What I Read this Week

W/c 11th August

Books

Empire of AI by Karen Hao

I haven’t made my way through this one yet, but I wanted to give some thoughts after the first few chapters. Firstly, and this will come as a surprise to almost no one, this book makes clear that those who get to the top of the tech world tend to be egomaniacs absolutely desperate for power. My mum has a background as an organisational psychologist, and she would describe these people as ‘high in social dominance orientation’.

Karen Hao focuses on Sam Altman, who is clearly extremely high in social dominance orientation – but so are Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg, and Sheryl Sandberg. These are people so painfully insecure that they only feel safe when they are able to control everyone around them. They are incredibly dangerous, and we just so happen to have built an economic system that rewards them for their paranoia, manipulation, and drive for growth at all costs.

The tech sector is not, of course, the only area in which these people are most likely to succeed. They’re in boardrooms and C-suites across the whole economy, because capitalist economies reward social dominance behaviours. They lead our biggest banks, manufacturers, energy providers, and even healthcare companies. So, why all the fuss about tech?

I considered this question a lot while reading the first few chapters of the book – and I think we should be concerned about the characters of the men leading the world’s largest tech companies for the same reason we were once concerned with the characters of financial executives in the 1980s, the robber barons in the 1920s, or railway executives in the 1840s. Namely, these people own and control the infrastructure that is becoming the foundation of our entire economy.