Empire of AI: fruit from a poison tree

The Nerd Reich’s Gil Duran in conversation with Karen Hao and Roger McNamee. Plus: Aurobindonian thoughts on our future

[T]he world is a wounded and venomous snake wriggling towards a destined off-sloughing and perfection. — Sri Aurobindo (ca. 1913)

The descent of the supramental is an inevitable necessity in the logic of things and is therefore sure. It is because people do not understand what the supermind is or realise the significance of the emergence of consciousness in a world of “inconscient” Matter that they are unable to realise this inevitability. — Sri Aurobindo (December 1, 1935)

Sri Aurobindo came to tell the world of the beauty of the future that must be realised. He came to give not a hope but a certitude of the splendour towards which the world moves. The world is not an unfortunate accident; it is a marvel which moves towards its expression. The world needs the certitude of the beauty of the future. And Sri Aurobindo has given that assurance. — The Mother (November 27, 1971)

When I began to read Sri Aurobindo’s The Synthesis of Yoga half a century ago, I discovered that it wasn’t a manual. I was enthralled by what the Integral Yoga promised to “deliver,” but I didn’t find the “clear and precise” instructions I was looking for. It took me some time to understand that the Synthesis was about what happens to someone who has stumbled into Sri Aurobindo’s field of conscious force and got caught in it. I understood it because it started happening to me. Even if it was just a trickle, a faint beginning, it inspired abiding trust. All this to say that I am convinced of the veracity of the above quotations.

But then there are these inevitable questions: How will this splendor come to pass? What will be the trajectory from the ugly now to that beautiful future? (There is also the personal question: what can or should I do to further the expression of said marvel? But this is not the place to address it.)

But first some excerpts (edited for readability) from a recent episode of Gil Duran’s The Nerd Reich podcast, in which he discusses Karen Hao’s book Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmare in Sam Altman’s OpenAI (Penguin Press, 2025) with the author and with tech investor-turned-watchdog Roger McNamee. These excerpts illustrate just one aspect of the dire straits in which the world presently finds itself.

Gil Duran: Karen Hao and Roger McNamee are pulling back the curtain on the battle between billionaires like Sam Altman and Elon Musk to control the future of AI and the world. A world where Congress is trying to kill any AI regulation even as every major company is racing to deploy artificial intelligence tools, all while they warn those tools might kill us. Hao’s book also illuminates the struggles of Kenyan workers forced to moderate the most traumatic content imaginable for poverty wages. And she writes about communities from Chile to Arizona defending their local resources from digital colonialists. AI dystopia isn’t just in the future; it’s also an empire nightmare happening right now.

Karen Hao: The title of my book, “Empire of AI,” is a nod to the argument that we need to think of these new companies as empires, new forms of empire. And the reason why I go to all these communities that you described is because you cannot tell the story of an empire by just staying in the power center of that empire. You have to go to the far reaches of empire to see how the technologies that are created within Silicon Valley really start to break down for the majority of the global population. In Kenya, for example, I went to speak with workers who had been contracted by OpenAI during a time when OpenAI was moving from a more fundamental research orientation to commercialization, and they realized that if they put text generation models into the hands of millions of users, they could run into a PR crisis with the model spewing toxic, hateful speech. So they went to Kenya to contract workers to design a content moderation filter that would wrap around these models and block anything that the models said that was unsavory before it reached the user.

What that meant for the Kenyan workers was they were reading reams of the worst content on the internet, as well as AI-generated content where OpenAI was prompting AI models to imagine the worst content on the internet. And they were putting them in these detailed taxonomies of: is this hate speech? Is this harassment? Is this violent content? Is this sexual content? To what degree is this content violent? To what degree does this sexual content involve abuse or abuse of children? So that the filter could be taught to block all these different categories of content. These content moderators were deeply traumatized by their work. And it not only broke their spirits, it broke their families and communities and the people that depended on them. And this is just one of the many stories that I highlight to show this technology is not magic. There’s a profound level of labor exploitation that’s happening. There’s a profound level of environmental and public health harms that are happening to develop these technologies.

And ultimately you begin to see the logic of empire because there is no logical basis for why those workers are paid a few bucks an hour and AI researchers at the center of power are paid million-dollar compensation packages. Their work is both fundamental to the functioning of this technology. The only basis is an ideological one, which is that this world should be a hierarchical one and that there are some groups that have a God-given right or a nature-given right to be superior and others who are born inferior.

