Jul 8, 2025
Empire of AI: How AI in Recruiting and Beyond Is Threatening Democracy and Creating a New Colonial World
Artificial intelligence (AI) has rapidly transformed many aspects of our lives, from how we communicate to how businesses operate. One of the most visible faces of AI today is ChatGPT, developed by OpenAI, a company that has become synonymous with cutting-edge AI technology. However, beneath the sleek interface and impressive capabilities lies a complex, often troubling story about the rise of AI and its broader social, environmental, and political impacts. In this article, we explore these issues through insights from Karen Hao, a seasoned technology journalist and author of the new book Empire of AI. Her investigative reporting reveals how AI companies like OpenAI are not only reshaping technology but also echoing colonial patterns of exploitation—extracting resources, labor, and data from marginalized communities around the world.
For professionals navigating the evolving landscape of employment, especially in sectors like recruiting, the key to staying active and valuable in your role is to embrace AI as a tool that enhances your workflow rather than replaces it. Tools like EQ.app are designed to harness AI for automating administrative tasks, freeing you to focus on the meaningful, human-centered parts of your job. This balance between technology and human insight is critical in an age where AI's influence is expanding rapidly.
Understanding AI: More Than Just ChatGPT
Artificial intelligence is often misunderstood as a single technology or application, but in reality, it is a collection of multiple technologies. Most people first encounter AI through applications like ChatGPT, which generate human-like text based on vast amounts of training data. Karen Hao explains that the Empire of AI refers to a specific trajectory in AI development driven by Silicon Valley’s “scale at all costs” mindset.
This approach involves training AI models on enormous datasets—essentially feeding the entirety of the English-language internet, spanning books, scientific articles, and other intellectual property, into these systems. The computational power required to process this data is staggering. It involves supercomputers housing tens of thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands, of computer chips spread across facilities the size of multiple football fields. These data centers consume energy on a scale comparable to entire cities.
This explosive growth in data and computational scale has profound consequences beyond technological advancement. It leads to significant social, labor, and environmental harms, which Hao argues are reminiscent of colonial empires that extracted resources and labor from colonized lands to fuel their ambitions.
The Environmental Cost: Energy and Water Use of AI Data Centers
One of the most overlooked costs of AI development is the massive consumption of energy and freshwater by data centers. According to a recent report by McKinsey, if the current rate of AI infrastructure expansion continues, within five years, the energy required to power AI globally could equal two to six times the annual energy consumption of the state of California. Crucially, much of this energy is sourced from fossil fuels, leading to increased carbon emissions and environmental degradation.
Already, there are reports of coal plants extending their operational lives and the emergence of unlicensed methane gas turbines to meet the growing demand of AI data centers. This reliance on fossil fuels starkly contrasts with the global imperative to reduce carbon footprints and combat climate change.
Water consumption is another critical issue. Data centers require large quantities of freshwater for cooling their equipment. This water must be clean and free from contaminants to avoid corrosion and bacterial growth inside the hardware. Most data centers draw directly from public drinking water supplies, which raises concerns about access and sustainability.
A Bloomberg analysis found that two-thirds of new data centers are being built in water-scarce regions, placing additional stress on communities already struggling with water shortages. This geographic distribution of infrastructure means that the environmental impact is not just about total water use but also about where and how water resources are appropriated, often disadvantaging vulnerable populations.
Case Study: Water Use Resistance in Chile
Chile provides a vivid example of the tensions between AI infrastructure development and community rights. The country has a history of privatizing public resources—including water—stemming from its past dictatorship. Yet, an anomaly exists in the greater Santiago metropolitan region, where one community still has access to a public freshwater resource that serves both itself and the wider country in emergencies.
Google sought to build a data center in this community, proposing to use an amount of freshwater 1,000 times greater than the community’s annual consumption. The water would be provided free, and the community was skeptical of any real benefits. Local residents discovered that taxes paid by Google went to the company’s administrative offices elsewhere, meaning the community would receive no direct financial returns. More alarmingly, there were no effective limits on how much freshwater Google could extract.
Community activists mobilized, conducting grassroots campaigns involving door-to-door outreach and information distribution. Their efforts escalated to the point where Google sent representatives to Chile, but they only spoke English, highlighting a disconnect with the local population. Eventually, the Chilean government intervened, creating roundtables to bring together community members, company representatives, and government officials to discuss ways to ensure that data center development benefits local populations.
While the fight is ongoing, this example highlights the growing resistance against unchecked AI industry expansion and the importance of local activism in holding corporations accountable.
Labor Exploitation in the Global South: The Hidden Workforce of AI
Behind the glossy AI products lies a less visible, often exploitative labor force. Karen Hao’s reporting uncovers the role of data annotation firms—middlemen companies that hire contract workers primarily in the Global South to prepare and clean data for AI training.
