Karen Hao’s Empire of AI exposes a dangerous illusion: that artificial intelligence is a neutral tool advancing human progress. In reality, today’s AI boom is consolidating power, not democratizing it. A handful of corporations—backed by states, capital, and extractive supply chains—are building an empire that mirrors the worst habits of old colonial rule.
AI systems are trained on the unpaid labor, language, culture, and creativity of the global public, then weaponized for profit and control. Communities in the Global South provide the data, minerals, and exploited labor; elites in the Global North reap the rewards. This is not innovation—it is extraction at planetary scale.
Democracy suffers as decisions once made in public are quietly outsourced to opaque algorithms. Surveillance expands. Accountability shrinks. Bias is automated, inequality hardened, and dissent increasingly policed by code written far from the people it governs. Power migrates upward, beyond voters, regulators, and even nation-states.
Hao’s warning is urgent: without democratic control, AI will not serve humanity—it will rule it. We must demand transparency, public oversight, labor rights, and limits on corporate dominance. Technology should answer to society, not the other way around. The future is not coded yet—but time is running out.
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