In our July Fourth special broadcast, we revisit our interview with longtime technology reporter Karen Hao, author of Empire of AI, which unveils the accruing political and economic power of artificial intelligence companies — especially Sam Altman’s OpenAI. Her reporting uncovered the exploitation of workers in Kenya, attempts to take massive amounts of freshwater from communities in Chile, along with numerous accounts of the technology’s detrimental impact on the environment. “This is an extraordinary type of AI development that is causing a lot of social, labor and environmental harms,” says Hao in an extended interview.
We begin our July Fourth special broadcast with the words of Frederick Douglass. Born into slavery around 1818, Douglass became a key leader of the abolitionist movement. On July 5, 1852, in Rochester, New York, Douglass gave one of his most famous speeches, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” He was addressing the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society. The late actor James Earl Jones read the historic address during a performance of Voices of a People’s History of the United States, which was co-edited by Howard Zinn.
Vijay Prashad Z Network The United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel has released one of the most devastating reports ever produced by a U.N. investigative body on the Israeli genocide in Gaza. Its title is almost unbearable to read: “The Essence of Childhood Has Been Destroyed.” […]
On a glorious morning walk about a week before America’s 250th birthday, I was listening to Jon Stewart’s podcast on that theme. I recommend it. One of the things he discusses with his historian guests, Yale’s David Blight and Harvard’s Annette Gordon-Reed, is the Declaration of Independence, which both historians called a “dangerous document” in […]
Elias Isquith, Black Agenda Report. White supremacy and slavery. It’s time to revisit America’s heroic creation myth and what really happened in 1776, author-historian tells Salon. With a sweeping and widely praised new essay on reparations in the Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates has challenged Americans to reconsider how they view their country’s history and to place the influence of […]