Roger McNamee: What we have in this generation of what is called AI is essentially a business where there’s 10,000 mostly white men who are benefiting, and 8 billion people around the world who are being either exploited at a minimum or directly harmed by the success of those 10,000. This is what I would describe as the end state of the evolution of the tech industry that’s been taking place since 2009.

Congress had decided Silicon Valley should be protected from interference, so we’re not going to create new laws against them. But we also didn’t enforce any of the old laws, and Silicon Valley got used to this. And then after 2009, it just basically said, “Look, we’re going to break the law with impunity.” And here we are with a thing in AI that’s based on, “okay, we’re going to basically end any effort to control climate change. We’re going to use up scarce water in places where water is really precious. We’re going to steal every copyright. We’re going to steal everybody’s personal data. And we’re going to do all that in order to unemploy tens of millions of people. And in order to make it work, we’re going to exploit hundreds of thousands of people in the global south who are used essentially as feedstock to make all this work for the benefit of roughly 10,000 white guys.”

From 1956, when Silicon Valley was created by the AT&T consent decree, until 2009, it was a completely reasonable thing for people to trust that whatever Silicon Valley created was going to make their life better. That was a completely reasonable hypothesis. Since 2009, I think you can make the case the industry has been so predatory that one should not trust a single thing that they have done nor believe a single thing that they have said.

Gil Duran: We increasingly see a trend in which money and power aren’t enough for these guys. They want direct political power too. And it doesn’t always work out, as we’re seeing right now, at least for the moment, with Elon Musk. Roger, why isn’t the money enough for some of these guys? Why do they need more than that?

Roger McNamee: I don’t really know the answer, but my hypothesis is that you have a whole generation in Silicon Valley that was essentially raised on dystopian fiction and video games. Really, in many ways, their emotional development was so affected by that that they didn’t go on to develop empathy or many other emotional tools that allow you to navigate a complex world....

Musk realized you could combine tech power with state power. And once you did that, you created something that might be irreversible. Musk’s whole idea is to replace a civil service with AI. That’s a category error of the most extreme kind. The whole point of government is to do the things capitalism doesn’t do well. All of this stuff is just, I mean, it’s terrifying. The other guys all took baby steps towards this, and it took Musk to do the giant leap.... I’ve been screaming about the threat of big tech to democracy for nine years, and it never occurred to me that somebody would figure out how to combine tech power with state power and do it in one shot, do it literally overnight as opposed to having to do it in steps.

Karen Hao: If we look at the history of empires, one of the analogies that I have been pointing to, that I didn’t put in my book but is extremely apt for the current moment that we’re in with the Trump administration, is the British East India Company, which was a corporate empire that ultimately ended up being nationalized by a state empire, the British Crown. That is when the Indian subcontinent went from being ruled by a company to being a formal colony of the British Empire. We are now seeing a corporate empire and the US government in its own empire era as a state empire, each trying to subsume the other. They currently have a tenuous alliance. But the alliance is happening because the state is trying to use Silicon Valley for its empire building, and Silicon Valley is trying to use the state as its empire-building asset....

Silicon Valley is now so deeply influenced by thinkers that talk about the politics of exit, about this idea that democracy doesn’t work anymore—the better way to organize society is through corporations run by CEOs. The endgame of Silicon Valley ... they’re trying to use the US government while they have this alliance to build hardware and software all around the world, striking deals in the Middle East, striking deals in other places to lay down infrastructure and ultimately get to escape velocity; they’re trying to get to a point where they become bigger than countries themselves and then take over the US government, take over democracy. And we will once again see the playing out of how Altman fares in trying to do the same dance that Musk did. But the bottom line is that whether or not Trump or Altman ultimately win out, both versions are highly, highly dangerous, because no one is trying to preserve democracy in either pathway. Both powerful entities, both the state power and the corporate power, are trying to ultimately move past democracy and return to an age of empire.

Gil Duran: how does the AI empire specifically work?

Karen Hao: There are four different parallels between what I call “empires of AI” and empires of old. The first is that they lay claim to resources that are not their own, but they interpret the rules to suggest that it was always their own. That refers to the data that these companies scrape from the internet. People who put that data online never gave informed consent for having their personal photos or their thoughts get taken and used to train models that might ultimately constrain their future economic opportunity. But companies will say, “Well, it’s in the public domain. It’s totally fair game.” And all that intellectual property that these artists and writers created, that’s fair use. We’re using it under “fair use.”

