Over the years, I’ve found only one metaphor that encapsulates the nature of what these AI power players are: empires. During the long era of European colonialism, empires seized and extracted resources that were not their own and exploited the labor of the people they subjugated to mine, cultivate, and refine those resources for the empires’ enrichment. They projected racist, dehumanizing ideas of their own superiority and modernity to justify—and even entice the conquered into accepting—the invasion of sovereignty, the theft, and the subjugation. They justified their quest for power by the
...more
