Silicon Valley elites are giving up having children. A female journalist from MIT reveals: Humans are just stepping stones for AI, and the world will soon be destroyed.
AI devours resources, manipulates expression, and reconstructs order. Every advancement in AI comes with a hidden cost, yet Silicon Valley elites choose infertility out of a belief in an impending doomsday. After a seven-year investigation, a Chinese female journalist published The AI Empire, revealing the hidden truths behind OpenAI!
Some people say that AI is the future of humanity.
However, the truth is quite the opposite. AI is rushing towards the future, leaving behind the cracks of humanity.
It consumes electricity, pollutes water sources, destroys jobs, and disrupts emotions...
In the name of "intelligence," it takes over human expression, judgment, and decision-making.
Technology is rewriting the script of civilization, but no one is certain about the future outcome of humanity.
Those who have built the AI empire with their own hands have quietly made a choice: not to have children, simply because they believe the world will no longer exist.
What are they thinking?
Based on more than 300 interviews, seven years of reporting on artificial intelligence, and her observations as the first journalist to gain in-depth access to OpenAI, journalist Karen Hao completed and published the book The AI Empire.
This book explores the cost of OpenAI's huge investment in technologies that may do more harm than good.
This book almost didn't see the light of day. Hao initially thought she could cooperate with Altman and OpenAI to obtain some formal participation and interview resources, but they ultimately refused.
She admitted that she was really frustrated at that time. Fortunately, her friends around her encouraged her to pursue the truth and become an excellent journalist.
With the publication of this book, she became a thorn in Altman's side.
During the investigation, she discovered a disturbing trend: more and more technology executives in the AI industry are choosing not to have children.
This choice is not due to economic pressure, personal preference, or social concepts, but based on their judgment of the future -
They believe that the world may not last much longer.
In The AI Empire, Karen Hao reveals: "They don't plan to have children because they think the world will soon cease to exist."
Among some AI elites, a certain "doomsday belief" has even formed:
They believe that the development of AI will inevitably replace humans and become the more suitable ruler of this planet.
In the eyes of these people, AI is not a tool, but the prototype of the next stage of intelligent life. And humans are just a transitional form towards it.
Some people even fall into a distorted form of extreme utilitarianism:
As long as a superintelligence with a higher moral level than humans is created, the "total moral quantity of the world" can be maximized, even if humans perish as a result.
This may sound like science fiction, but it truly reflects the reality: a group of engineers who are reshaping society have already quietly given up the idea of coexisting with the world for a long time.
Of course, not all AI practitioners are so pessimistic or cold - hearted. Many people believe that what they are doing can truly benefit the earth. The capabilities of AI do have the potential to accelerate scientific progress, and its potential is exciting - because it may bring about a real paradigm shift.
But is this enough to justify their current actions?
Hao doesn't think so: The evil deeds done today can only be compensated by future AGI. And that future may very well develop in the opposite direction.
The reason why those AI executives can easily accept this cost is that they themselves won't be affected at all. They have enough wealth to build bunkers. When the crisis comes, they already have survival plans in place.
Altman has openly admitted that he has a "doomsday shelter."
AI giants cross the line and then say "sorry"
A more dramatic scene took place in the summer of 2024.
OpenAI released a new version of its voice assistant, with a voice very similar to Scarlett Johansson's in the movie Her.
On the day of the release, Altman wrote a single word on X: "her."
Scarlett Johansson never thought she would have to confront the powerful forces in Silicon Valley.
But this time, the Hollywood star was extremely angry and revealed that she had clearly rejected the invitation to voice the new AI assistant. Soon, the model was abandoned. Johansson and a group of lawyers defeated the tech giant.
Finally, the model was urgently taken down, and the AI company bowed its head in public for the first time.
Karen Hao only realized after multiple failed negotiations:
OpenAI doesn't really welcome investigations; it only welcomes cooperation.
This small conflict is one of the many stories in The AI Empire: Inside the Reckless Race for Full Dominance.
This 482 - page book tells the story of OpenAI and its founder Altman, focusing on significant and worrying truths:
· Will AI take away your job?
· Will it damage your mental health?
· Will it plunge the environment into disaster through its energy - consuming servers?
The answer to all of the above questions and more is yes.
