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In our July Fourth special broadcast, we revisit our interview with longtime technology reporter Karen Hao, author of Empire of AI, which unveils the accruing political and economic power of artificial intelligence companies — especially Sam Altman’s OpenAI. Her reporting uncovered the exploitation of workers in Kenya, attempts to take massive amounts of freshwater from communities in Chile, along with numerous accounts of the technology’s detrimental impact on the environment. “This is an extraordinary type of AI development that is causing a lot of social, labor and environmental harms,” says Hao in an extended interview.

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.

We turn now to the Empire of AI. That’s the name of a new book by the journalist Karen Hao, who’s closely reported on the rise of the artificial intelligence industry with a focus on Sam Altman’s OpenAI. That’s the company behind ChatGPT. Karen Hao compares the actions of the AI industry to those of colonial powers in the past. She writes, quote, “The empires of AI are not engaged in the same overt violence and brutality that marked this history. But they, too, seize and extract precious resources to feed their vision of artificial intelligence: the work of artists and writers; the data of countless individuals posting about their experiences and observations online; the land, energy, and water required to house and run massive data centers and supercomputers,” she writes.

Karen Hao is a former reporter at The Wall Street Journal and MIT Technology Review, where she became the first journalist to profile OpenAI. Democracy Now!’s Juan González and I spoke to her. I began by asking her to explain what artificial intelligence is.

As Heat Wave Spreads Across the US, Data Centers Strain Electrical Grids

KAREN HAO: So, AI is a collection of many different technologies, but most people were introduced to it through ChatGPT. And what I argue in the book, and what the title refers to, Empire of AI, it’s actually a critique of the specific trajectory of AI development that led us to ChatGPT and has continued since ChatGPT. And that is specifically Silicon Valley’s scale-at-all-costs approach to AI development. AI models in modern day, they are trained on data. They need computers to train them on that data. But what Silicon Valley did, and what OpenAI did in the last few years, is they started blowing up the amount of data and the size of the computers that need to do this training. So, we are talking about the full English-language internet being fed into these models — books, scientific articles, all of the intellectual property that has been created — and also massive supercomputers that run tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands, of computer chips that are the size of dozens, maybe hundreds, of football fields and use practically the entire energy demands of cities now. So, this is an extraordinary type of AI development that is causing a lot of social, labor and environmental harms. And that is ultimately why I evoke this analogy to empire. JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Karen, could you talk some more about not only the energy requirements, but the water requirements of these huge data centers that are, in essence, the backbone of this widening industry? KAREN HAO: Absolutely. I’ll give you two stats on both the energy and the water. When talking about the energy demand, McKinsey recently came out with a report that said in the next five years, based on the current pace of AI computational infrastructure expansion, we would need to put as much energy on the global grid as what is consumed by two to six times the energy consumed annually by the state of California, and that will mostly be serviced by fossil fuels. We’re already seeing reporting of coal plants with their lives being extended. They were supposed to retire, but now they cannot, to support this data center development. We are seeing methane gas turbines, unlicensed ones, being popped up to service these data centers, as well. From a freshwater perspective, these data centers need to be trained on freshwater. They cannot be trained on any other type of water, because it can corrode the equipment, it can lead to bacterial growth. And most of the time, it actually taps directly into a public drinking water supply, because that is the infrastructure that has been laid to deliver this clean freshwater to different businesses, to different homes. And Bloomberg recently had an analysis where they looked at the expansion of these data centers around the world, and two-thirds of them are being placed in water-scarce areas. So they’re being placed in communities that do not have access to freshwater. So, it’s not just the total amount of freshwater that we need to be concerned about, but actually the distribution of this infrastructure around the world. JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And most people are familiar with ChatGPT, the consumer aspect of AI, but what about the military aspect of AI, where, in essence, we’re finding Silicon Valley companies becoming the next generation of defense contractors? KAREN HAO: One of the reasons why OpenAI and many other companies are turning to the defense industry is because they have spent an extraordinary amount of money in developing these technologies. They’re spending hundreds of billions to train these models. And they need to recoup those costs. And there are only so many industries and so many places that have that size of a paycheck to pay. And so, that’s why we’re seeing a cozying up to the defense industry. We’re also seeing Silicon Valley use the U.S. government in their empire-building ambitions. You could argue that the U.S. government is also trying to use Silicon Valley, vice versa, in their empire-building ambitions. But certainly, these technologies are not — they are not designed to be used in a sensitive military context. And so, the aggressive push of these companies to try and get those defense contracts and integrate their technologies more and more into the infrastructure of the military is really alarming. AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to go to the countries you went to, or the stories you covered, because, I mean, this is amazing, the depth of your reporting, from Kenya to Uruguay to Chile. You were talking about the use of water. And I also want to ask you about nuclear power. KAREN HAO: Yeah. AMY GOODMAN: But in Chile, what is happening there around these data centers and the water they would use and the resistance to that? KAREN HAO: Yeah. So, Chile has an interesting history in that it’s been under — it was under a dictatorship for a very long time. And so, during that time, most public resources were privatized, including water. But because of an anomaly, there’s one community in the greater Santiago metropolitan region that actually still has access to a public freshwater resource that services both that community, as well as the rest of the country in........

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