The second feature is that empires exploit a lot of labor. So that refers not just to these companies contracting workers all over the global south and in economically vulnerable communities to help produce the technologies they create, such as through content moderation, data preparation, data cleaning, for just a few bucks an hour. But also the fact that their technologies are ultimately labor-automating technologies. OpenAI’s definition of Artificial General Intelligence is highly autonomous systems that outperform humans in most economically valuable work. So they are explicitly saying that their intent is to do better the jobs that people usually get paid for. And so there’s labor exploitation going into the creation of this technology, and then the technology itself perpetuates labor exploitation.

The third thing is that empires monopolize knowledge production. The top AI researchers in the world used to mostly work for academia or independent research labs. They now mostly work for AI companies. And that means the fundamental science that underpins our public understanding of how AI works and its limitations is being filtered through what is good or bad for the empire. That’s effectively the equivalent of all climate science being predominantly done by researchers working for oil companies.

And the fourth feature is that empires always engage in this narrative that there’s good empires and there are evil empires. And they, the good empire, need to do all this resource extraction, need to do all this labor exploitation in order to be strong enough to beat back the evil empire. I talk throughout my book about how OpenAI consistently identifies new evil empires to hold up. Originally the evil empire was Google. Now increasingly the evil empire is China. And the idea is they as the good empire are ultimately civilizing the world. They’re not engaging in exploitation. They’re actually bringing progress and modernity to everyone and giving humanity this gift where they can bring all of the human race to heaven instead of damn them to hell. That is literally the language that they use these days. They talk about heaven and hell. And that is quite a profound echo of the way empires of old used to describe themselves as well.

Roger McNamee: There’s a fifth element that I would just like to add, which is my own personal one, which is that empire is about essentially collecting wealth in the hands of a tiny number of people by exploiting literally everyone else. And when you get into conversations about democracy, I think people don’t really understand what this is really about. It’s human rights. Are you going to be a human being with agency, you know, are you equal to everyone else? Or are you somehow going to be lesser than others? And I think that the tech industry has a very clear plan, which they do not hide any longer. They used to hide it, but now they’re really open about it, which is, “You little people, you have no rights. We’re going to take whatever work you have, product you have created, whatever it is that you do for a living, we’re going to take that away from you for our benefit.”

Gil Duran: In my view, the co-optation and corruption of the Democratic Party is an even bigger threat than the Republican Party. We know the Republicans are already there, but the Democrats now, people who were fighting for this different future supposedly, are actually going for the exact same future, just with different language and a different take on certain issues that we might all agree on. But Karen, you recently described generative AI as fruit from a poison tree. What are the poisoned roots of AI development that can’t be wished away with better intentions? What would you say to those currently using AI products as consumers about what they’re actually participating in?

Karen Hao: Silicon Valley’s conception of AI development is the scale-at-all-costs paradigm of AI development. This is the kind that is scraping all the English language data on the internet. This is the kind of AI that is leading to the mass proliferation of data centers and supercomputers, which is then creating environmental, public health, and freshwater crises all around the world.... The reason why I call Silicon Valley’s conception of AI “fruit from a poison tree” is because of exactly that: that there are just so many social, environmental, and labor harms along the supply chain production of this technology. And then, as I mentioned, the technology itself is labor exploitative and is also leading to detrimental effects like the erosion of critical thinking in schools. Every time someone uses these tools, they are helping to perpetuate that imperial ambition.... We need to recognize that convenience, the convenience of these tools, is the way that Silicon Valley is greasing the wheels for the perpetuation, fortification, continuation of the empire.

“Hubris and the Fall” — Painting by Steve Stefanko

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So how might the wounded and venomous snake wriggle towards its destined off-sloughing and perfection? In speculations of this kind, it is a massive error to ignore the evolution of consciousness — to ignore that the world is what it is (to us) because of the way it is experienced by us, and to ignore that the future evolution of the world depends increasingly on the future evolution of the consciousness by which it is experienced.

Our mental consciousness deals with the external world by discovering laws, understands it in terms of laws, acts in it by applying laws. What it cannot do is change the laws by which it understands the world and acts in it. Supermind, on the other hand, being the consciousness by which Reality has initially subjected itself to constraints, also has the power to loosen and even to remove them. Having subjected its native dynamism to what we call the laws of physics (in order to set the stage for the adventure of evolution), it can also change these laws.

