But in the same way we once thought Facebook was merely a place for posting vacation pictures and connecting with long-lost elementary school friends, or for sparking positive and transformative social movements, there is more to the sleek, entrancing exterior than meets the eye. Under the hood, generative AI models are monstrosities, built from consuming previously unfathomable amounts of data, labor, computing power, and natural resources. GPT-4, the successor to the first ChatGPT, is, by one measure, reportedly over fifteen thousand times larger than its first generation, GPT-1, released five years earlier. The exploding human and material costs are settling onto wide swaths of society, especially the most vulnerable, people I met around the world, whether workers and rural residents in the Global North or impoverished communities in the Global South, all suffering new degrees of precarity. Rarely have they seen any ātrickle-downā gains of this so-called technological revolution; the benefits of generative AI mostly accrue upward.
Over the years, Iāve found only one metaphor that encapsulates the nature of what these AI power players are: empires. During the long era of European colonialism, empires seized and extracted resources that were not their own and exploited the labor of the people they subjugated to mine, cultivate, and refine those resources for the empiresā enrichment. They projected racist, dehumanizing ideas of their own superiority and modernity to justifyāand even entice the conquered into acceptingāthe invasion of sovereignty, the theft, and the subjugation. They justified their quest for power by the need to compete with other empires: In an arms race, all bets are off. All this ultimately served to entrench each empireās power and to drive its expansion and progress. In the simplest terms, empires amassed extraordinary riches across space and time, through imposing a colonial world order, at great expense to everyone else.