Tech Giants
In Empire of AI, journalist Karen Hao writes about the rise of OpenAI and the impacts of AI around the world. Below is an extract from the book on the effects on Chile’s mineral reserves and water resources.
When Sonia Ramos was a child, she witnessed an accident that would shape the rest of her life. She was born into a mining family in Chile. Her father worked for an American copper company; she grew up among the children of the other workers. In 1957, a part of the Chuquicamata mine collapsed, killing several people and injuring dozens more. Though her father was spared, she remembers watching the wretchedness of the aftermath unfold around her: affected families spiraling into abject poverty, children wasting away from hunger. Four decades later, as Ramos began to protest mining, becoming one of the most active and outspoken Indigenous voices in Chile shining a light on its social, cultural, and environmental destruction, she would remember the lessons she learned in the tragedy: The mining industry is a system, and that system, left to its own devices, will seek profit at any cost. “The worker doesn’t exist,” she says. None of the victims received any ceremony or commemoration; none of their families received compensation. “In that place, there is no humanity.”