Modern AI systems require vast amounts of data, scraped from the internet, to be cleaned and annotated before they can be used effectively. This process involves categorizing content, filtering out harmful or inappropriate material, and providing detailed labels to train AI filters. OpenAI, for example, contracted firms in Kenya where workers were tasked with reviewing some of the worst content on the internet, including hateful, violent, and sexual text. These workers had to classify this content in painstaking detail to help develop moderation filters for AI outputs.
The labor conditions for these workers are harsh. They are often paid minimal wages—sometimes just a few dollars an hour—and face significant psychological trauma from exposure to disturbing content. This situation mirrors the earlier era of social media content moderators, many of whom suffered lasting mental health effects.
Meanwhile, AI researchers and executives in Silicon Valley earn multimillion-dollar salaries. This stark disparity in compensation and working conditions underscores the colonial logic embedded in the AI industry: the extraction of labor and resources from marginalized communities to fuel the ambitions of a wealthy elite.
AI and the Military: Silicon Valley as the New Defense Contractor
Another dimension of AI’s expanding empire is its increasing entanglement with the military-industrial complex. Companies like OpenAI and others are turning to defense contracts to recoup their massive investments. Training AI models costs hundreds of billions of dollars, and few industries can afford such expenditures except for the defense sector.
This has led to a cozy relationship between Silicon Valley and the U.S. government, with AI companies aggressively pursuing military contracts and integrating their technologies into defense infrastructure. While governments seek to leverage AI for strategic advantage, these technologies were not originally designed for sensitive military applications, raising concerns about their appropriateness and the ethical implications of their deployment.
The intertwining of commercial AI ambitions with military interests reflects a broader pattern of empire-building, where technology is wielded as a tool for geopolitical dominance, often at the expense of democratic oversight and human rights.
Sam Altman and OpenAI: The Face of Silicon Valley’s AI Empire
At the center of this AI empire is Sam Altman, a quintessential Silicon Valley figure. Altman’s career trajectory—from startup founder to president of the renowned startup accelerator Y Combinator, and now CEO of OpenAI—embodies the Silicon Valley ethos of relentless growth and innovation.
OpenAI’s origins as a nonprofit aimed to counterbalance profit-driven motives in AI development. However, within a year and a half, the company shifted to a “scale at all costs” approach, nesting a for-profit arm within the nonprofit structure to attract the massive capital required. Altman’s exceptional fundraising skills have enabled OpenAI to raise tens of billions, possibly even hundreds of billions, to pursue this aggressive growth strategy.
Altman’s vision is both sweeping and strategic. Early in his career, he invested in emerging technologies like quantum computing, nuclear fusion, and self-driving cars, positioning himself at the center of multiple technological trends. When AI began accelerating rapidly, he focused his efforts there, building OpenAI into a dominant force.
Despite the massive capital inflows, the economic impact of OpenAI’s technology remains modest relative to the investments made. Altman himself has joked about the “trillions” required to develop AI, underscoring the scale and risk involved.
The Future of AI in Recruiting and Beyond: Embracing AI Responsibly
In sectors like recruiting, AI tools are transforming workflows by automating routine administrative tasks such as resume screening, interview scheduling, and candidate communication. This automation has the potential to increase efficiency and reduce bias when implemented thoughtfully. However, the story of AI’s broader empire reminds us to be vigilant about the ethical, social, and environmental implications of these technologies.
To stay relevant and effective in today’s employment landscape, professionals must learn to integrate AI tools into their workflows rather than fear displacement. Platforms like eq.app are designed to empower users by using AI to handle repetitive, time-consuming administrative tasks. This allows recruiters and other professionals to focus on the meaningful parts of their jobs—building relationships, understanding candidate needs, and making strategic decisions.
By adopting AI responsibly and ethically, you can leverage its power to enhance your productivity while maintaining the human touch that technology cannot replace. This balanced approach is key to thriving in an era where AI continues to reshape industries.
Conclusion: Challenging the Empire of AI
The rise of AI, epitomized by companies like OpenAI, is not just a story of technological innovation. It is a complex narrative involving environmental exploitation, labor abuses, geopolitical ambitions, and the consolidation of power reminiscent of colonial empires. Karen Hao’s work in Empire of AI sheds light on these hidden dimensions, urging us to critically examine the costs and consequences of AI’s expansion.
As AI becomes increasingly integrated into areas like recruiting, it is vital to approach these tools with both optimism and caution. Embracing AI as a complement to human skills—using platforms like eq.app to automate the mundane while focusing on meaningful engagement—can help professionals stay active and relevant. At the same time, society must demand transparency, fairness, and sustainability from the AI industry to ensure that its benefits are shared equitably and its harms minimized.
The empire of AI is still being built. Whether it becomes a force for inclusive progress or a new form of exploitation depends on the choices we make today.