On Hard Knock Radio, host Davey D sits down with award-winning tech journalist Karen Hao to unpack her book Empires of AI—a sweeping critique of how today’s AI boom concentrates power while eroding public agency. Hao traces OpenAI’s arc from a purportedly altruistic nonprofit to a profit-driven juggernaut shaped by the egos and ambitions of its founders. She argues that to evaluate tools like ChatGPT, we can’t stop at personal convenience; we have to reckon with the hidden inputs—mass data scraping from writers and artists, huge land/energy/water demands for data centers, and uneven, sometimes harmful outcomes for users.
Hao and Davey probe how “convenience” morphs into dependency. Hao says many people recognize the hollowing effect of constant engagement and that younger users, in particular, are increasingly skeptical. She describes a “quasi-religion” inside the Valley: AGI believers split into “boomers” (utopia) and “doomers” (apocalypse), both projecting salvation or damnation onto speculative tech. Sam Altman, she contends, deliberately cultivates myth—an “everything machine” that promises to tutor kids, cure loneliness, and fix climate change—pushing beyond Apple-style brand loyalty into messianic claims about intelligence itself.
Davey presses the Apple analogy, and Hao counters that AI’s leap is qualitative: companies market systems as smarter than users while fraying the basic “fair exchange” with the public. She points to research suggesting heavy reliance on chatbots can dull critical-thinking “muscle,” especially worrisome for kids forming habits and worldviews shaped by corporate values baked into models.
The “empire” frame sharpens around labor and extraction. Hao recounts Kenyan workers paid under $2/hour to sanitize training data—absorbing trauma akin to social-media moderation—while generating value that fuels Silicon Valley profits. She echoes Indigenous critics who call data the “last frontier” of colonization: platforms seize what communities create, then sell it back as services.
The conversation lands on politics. With Trump pushing to purge “woke AI,” strip guardrails, and supercharge surveillance, Hao says the mask slips: these systems aren’t neutral; they’re infrastructures that can hard-wire an ideology. Her closing appeal: widen the lens, resist the addictiveness, and organize for public-interest AI—so communities, not empires, set the terms.
Hard Knock Radio is a drive-time Hip-Hop talk show on KPFA (94.1fm @ 4-5 pm Monday-Friday), a community radio station without corporate underwriting, hosted by Davey D and Anita Johnson.