INTELLIGENCE * AGENT INTERESTINGLY : BOOK REVIEW

'' Empire of AI : Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI '' By Karen Hao.

The '' paper clip problem '' is a well known ethics thought experiment in the world of artificial intelligence. It imagines a superintelligent A.I. charged with the seemingly harmless goal of making as many paper clips as possible.

Trouble is, as the philosopher Nick Bostrom put it in 2003, without common-sense limits it might transform '' first all of earth and then increasing portions of space into paper clip manufacturing facilities. ''

This tale has long served as a warning about objectives pursued too literally.

One new book that orbits the entrepreneur Sam Altman and the firm he co-founded, OpenAI, suggest we may already be living with a version of the problem.

In '' Empire of AI '' the journalist Karen Hao, who has worked for the Wall Street Journal and contributes to The Atlantic, argues that the pursuit of an artificial superintelligence has become its own figurative paper clip factory, devouring too much energy, minerals and human labour.

'' Empire of AI '' is the broader and critical, Hao profiled OpenAI in 2020, two years before its most famous product, the intelligent chatbot called ChatGPT, debuted publicly.

She portrays OpenAI and other companies that make up the fast growing A.I. sector as a '' modern-day colonial world order.''

Much like the European powers of the 18th and 19th centuries, they '' seize and extract precious resources to feed their vision of artificial intelligence.''

In a corrective to tech journalism that rarely leaves Silicon Valley, Hao ranges well beyond the Bay Area with extensive fieldwork in Kenya, Colombia and Chile.

Hao's 2020 profile of OpenAI, published in the M.I.T. Technology Review, was unflattering and the company declined to cooperate with her book.

She believes that OpenAI was '' began as a sincere stroke of idealism,'' but she wants to make its negative spillover effects evident. Hao does an admirable job of pulling the camera back.

Telling the stories of workers in Nairobi, who earn '' starvation wages to filter out violence and hate speech'' from ChatGPT, and of visits to communities in Chile where data centers siphon prodigious amounts of water and electricity to run complex hardware.

The World Students Society thanks Tim Wu, a law professor at Columbia University and the author of the forthcoming '' The Age of Extraction : How Tech Platforms Conquered the Economy and Threaten Our Future Prosperity.''