Empire of AI by Karen Hao

Author:Karen Hao [Hao, Karen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2025-05-20T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 12

Plundered Earth

In Santiago, Chile, on days after a good rain, the smog washes away and reveals a stunning view of the Andes mountains. The Andes run all the way up and down this thin sliver of a country, from Patagonia at its southern tip over 2,600 miles north—twice the length of Miami to Boston—to Chile’s upper border. In this part of the country, the urban landscapes of the capital turn into an endless expanse of desert, which, save parts of Antarctica, is the driest place on earth. The mountains come into sharper focus, their colors more vibrant under the naked sun.

Before Chile was Chile, the Atacama Desert, as it is named, was home to many Indigenous groups. Where others may have seen a punishing barren landscape, they coaxed the desert into a home, tapping the water and minerals deep under the earth to grow crops, raise livestock, and perform ancestral rituals. Then the Spanish arrived. They cut up the region into administrative units with borders. To this day Indigenous elders still warn in oral histories of a repression that grew so violent the Spanish cut off the tongues of anyone who dared to continue speaking their native language. From there, the empire established the country’s relationship with the rest of the world: It would provide raw resources—land, water, energy, minerals—to strengthen the political and economic agendas of other nations.

Today nearly 60 percent of Chile’s exports are minerals, primarily found in the Atacama Desert, chiefly copper, a highly conductive metal used in all kinds of electronics, and more recently lithium, the essential ingredient for lithium-ion batteries. Those and other resource exports drive the country’s economy. In Santiago everyone knows someone who lives by the rhythms of the mining industry: During their work “shifts” they live in the north; during their days off, they come back to the capital.

The country has struggled to build any other industry to serve as its economic engine. Long after the Spanish empire ended, the US infamously played a key role in ensuring this trajectory. In the 1950s and ’60s, as developmental economics took root in Chile and Uruguay, favoring strong government regulation and an inward focus on industrialization as the path to maturing a developing economy, American multinationals who had made billions from their holdings in Chilean mines began to chafe against the growing state taxes and restrictions. The US government subsequently embarked on a quest to refashion Chile’s economic policies to be more favorable to American business interests, launching a program in 1956 called “the Chile Project” to educate a hundred Chilean students at the University of Chicago under the intellectual tutelage of American economist Milton Friedman.

Friedman was a towering figure in economics who would go on to receive a Nobel Prize in 1976 and whose ideas could best be summed up by the title of his influential 1970 op-ed in The New York Times: “The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits.” Friedman stood for everything that developmental economics did not:

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