We absolutely need to think of this company as a new form of empire and to look at these colonial dynamics in order to understand ultimately how to build technology that is more beneficial for humanity. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us, made in partnership with The Nation magazine.

I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week my guest is Karen How.

Karen is an award-winning journalist who has written for MIT Technology Review,

the Wall Street Journal, and The Atlantic, and is now the author of Empire of AI, Dreams and

and Nightmares in Sam Altman's Open AI. It is a fantastic book that digs into not just this

company, you know, that we have all become so familiar with, not just this executive, this man

in Sam Altman and how he has shaped, not just this executive, this man in Sam Altman

and how he has shaped, not just this tech industry, but so much of our world over the past

few years? Or could it look very different and have much fewer of the harmful impacts that we

have come to associate with generative AI over the past few years? I think you will know the answer

to that. I am a huge fan of Karen's new book.

I think it is fantastic. And it echoes a lot of the things that other guests on the show have

been saying for the past number of years about AI, about generative AI, about this quest that Open

AI has been on along with these other tech companies to build these massive models, to despoil the environment

in the process, and not to really care about the consequences of the decisions that they're

making. Karen describes really well how the quest for generative AI has really been shaped

for commercialization and ideology over anything else, and how artificial intelligence does not actually have to be the way that

these companies have set out to create it, but could look very different. And as a result,

would not have the degree of harms or the degree of environmental impact that we are seeing

with the rollout of these technologies in the way that Sam Altman and Open AI feel that they

should be developed. It's no wonder that Sam Altman has even tweeted about Karen's book to try to

discourage people from taking to heart the criticisms that she's making about the company.

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