Empire of AI

A handful of individuals and companies are reshaping the future of humanity, and we’re largely along for the ride.

That’s a thought I’ve had before, but it was permanently solidified while reading Karen Hao’s new instant New York Times bestseller, Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI.

In some ways, this is nothing new.

Companies like Apple and Meta have been shaping our collective futures for quite some time now.

What makes this moment different, however, isn’t just the concentration of power, though that’s concerning enough, it’s that the technology we’re dealing with—artificial intelligence, specifically the large language models most of us use daily—is more powerful than anything we’ve ever seen.

Yet we understand alarmingly little about how it actually works.

Hao captures this sentiment perfectly early on in the book:

“On the surface, generative AI is thrilling: a creative aid for instantly brainstorming ideas and generating writing; a companion to chat with late into the night to ward off loneliness; a tool that could one day be so effective at boosting productivity that it will increase top-line economic activity…[but] under the hood, generative AI models are monstrosities, built from consuming previously unfathomable amounts of data, labor, computing power, and natural resources.”

Willful blindness

What Hao is getting at, this disconnect between surface appeal and hidden complexity, is nothing new of course.

It’s easy not to think about the true costs of AI, just as it’s easy for most Americans who use Facebook not to think about its role in fueling genocide in Myanmar, or the damage social media has done to an entire generation of young people.

We gloss over headlines about everyone cheating their way through college, and people worldwide becoming convinced they’re unlocking spiritual dimensions while talking to “ChatGPT Jesus” while experiencing “ChatGPT psychosis.”

The problem—which is the same problem we always have—is that two things can be true at once.

AI is changing the world in both incredible and terrible ways.

It’s both the solution and the problem.

It’s the best of human innovation, and the worst.

My own contradiction

In my work and business, generative AI has changed everything.

Projects that would have required four or five people just two years ago now take one.

I’m better, smarter, and more prolific in nearly every area, including technical skills like coding.

It’s hard to imagine going back to the way things were before November 2022 when ChatGPT launched.

Yet knowing that Meta, Google, Apple, Nvidia, Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and a handful of others are pushing us toward a future where I—at forty-seven—might be experiencing, as Avital Balwit, chief of staff to Anthropic’s CEO, put it, my last five years of meaningful work, is more than a little concerning.

The contradictions are everywhere, too.

I recently took my first Waymo ride in San Francisco, watching the world pass by from a driverless SUV.

At an MIT hackathon earlier this year, my team built and demoed a working AI product in thirty-six hours.

I founded an AI healthcare startup last year and coded the entire initial product myself to hand off to an engineering team.

And just yesterday, Nvidia became the world’s first four-trillion-dollar company.

All of that is amazing.

All of that also feels incredibly unsettling.

Bullet train to nowhere

It’s like we’re hurtling toward a cliff in a bullet train.

We all know what’s coming, yet we’re still trying to get to the first-class dining car for one last extravagant meal before we’re catapulted into the abyss.

But what gives me the most pause isn’t even the technology itself—it’s the illusion of collective participation in what’s actually a handful of people making decisions that will define our future.

We’re supposed to be in this together, but we’re largely spectators to choices being made in boardrooms we’ll never see.

Stay awake

I don’t even really know where I’m going with all this.

I don’t have any more answers than you do.

But here’s what I think: we need to participate while staying objective about what we’re participating in. We need to stay engaged, but stay awake.

There’s no longer any doubt that we’re living through the most significant technological transformation in human history.

The least we can do is be conscious participants rather than passive recipients of whatever future gets decided for us.