Drilled

Drilling Deep: Karen Hao on How Big AI Is Gambling with the Planet’s Chips

What is “artificial intelligence”? Is it a fancy technology? A management consulting buzzword? A PR effort to inflate corporate share prices? A political project designed to shape the world more to the liking of the billionaire class? A way to replace needy human workers with machines? Perhaps it’s all of that—and more. In her groundbreaking book Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI [https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/743569/empire-of-ai-by-karen-hao/], award-winning journalist Karen Hao argues that AI—and the profit-driven infrastructure that surrounds it—is a colonial project. What OpenAI boss Altman and his fellow ideologues [https://drilled.media/news/network-state] in Silicon Valley are pursuing, Hao says, is not just corporate power but imperial power. They are building empires. And as history shows, empires are built on resource extraction, particularly the old-fashioned kind: of labor, energy, minerals, land, water. Seemingly overnight, tech elites’ feel-good climate promises have evaporated [https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/05/climate/tech-companies-climate-goals.html], having been seamlessly swapped for slippery promises that so-called “artificial general intelligence” will save the planet for us. Never mind that AGI is a fantastical concept that has no agreed-upon definition [https://prospect.org/2025/12/09/artifice-age-of-artificial-intelligence-silverman-morris-review/], or that, more fundamentally, it appears nowhere close to existing. In Big Tech’s frenzied pursuit of the “hyperscale” AI dominance that evangelists claim will unlock AGI, as well as its expanding [https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/microsoft-nvidia-uae-ai-chips-cf8491b6] alliances [https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/27/technology/saudi-arabia-ai-exporter.html] with fossil fuel-backed petrostates and authoritarian political movements, the industry has become an increasingly central [https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jan/29/gas-power-ai-climate] contributor [https://www.citizen.org/article/reining-in-big-tech-policy-solutions-to-address-the-data-center-buildout/] to the climate crisis. In an October conversation with Drilled, Hao discussed how Silicon Valley giants appear to be following the oil and gas industry’s playbook of disinformation and deceit; how Altman and OpenAI’s secrecy and disingenuous rhetoric transformed the field of AI research into corporate PR; and why the destructive trajectory of AI scale and commercialization is not inevitable—no matter what its power-hungry proponents would have you believe. See omnystudio.com/listener [https://omnystudio.com/listener] for privacy information.

10 Years After Berta Cáceres’s Murder, Why Is Honduras Still So Dangerous for Environmentalists?

This week marks the 10-year anniversary of the hired hit that took Berta Cáceres’s life and robbed both the Honduran and global environmental movements of a uniquely effective leader. Cáceres was targeted by a dam company, with an assist from the police, military, government officials and international banks because of her effective organizing on behalf of her people, the Lenca. Nina Lakhani literally wrote the book on Cáceres’s killing, and in this episode she walks us through what happened then, what’s happening now, the role the U.S. played in all of it, and what Americans can learn from the way Honduran activists continue to show up in the face of violent repression. Read Nina’s story [https://drilled.media/news/berta]  Read Nina’s book [https://www.versobooks.com/products/790-who-killed-berta-caceres?srsltid=AfmBOorpFiSw1Fs5YU0TZy70o_w6SYPMlKfbReDbyQpDTWSGZ_0CZhTU] Check out Berta’s organization, Copinh [https://copinh.org/en/] See omnystudio.com/listener [https://omnystudio.com/listener] for privacy information.

From Question Everything: Why did ICE Lock Up this Pro-Trump Reporter? (Part One)

Last June, journalist Mario Guevara was arrested while covering an anti-ICE protest in Georgia, transferred to ICE detention, and locked up by the federal government for more than 100 days. But Mario is not the kind of ICE-criticizing reporter you might be picturing. He was a Trump-supporting, Republican-identifying, law-and-order-sympathizing immigration hawk, who knew ICE well and had covered them favorably for years. Why did the Trump administration still go after him? In this special two-part series from Question Everything, Brian Reed looks into. Mario Guevara. This is part one. Find part two, and more from Question Everything [https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/question-everything/id1765799296], wherever you get podcasts. See omnystudio.com/listener [https://omnystudio.com/listener] for privacy information.

Just Because the U.S. Says It's Legal Doesn't Make It So: Companies Trading in Illegally Seized Venezuelan Oil Face Legal Risk

Fernanda Hopenhaym, member of the UN Working Group on Business and Human Rights  [https://www.ohchr.org/en/special-procedures/wg-business/members#:~:text=Ms.%20Fernanda%20Hopenhaym%20is%20Co%2DExecutive,America%20dedicated%20to%20corporate%20accountability.]walks Drilled senior global climate justice reporter Nina Lakhani through the many legal pitfalls companies getting involved in the United States seizure of the Venezuelan oil industry might be facing. Check out the longer story on our website. [https://drilled.media/news/hopenhaym]   See omnystudio.com/listener [https://omnystudio.com/listener] for privacy information.

How Climate Protest Backlash Led to Present-Day Repression

It's easy to feel like climate "doesn't matter" as the United States descends into fascism, as if climate and democracy are somehow separate issues. Researcher Oscar Berglund [https://www.bristol.ac.uk/people/person/Oscar-Berglund-2742b53a-dfd3-416a-af8d-13655e3f1a6b/] and Amy Westervelt connect the dots between the global backlash to climate protest and the broader repression we're seeing in supposedly democratic countries around the world.   See omnystudio.com/listener [https://omnystudio.com/listener] for privacy information.