How the tech bros of AI are breaking our democracy
The News Agents
Global
4.1 • 5.4K Ratings
🗓️ 29 May 2026
⏱️ 53 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In his essay this week on the way forward for Britain, Tony Blair posits that "governing in the age of AI will be the principal challenge. And opportunity" for our political class.
Karen Hao certainly agrees that it will be one of the defining challenges of our lives. An MIT grad, she started off in Silicon Valley, before turning to journalism and becoming one of the most authoritative reporters on the new world of AI. She is deeply alarmed by the AI race, and by the companies - and men - leading the pursuit.
Her book, 'Empire of AI', contends that these new giants of industry have weaponised the sales pitch around AI to extract immense resources to swell their bottom line, and erode democracies around the world in the process.
Lewis sat down with her to discuss the acutely political nature of AI, the new, uniquely powerful empires being built, and how - and if - democracies can wrestle back control.
The News Agents is brought to you by HSBC UK - https://www.hsbc.co.uk/
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The Newsagents podcast is brought to you by HSBC UK, opening up a world of opportunity. |
| 0:08.3 | This is a global player original podcast. |
| 0:11.7 | Open AI, when it came along, what was it? |
| 0:14.2 | It was a non-profit. |
| 0:15.7 | It was a non-profit. |
| 0:16.5 | Which seems hilarious now. |
| 0:18.0 | AI is a political project. |
| 0:19.7 | It's meta, which was a social media company and now an AI company. |
| 0:23.6 | The kind of AI data center that it's constructing now in Louisiana is nearly 400 times the size |
| 0:29.6 | in footprint of the first data center that it built to support Facebook. |
| 0:33.6 | If someone is saying, you cannot stop one of the forces that will come to shape how |
| 0:41.0 | the future looks, then what's even the point of democracy after that? It is a truism that AI |
| 0:47.1 | will dominate our lives, that it already is, that there is something inexorable or inevitable about it. As Tony Blair has said in his |
| 0:56.4 | recent essay, that artificial intelligence will change everything. I mean everything. There is no |
| 1:02.8 | point in debating whether this technological revolution is a good or a bad thing. Just know it is a thing. |
| 1:09.8 | In fact, he says, it is the thing. It is as if he were talking |
| 1:14.2 | about the weather. But what if it isn't true? AI companies like to present what they're doing |
| 1:20.4 | as Blair's done, as somehow being beyond politics, as beyond political arguments. They talk |
| 1:27.1 | as if they are engaged in a utopian project to |
| 1:30.1 | turn the wheel on humanity's development, indeed to reinvent that wheel, and for that wheel to reinvent |
| 1:36.9 | itself, add infinitum, creating a world of abundance, permanent revolution. It is a convenient fiction for politicians like |
| 1:46.1 | there to cling to, a get out of jail free card for something, anything to come along and rest |
... |
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