As the author says in the book:
How do we govern artificial intelligence? AI is one of the most important technologies of this era.
In just over a decade, it has revolutionized the pillars of the Internet. Now, it is expected to reshape many other key functions of society, from healthcare to education, from law to finance, from journalism to government.
The future of AI - the form of this technology - is inseparable from our future.
Some people swallow the malice for AI and silently break down at home
AI is becoming smarter, while some people have become content filters.
In the past few years of continuous updates of large - language models, people have witnessed many miracles: it can write songs, give speeches, comfort the lonely, and have fluent conversations.
But in this intelligence race initiated by humans, we have quietly created another profession: those who wipe the "soul" for AI.
In the book, Karen Hao also records the story of a Kenyan content moderator.
In order to clean up the training data for OpenAI, he is exposed to a large amount of extreme content every day: hatred, abuse, pedophilia...
Finally, he had an emotional breakdown, and his wife and children left him.
After listening to his story, Hao said, "I went back to the hotel and cried. This technology is tearing apart human families."
This is not an exception, but a pattern.
It happens in night shifts that go unnoticed, among temporary workers and low - paid outsourcers.
Content moderation is just part of the cost of AI.
We can see the growth of intelligence, but not the burning cost
In Ireland, more than 80 data centers provide fuel for the expansion of AI computing power, consuming one - fifth of the country's total electricity consumption.
A simple weather query is equivalent to lighting up an entire power grid.
Someone sarcastically said, "We use a diesel generator just to let the machine tell you that it might rain today."
As AI becomes more accurate, the cost becomes heavier.
However, this part is hidden in servers, cooling equipment, and energy reports that are never made public.
Under the guise of "openness," doing the most closed - door things
Karen Hao once thought that OpenAI would be an exception.
OpenAI initially claimed to be non - profit and declared that it would "safely build artificial intelligence to serve the interests of all humanity."
Even after it became partially for - profit, its mission statement still carried those words: "open to all," "transparent," and "decentralized."
If this is openness, then what is closure?
As a journalist, she entered the company's San Francisco headquarters. But she soon discovered that "transparency" was just part of the company's decoration style.
No employee was willing to chat with her, and even the employee cafeteria refused her entry.
She tried to talk to the senior management to figure out what OpenAI's mission really was.
But what she got were not clear answers, but vague slogans and strange analogies.
Some very simple questions made these executives scramble.
They talked a lot about AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) - a hypothetical intelligent system driven by silicon chips and with human - like consciousness.
They excitedly described how AGI could solve complex problems such as medicine and climate change. But when Hao asked them exactly how they planned to achieve AGI and how to ensure that this technology could be fairly distributed in society, the answers began to become vague.
Someone vaguely replied, "Fire is also an example. It also has some serious side effects."
She couldn't help but write down her doubts: "This organization that has always claimed to oppose the values of Silicon Valley sounds more like Silicon Valley itself.?"
They talk about the "future," but never disclose how much water and electricity they use
At the end of The AI Empire, Karen Hao poses a question:
If these technologies are really going to shape the future society, can we first know how many resources they are consuming today?
Currently, the AI industry is expanding at an unprecedented speed.
The four giants, Meta, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft, have already spent tens of billions of dollars on AI data centers and infrastructure construction in the first half of 2025.
Their consumption of electricity and water has exceeded people's imagination - even exceeding the load - bearing capacity of the national power grid itself.
What's even more ironic is that the public knows almost nothing about this.
AI companies have never voluntarily disclosed the real data of the energy required for the operation of their models.
In this imbalanced structure, technology companies dominate the "future narrative" while refusing to bear the "real - world costs."
To this day, we still don't know which cable is burned out and which river is drained dry by a single conversation with ChatGPT.
Everyone is talking about the future of AI, but no one is calculating its present.
This is the real danger, not whether it will destroy humanity, but that its destruction process is too silent.
And humanity seems to have gotten used to giving up everything in silence.
References
https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/2025/08/09/karen-hao-on-ai-tech-bosses-many-choose-not-to-have-children-because-they-dont-think-the-world-is-going-to-be-around-much-longer/
This article is from the WeChat official account "New Intelligence Yuan", author: Qingqing KingHZ, published by 36Kr with