NPR's Steve Inskeep speaks with tech journalist Karen Hao about the Pope's recent warnings that AI companies represent a new form of colonialism.

STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:

We are following up on a word Pope Leo used about artificial intelligence. His recent statement on AI warned of it becoming a new form of colonialism. That word brings to mind empires of centuries past that took land and resources. In this case, it's companies exploiting people's data and other things. In talking of colonialism, Leo appears to have picked up on tech writers who have used that term for almost a decade. One of them is Karen Hao. Her book "Empire Of AI" says that some tech researchers talk of their mission in religious terms.

KAREN HAO: They say that they are trying to bring progress and modernity, they're trying to benefit all of humanity, and essentially, if you allow them to do this, they will bring humanity to this kind of utopic state where cancer is cured, climate change is no more, poverty is no more. Essentially, what they're describing is a heaven, and they say if they don't do it, then the bad guys will and humanity will descend into hell. And of course, religion was a deeply integral part of the expansion of empires of old, which is part of the reason why it is so fascinating that Pope Leo XIV, as someone who is at the top of one of the religions of old, is putting out a document that's meant to encounter the religions of the new world.

INSKEEP: Some people are going to hear this and think it is just an intellectual exercise. If you see certain things today as colonialism, it's easy to just plug tech firms into that existing framework.

HAO: It's not intellectual. People are literally feeling the dispossession. We are seeing this most prominently with data center protests all across the country. And when I speak with communities that are pushing back against these facilities, it's not a new form of NIMBYism. They aren't just pushing back because they don't want to host a large facility. They're pushing back because this facility - yes, it hikes up their utility prices. It could contaminate their soil and their water and their air. But more importantly, it also represents this physical manifestation of something deeply corrosive happening in American society right now, which is that we are about to mint the world's first trillionaire while there is a massive affordability crisis, where the average American cannot actually put food on the table for their kids and guarantee that their kids are going to have a better life than they do.

INSKEEP: You're saying that AI exploits the work of people who create stuff and puts it to its own use, but things that we create have always been out in the public and people have made new uses of them. A tech leader might say what you're describing is economic activity.

HAO: What I would say is in the past, when people would use knowledge that was already in the public domain to facilitate economic opportunity, we said it was a good thing because it actually grew the economic pie for everyone. But what we're seeing now with the way that they're hoovering up knowledge work and trying to monopolize and become the sole provider of knowledge work is it's actually shrinking the economic pie for most people.

So at the moment, data annotation work, which is the kind of work that goes into preparing and cleaning data for training AI models, that has become the fourth-fastest-growing job in the U.S. And who is actually doing that work? College graduates, Ph.D. graduates, even professionals like lawyers, doctors, scientists. And those professionals sometimes are coming to this work to serve the AI industry after their original sector used AI to justify laying them off. And so we are seeing a greater exacerbation of inequality. And ironically, I have talked with Silicon Valley establishment leaders who recognize this. They just admit they do believe that the way that they are currently developing these AI technologies will, in fact, inflame inequality.

INSKEEP: Does that include leaders of Anthropic, who showed up for the pope's announcement?

HAO: I have not personally spoken with leaders of Anthropic about this particular claim. But at first, when I heard that the Anthropic co-founder would be there, I thought this would be an effort on behalf of the company to try and capture this religious institution the way that they sought to capture the media, to capture the policymakers, capture the public. But the document doesn't actually pull any punches. It is actually deeply critical of companies like Anthropic.

There is genuinely a question for me now of whether or not this is an attempt to capture this religious institution and whether Anthropic is going to have more influence because of it, or if the Catholic Church is trying to actually guide the companies and the industry by having an industry representative there and using its own influence to steer the direction of the industry.

INSKEEP: Karen Hao is author of the book "Empire Of AI."

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