{"id":331034,"date":"2025-08-09T17:01:12","date_gmt":"2025-08-09T17:01:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/331034\/"},"modified":"2025-08-09T17:01:12","modified_gmt":"2025-08-09T17:01:12","slug":"many-choose-not-to-have-children-because-they-dont-think-the-world-is-going-to-be-around-much-longer-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/331034\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Many choose not to have children because they don\u2019t think the world is going to be around much longer\u2019 \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

Scarlett Johansson<\/a> never intended to take on the might of Silicon Valley. But last summer the Hollywood star discovered a ChatGPT<\/a> model had been developed whose voice \u2013 husky, with a hint of vocal fry \u2013 bore an uncanny resemblance to the AI<\/a> assistant voiced by Johansson in the 2013 Spike Jonze movie Her. On the day of the launch, OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman<\/a>, maker of ChatGPT, posted on X a one-word comment: \u201cher\u201d. Later Johansson released a furious statement revealing she had been asked to voice the new aide but had declined. Soon the model was scrapped. Johansson and a phalanx of lawyers had defeated the tech behemoths. <\/p>\n

That skirmish is one among the many related in Karen Hao\u2019s new book Empire of AI: Inside the Reckless Race for Total Domination, a 482-page volume that, in telling the story of San Francisco company OpenAI and its founder, Altman, concerns itself with large and worrying truths. Could AI steal your job, destabilise your mental health and, via its energy-guzzling servers plunge the environment into catastrophe? Yes to all of the above, and more.<\/p>\n

[\u00a0Empire of AI: Inside the Reckless Race for Total Domination by Karen Hao – Precise, insightful, troublingOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

As Hao puts it in the book: \u201cHow do we govern artificial intelligence? AI is one of the most consequential technologies of this era. In a little over a decade, it has reformed the backbone of the Internet. It is now on track to rewire a great many other critical functions in society, from healthcare to education, from law to finance, from journalism to government. The future of AI \u2013 the shape this technology takes \u2013 is inextricably tied to our future.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a rainy day in Dublin when I travel to Dalkey to meet Hao, a Hong Kong-dwelling, New Jersey-raised journalist who has become a thorn in Altman\u2019s side. Educated at MIT, she writes for the Atlantic and leads the Pulitzer Centre AI Spotlight series, a programme that trains journalists in covering AI matters. Among families grabbing a bite to eat in a local hotel, the boisterous kids running around tables in the lobby and tourists checking in and out, Hao, neat and professional in a cream blazer with her hair tied back, radiates an air of calm authority.<\/p>\n

\u201cAI is such an urgent story,\u201d she says. \u201cThe pursuit of AI becomes dangerous as an idea because it\u2019s eroding people\u2019s data privacy<\/a>. It\u2019s eroding people\u2019s fundamental rights. It\u2019s exploiting labour, but it\u2019s humans that are doing that, in the name of AI.\u201d <\/p>\n

Whether you\u2019re in Dublin or San Diego, AI is hurtling into our lives. ChatGPT has 400 million weekly users. You can\u2019t go on to WhatsApp<\/a>, Google<\/a> or Meta<\/a> without encountering an AI bot. It was revealed in a recent UK Internet Matters survey that 12 per cent of kids and teens use chatbots to offset feelings of loneliness. Secondary school students are changing their CAO forms to give themselves the best chance of thwarting the broken career ladder that AI has created. <\/p>\n

The impact of AI on the environment is extraordinary. Just one ChatGPT search about something as simple as the weather consumes vast energy, 10 times more than a Google search. Or, as Des Traynor of Intercom put it at Dalkey Book Festival recently, it\u2019s like using a \u201cmassive diesel generator to power a calculator\u201d. <\/p>\n

It\u2019s far from the utopian ideal of a medical solutions-focused, climate-improving enterprise that was first trumpeted to Hao when she began investigating OpenAI and Altman in 2019. <\/p>\n

As a 20-something reporter at MIT Technology Review covering artificial intelligence, Hao became intrigued by the company. Founded as a non-profit, OpenAI claimed not to chase commercialisation. Even its revamp into a partially for-profit model didn\u2019t alter its mission statement: to safely build artificial intelligence for the benefit of humanity. And to be open and transparent while doing it. <\/p>\n

But when Hao arrived at the plush headquarters on San Francisco\u2019s 18th and Folsom Streets, all exposed wood beam ceilings and comfy couches, she noticed that: nobody seemed to be allowed to talk to her casually. Her photograph had been sent to security. She couldn\u2019t even eat lunch in the canteen with the employees. \u201cThey were really secretive, even though they kept saying they were transparent,\u201d Hao says. \u201cLater on, I started sourcing my own interviews. People started telling me: this is the most secretive organisation I\u2019ve ever worked for.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"KarenKaren Hao in Dublin during the Dalkey book festival. Photograph: Nick Bradshaw <\/p>\n

The meetings Hao had with OpenAI executives did not impress her. \u201cIn the first meeting, they could not articulate what the mission was. I was like, well, this organisation has consistently been positioning itself as anti-Silicon Valley. But this feels exactly like Silicon Valley, where men are thrown boatloads of money when they don\u2019t yet have a clear idea of what they\u2019re even doing.\u201d<\/p>\n

Simple questions appeared to wrong-foot the executives. They spoke about AGI (artificial general intelligence), the theoretical notion that silicon chips could one day give rise to a human-like consciousness. AGI would help solve complex problems in medicine and climate change<\/a>, they enthused. But how would they achieve this and how would AGI technology be successfully distributed? They hedged. \u201cFire is another example,\u201d Hao was told. \u201cIt\u2019s also got some real drawbacks to it.\u201d <\/p>\n

