Review of Silicon Empires: The Fight for the Future of AI by Nick Srnicek (Polity Books, 2025)
In any list of “known unknowns” facing the world in 2026, artificial intelligence must be close to the top. Are the predictions of widespread AI adoption displacing hundreds of millions of workers about to be realized? Will the AI bubble burst? Will the United States or China win the race to “artificial general intelligence”?
Nick Srnicek’s book Silicon Empires doesn’t answer any of these questions directly, but it does, as the author puts it, “offer a map of the terrain in which we must fight.” By carefully charting AI’s development within its proper economic and geopolitical context, and spanning analysis of both the US and China, Srnicek’s guide to AI can help us maintain a long-term, realistic perspective of the technology’s likely trajectory.
It’s no longer a fringe idea to say there is a bubble in AI, since this has even been acknowledged by industry darlings like Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman appears to already be positioning his company for a state bailout. One measurement of the AI bubble finds that it is seventeen times as large as the dot-com bubble and four times bigger than the subprime housing bubble that triggered the 2008 financial crash. A crisis is clearly in the making.
It’s no longer a fringe idea to say there is a bubble in AI, since this has even been acknowledged by industry darlings like Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates.
Srnicek’s sober analysis encourages us to look beyond the bubble. The fact that AI will go through painful birth pangs is neither new nor surprising: the history of technological breakthroughs is one of struggle and strife before success. Furthermore, it is highly unlikely that any crisis will take down the Big Tech firms, which are the leading players in AI development, due to the strength of their market position and their intrinsic importance to global digital infrastructure.
As Srnicek…
Auteur: Ben Wray
