corporate power but imperial power. They are building empires. And as history shows, empires are built on resource extraction, particularly the old-fashioned kind: of labor, energy, minerals, land, water.
Seemingly overnight, tech elites’ feel-good climate promises have evaporated, having been seamlessly swapped for slippery promises that so-called “artificial general intelligence” will save the planet for us. Never mind that AGI is a fantastical concept that has no agreed-upon definition, or that, more fundamentally, it appears nowhere close to existing. In Big Tech’s frenzied pursuit of the “hyperscale” AI dominance that evangelists claim will unlock AGI, as well as its expanding alliances with fossil fuel-backed petrostates and authoritarian political movements, the industry has become an increasingly central contributor to the climate crisis.
In an October conversation with Drilled, Hao discussed how Silicon Valley giants appear to be following the oil and gas industry’s playbook of disinformation and deceit; how Altman and OpenAI’s secrecy and disingenuous rhetoric transformed the field of AI research into corporate PR; and why the destructive trajectory of AI scale and commercialization is not inevitable—no matter what its power-hungry proponents would have you believe.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Porn is everywhere. Millions stream it every day, yet nobody seems to know who really controls the business. |
| 0:07.3 | I'm Alex Barker. I'm a journalist at the Financial Times. |
| 0:10.6 | Years ago, my fellow reporter Patricia Nilsson and I started digging into the porn industry to find out how the money flows. |
| 0:17.7 | And in our new audiobook, The Kink Machine, the Hidden Business of Adult |
| 0:22.5 | Entertainment, you'll hear our investigation into the power and influence that drives the most |
| 0:28.4 | taboo corners of the internet. Find the Kink Machine, the hidden business of adult entertainment |
| 0:34.4 | at Pushkin.fm slash audiobooks, or at Audible, Spotify, or wherever you get your audiobooks. |
| 0:45.8 | Hello and welcome back to Drilled. I'm Amy Westerbilt. |
| 0:49.6 | Today we're bringing you another installment of our ongoing series, Drilling Deep, where we speak to authors of recent books that are either about climate or about things that intersect with climate in a big way. |
| 1:03.1 | Today is a super timely one. We're going to talk about AI. |
| 1:08.8 | Specifically, we're going to talk about Karen Howe's new book, Empire of AI, Dreams and |
| 1:14.7 | Nightmares, and Sam Altman's Open AI. |
| 1:18.9 | In this episode, Adam Lewenstein interviews journalist Howe, who argues that AI and the profit-driven |
| 1:27.1 | infrastructure that surrounds it is a colonial project. |
| 1:32.4 | What Open AI boss Altman and his fellow ideologues in Silicon Valley are pursuing, Howe says, |
| 1:39.0 | is not just corporate power, but imperial power. |
| 1:42.6 | It makes sense when you think about the fact that AI, at its core, its most basic and ongoing purpose is about 24-hour surveillance to keep all us pleads in line. |
| 1:56.8 | These guys are building empires, and as history shows, empires are built on resource extraction, |
| 2:03.2 | particularly the old-fashioned kind, labor, energy, minerals, land, and water. |
| 2:10.3 | It seems like almost overnight. Big tech's feel-good climate promises have evaporated. |
| 2:16.3 | They've been swapped seamlessly for slippery promises |
| 2:20.0 | that so-called artificial general intelligence will solve climate. Never mind that it's a fantastic |
... |
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