Since that time, AGI has not been developed, but billions have been pumped into large language models such as ChatGPT, which can perform tasks such as question answering and translation. Built by consuming vast amounts of often garbage data from the bottom drawer of the Internet, AI chatbots are frequently unreliable. An AI assistant might give you the right answer. Or it might, as Elon Musk\u2019s AI bot Grok did recently<\/a>, praise Adolf Hitler and cast doubt on people with Jewish surnames. \u201cQuality information and misinformation are being mixed together constantly,\u201d Hao says, \u201cand no one can tell any more what are the sources of truth.\u201d<\/p>\n

It didn\u2019t have to be this way. \u201cBefore ChatGPT and before OpenAI took the scaling approach, the original trend in AI research was towards tiny AI models and small data sets,\u201d Hao says. \u201cThe idea was that you could have really powerful AI systems with highly curated data sets that were only a couple of hundred images or data points. But the key was you needed to do the curation on the way in. When it\u2019s the other way around, you\u2019re culling the gunk and toxicity and that becomes content moderation.\u201d<\/p>\n

One particularly moving section of Hao\u2019s book is when she journeys to poorer countries to look at how people who work on the content moderation side of OpenAI cope day-to-day. Meagre incomes, job instability and exposure to hate speech, child sex abuse and rape fantasies online are just some of the realities contractors face. In Kenya<\/a>, one worker\u2019s sanity became so frayed his wife and daughter left him. When he told Hao his story, the author says she felt like she\u2019d been punched in the gut. \u201cI went back to my hotel, and I cried because I was like, this is tearing people\u2019s families apart.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hao nearly didn\u2019t get her book out. She had thought she would have some collaboration with Altman and OpenAI, but the participation didn\u2019t happen. \u201cI was devastated,\u201d she admits. \u201cFortunately I had a lot of amazing people in my life who were like, \u2018Are you going to let them win or are you going to continue being the excellent journalist you know you can be, and report it without them?\u2019\u201d <\/p>\n

Understanding companies such as OpenAI is becoming more important for everyone. In recent weeks, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon<\/a> and Alphabet<\/a>, Google\u2019s parent company, delivered their quarterly public financial reports, disclosing that their year-to-date capital expenditure ran into tens of billions<\/a>, much of it required for the creation and maintenance of data centres<\/a> to power AI\u2019s services. <\/p>\n

In Ireland, there are more than 80 data centres, gobbling up 50 per cent of the electricity in the Dublin region, and hoovering up more than 20 per cent nationally, as they work to process and distribute huge quantities of digital information. <\/p>\n

[\u00a0Let\u2019s get real: Ireland\u2019s data centre boom is driving up fossil fuel dependenceOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

Hao believes governments must force tech companies to have more transparency in relation to the energy their data centres consume. \u201cIf you\u2019re going to build data centres, you have to report to the public what the actual energy consumed is, how much water is actually used. That enables the public and the government to decide if this is a trade-off worth continuing. And they need to invest more in independent institutions for cultivating AI expertise.\u201d<\/p>\n

While governments have to play their part, it\u2019s difficult reading the book not to find yourself asking the simple question: why aren\u2019t tech bosses themselves concerned about what they\u2019re doing?<\/p>\n

Tech behemoths may be making billions \u2013 AI researchers are negotiating pay packages of $250 million<\/a> from companies such as Meta \u2013 but surely they\u2019ve given a care to their children\u2019s future? And their children\u2019s children? Wouldn\u2019t they prefer them to live in a world they still have flowers and polar bears and untainted water?<\/p>\n

[\u00a0Adam Kelly: I am a university lecturer witnessing how AI is shrinking our ability to thinkOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat\u2019s interesting is many of them choose not to have children because they don\u2019t think the world is going to be around much longer,\u201d Hao says. \u201cWith some people in more extreme parts of the community, their idea of Utopia is all humans eventually going away and being superseded by this superior intelligence. They see this as a natural force of evolution.\u201d <\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s like a very intense version of utilitarianism,\u201d she adds. \u201cYou\u2019d maximise morality in the world if you created superior intelligences that are more moral than us, and then they inherited our Earth.\u201d <\/p>\n

Offering a more positive outlook, there are many in the AI community who would say that the work they are doing will result in delivering solutions that benefit the planet. AI has the potential to accelerate scientific discoveries: its possibilities are exciting because they are potentially paradigm-shifting. <\/p>\n

Is that enough to justify the actions being taken? Not according to Hao. \u201cThe problem is: we don\u2019t have time to continue destroying our planet with the hope that one day maybe all of it will be solved by this thing that we\u2019re creating,\u201d she says. \u201cThey\u2019re taking real world harm today and offsetting it with a possible future tomorrow. That possible future could go in the opposite direction.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThey can make these trade-offs because they\u2019re the ones that are going to be fine. They\u2019re the ones with the wealth to build the bunkers. If climate change comes, they have everything ready.\u201d<\/p>\n

Empire of AI: Inside the Reckless Race for Total Domination by Karen Hao is published by Allen Lane<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Scarlett Johansson never intended to take on the might of Silicon Valley. But last summer the Hollywood star…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":331035,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3163],"tags":[323,3836,324,1942,1315,2311,7962,16354,295,867,10544,598,1318,20208,53,16,15,37368],"class_list":{"0":"post-331034","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-alphabet","10":"tag-amazon","11":"tag-artificial-intelligence","12":"tag-chatgpt","13":"tag-climate-change","14":"tag-data-privacy","15":"tag-data-centres","16":"tag-elon-musk","17":"tag-google","18":"tag-kenya","19":"tag-meta","20":"tag-openai","21":"tag-sam-altman","22":"tag-technology","23":"tag-uk","24":"tag-united-kingdom","25":"tag-weekendreview"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114999884727666373","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/331034","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=331034"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/331034\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/331035"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=331034"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=331034"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=331034"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}