Downstream: AI Billionaires Want to Control Every Aspect of Your Life w/ Karen Hao

**Aaron Bastani** (0:08)
At some point this year, Elon Musk will become the world's first trillionaire. That's right, he'll be worth more than a trillion US dollars.
It's a benchmark nobody's got to before. Remember, the first company wasn't worth a trillion dollars until 2018, that was Apple, by the way. How is he getting so rich so quickly? A big part of it is, of course, SpaceX. It'll be floated on the stock market this year, and part of that flotation is XAI.
So we are now entering a world not just of trillion dollar companies, but trillion dollar individuals, and that goes hand in hand with an industry, artificial intelligence, which is remaking commerce, politics, and society more generally. Its implications are huge, and our concerns collectively about it are growing by the month. But here's the thing, the more worried we get, the more we use it. And there's obviously some hypocrisy going on there. But that's the world, isn't it? It's always replete with contradictions. The point is, politically, how do you manage a technology this powerful, this disruptive, this prone to changing the status quo? Or on the other hand, is that all just marketing rubbish? Have I fallen for the ads and the PR from the likes of Open AI, Elon Musk and Meta? Those are really important questions. And they were first touched upon by today's guest, Karen Hao, in the hardback version of this book, Empire of AI. We talked a year ago. Superb conversation, did really well, not least because it's a really important topic. I'm very happy to have Karen back today because in the last 12 months, the Empire of AI, its borders and its generals have changed to a pretty substantial degree. Karen Hao, welcome back to Downstream.

**Karen Hao** (1:50)
Thank you so much.

**Aaron Bastani** (1:51)
So excited to have you back on.

**Karen Hao** (1:53)
I'm also excited to be back on.

**Aaron Bastani** (1:55)
Before we started, I'm going to smirk up the backside of Novara Media. Before we started, you were kind enough to say, I'm just really excited to talk to you, talk about your book. The first conversation was so illuminating for me personally. And you said, I don't do second interviews.

**Karen Hao** (2:10)
I really try to avoid it because I've had a really crazy schedule, but I just loved my Novara Media interview. It was my favorite one of the entire tour. So I'm coming back.

**Aaron Bastani** (2:22)
Oh, that is so nice to hear. It did so well.
And it's got millions of views. And I think it's because you just struck the right chord at the right time. And I suppose that's the story of the book more generally, isn't it? You've catalyzed the conversation, but I mean, it wouldn't blow up in the way that it did if it just catalyzed the conversation. You've also fed into real concerns and anxieties that are globally held at this point.

**Karen Hao** (2:49)
Yeah. I didn't realize. I think when we had our first interview and I was just beginning the journey of going on book tour, I didn't really know how the book would land yet, even then. And I didn't really understand how rapidly the global conversation around AI would change. I mean, it's literally been just a year between our last interview and today.
And the turnaround on how people talk about AI now has been remarkable. And I think a lot of it has been because people are paying attention, they are hungry for knowledge, they are actually educating themselves about what this technology is, who is building it, what their agenda is, and they're not standing for it. And they're actually contesting it in resistance movements around the world.

**Aaron Bastani** (3:41)
So what's changed in the last year? Because the book is called, and I should get it up. It's out in paperback. It's very good. I'm sure you bought the hardback, but you can get the paperback now, if you haven't got that. I always say this as well, if you want to radicalise loved ones and friends, buy books, right? What's changed with the Empire of AI? How have the frontiers changed? What new generals are on the scene?
To take the metaphor. Yeah, what rebellious provinces are there and so on? You said a lot has changed, so what really stands out?

**Karen Hao** (4:11)
Yeah, well, there is a bit...
I think the more that I've talked about the book, the more that it's solidified in my mind, that ultimately the most important way to understand the AI story today, as it's conceived of by Silicon Valley, is that it is a political project. And the central feature of this political project is taking agency away from people so that the empire can be the monopoly on decision-making power in the world, on shaping everyone's future. And the thing that we've seen is people aren't actually accepting this narrative anymore. I mean, when I first started reporting the book, every community that I encountered would say the same thing. It was this sense of powerlessness, this sense of, there's nothing that I can do in the face of this immense amount of control and controlling influence from these entities. And now, there are so many people around the world, whether individuals, communities or institutions, that are like, wait a minute, we have our own power, we have our own agency, and even more so if we act as a collective.