Lewis Goodall

OpenAI, when it came along, what was it?

It is a truism that AI will dominate our lives, that it already is, that there is something inexorable or inevitable about it.

As Tony Blair has said in his recent essay, that artificial intelligence will change everything.

I mean everything.

There is no point in debating whether this technological revolution is a good or a bad thing.

Just know it is a thing.

In fact, he says, it is the thing.

It is as if he were talking about the weather.

But what if it isn't true?

AI companies like to present what they're doing as Blair's done, as somehow being beyond politics, as beyond political arguments.

They talk as if they are engaged in a utopian project to turn the wheel on humanity's development.

Indeed, to reinvent that wheel.

And for that wheel to reinvent itself ad infinitum, creating a world of abundance.

permanent revolution it is a convenient fiction for politicians like bear to cling to a get out of jail free card for something anything to come along and rest us from our political malaise and economic slump and the problem with our treating them that way in talking about them that way is that we don't see them for what they really are and for my guest today the journalist and writer karen howe

What they are are not companies or religions or brain trust.

What they are is empires, something which rises above even the great corporate power that we saw in, say, the railway companies of the 19th century or the.

energy companies in the 20th century or the financial companies of the early 21st, that these firms are accruing and accreting such profound political, financial, cultural and resource power, such a chokehold over knowledge itself that they are best understood otherwise.

as early imperiums.

She believes that the test of the 2020s and beyond for democracy is whether they can be brought back under democratic control to make what they do work for us and not for them.

Her book Empire of AI is out now and seeks to answer that question and more.