What can safely be predicted is the eventual evolution of a new species of gnostic (meaning supramentally conscious) beings. Their way of acting in the world — and on what to us is an external world — will be as direct as their way of knowing the world. As the latter requires no mediating representations, so the former does not depend on the instruments and methods that mental agents employ. While a change in our mental experience of the world generally results from a change in what appears to us to be a mind-independent external world, the evolution of supramentally conscious agents reverses this causal dependence: a “mere” change in their experience of the world will cause a change in the world experienced by us. This can happen in either (or both) of two ways: by a direct action on the manner their mentally conscious fellow beings experience the world, and by a direct action on the world their mentally conscious fellow beings consider to be external to them. (Would they know the difference?)

But how will the new species come into being? Its evolution will differ from that of the human species in that human beings can consciously participate in the evolution of the gnostic being. As the emergence of mind from its involution in submental life was made possible by the descent of mind from a pre-existent plane of consciousness or existence, so the emergence of supermind from its involution in mind is made possible by the descent of supermind from a pre-existent supraphysical plane. But while subhuman life was a passive recipient of the descending mental consciousness, the human being can consciously and actively participate in the descent of the supramental consciousness. This participation is what Sri Aurobindo means by “Yoga.”

[W]hat Nature aims at for the mass in a slow evolution, Yoga effects for the individual by a rapid revolution. It works by a quickening of all her energies, a sublimation of all her faculties. While she develops the spiritual life with difficulty and has constantly to fall back from it for the sake of her lower realisations, the sublimated force, the concentrated method of Yoga can attain directly and carry with it the perfection of the mind and even, if she will, the perfection of the body. Nature seeks the Divine in her own symbols: Yoga goes beyond Nature to the Lord of Nature, beyond universe to the Transcendent and can return with the transcendent light and power, with the fiat of the Omnipotent.... And as the mental life uses and perfects the material, so will the spiritual use and perfect the material and the mental existence as the instruments of a divine self-expression. [SY 29‒30]

This active participation through the concentrated method of Yoga is as yet an option only for the individual:

A change of this kind, the change from the mental and vital to the spiritual order of life, must necessarily be accomplished in the individual and in a great number of individuals before it can lay any effective hold upon the community. The Spirit in humanity discovers, develops, builds its formations first in the individual man: it is through the progressive and formative individual that it offers the discovery and the chance of a new self-creation to the mind of the race....

[I]f the spiritual change of which we have been speaking is to be effected, it must unite two conditions which have to be simultaneously satisfied but are most difficult to bring together. There must be the individual and the individuals who are able to see, to develop, to re-create themselves in the image of the Spirit and to communicate both their idea and its power to the mass. And there must be at the same time a mass, a society, a communal mind or at the least the constituents of a group-body, the possibility of a group-soul which is capable of receiving and effectively assimilating....

That the combination must happen some day is a certainty, but none can tell how many attempts will have to be made and how many sediments of spiritual experience will have to be accumulated in the subconscient mentality of the communal human being before the soil is ready....

What then will be that state of society, what that readiness of the common mind of man which will be most favourable to this change, so that even if it cannot at once effectuate itself, it may at least make for its ways a more decisive preparation than has been hitherto possible? For that seems the most important element, since it is that, it is the unpreparedness, the unfitness of the society or of the common mind of man which is always the chief stumbling-block. It is the readiness of this common mind which is of the first importance; for even if the condition of society and the principle and rule that govern society are opposed to the spiritual change, even if these belong almost wholly to the vital, to the external, the economic, the mechanical order, as is certainly the way at present with human masses, yet if the common human mind has begun to admit the ideas proper to the higher order that is in the end to be, and the heart of man has begun to be stirred by aspirations born of these ideas, then there is a hope of some advance in the not distant future. [HC 246‒48]

This was written in the wake of the first World War. In the wake of World War II, Sri Aurobindo wrote the following:

The question now put by evolving Nature to mankind is whether its existing international system ... cannot be replaced by ... a true system, eventually a real unity serving all the common interests of the earth’s peoples....

The indwelling deity who presides over the destiny of the race has raised in man’s mind and heart the idea, the hope of a new order which will replace the old unsatisfactory order and substitute for it conditions of the world’s life which will in the end have a reasonable chance of establishing permanent peace and well-being....

It is for the men of our day and, at the most, of tomorrow to give the answer. For, too long a postponement or too continued a failure will open the way to a series of increasing catastrophes which might create a too prolonged and disastrous confusion and chaos and render a solution too difficult or impossible; it might even end in something like an irremediable crash not only of the present world-civilisation but of all civilisation. A new, a difficult and uncertain beginning might have to be made in the midst of the chaos and ruin after perhaps an extermination on a large scale, and a more successful creation could be predicted only if a way was found to develop a better humanity or perhaps a greater, a superhuman race. [HC 586‒87]