Journalist Karen Hao on Sam Altman, OpenAI & the "Quasi-Religious" Push for Artificial Intelligence

[Uncle Joe]

As part of our July Fourth special broadcast, we continue our extended interview with Karen Hao, author of Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI. The book documents the rise of OpenAI and how the AI industry is leading to a new form of colonialism. “One of the things that you really have to understand about AI development today is that there are what I call quasi-religious movements that have developed within Silicon Valley,” says Hao. “The concept of artificial general intelligence is not one that’s scientifically grounded.”

[Kid Berwyn]

1. Singularity: Tech Bros in a rush to upload their "minds"

I understand how Ms. Hao thinks it’s colonialism but, IMFO, AI is NAZI as all hell.

Excerpt…

AI is fascism

by Tim Bousquet
Halifax Examiner, October 1, 2025

Excerpt…

The AI industry has no discernible pathway to profitability. As Ed Zitron has been pointing out for three years, every dollar in revenue for the big AI firms is dwarfed by many times as much in costs, and the costs are only increasing as the products get shittier.

So lately I’ve been thinking of AI as a meme industry. Just as a “meme stock” like Tesla has no underlying economic value, the entire AI industry has no underlying economic value. Both meme stocks and meme industries only have value because of the hype around them.

(It’s true that the value of anything and everything, currency or shares of a mining stock or the national debt or whatever, is social — what people believe it to be — but with the meme stuff there’s not even a widely held belief of value beyond the hype; no one much is rushing out to buy actual Teslas with actual money, and no one much is buying actual AI products with actual money. At least not with anything near the money that is required to produce Teslas or AI products).

And so the hype must be maintained, and others must be forced to believe in the hype and buy into it.

This first became apparent with the notion that was often expressed as something like “you won’t lose your job because of AI if you learn how to use AI; only those who refuse to learn AI will lose their jobs.” Believe the hype or lose your job!

People are losing their jobs, but not really so much because of AI but because of managers who are looking for any excuse to cut payroll costs, even if, as in AI’s case, the excuse doesn’t make financial sense.

At some point, however, the hype of AI runs right up against the reality of the limitations of AI.

Continues…

https://www.halifaxexaminer.ca/morning-file/ai-is-fascism/

Bousquet made a case in 2025 for helping us US citizens, as he sees Trump goosestepping over millions of us on his way to infamy.