The Hour of the Predator: Encounters with the Autocrats and Tech Billionaires Taking Over the World. By Giuliano da Empoli. Pushkin Press £12.99. (Translated by Sam Taylor)
The author was formerly an advisor to an Italian prime minister, a role which gave him the opportunity to meet various powerful people. Here he examines the actions of dictators and technology bosses; he describes many of them as Borgians, resembling Cesare Borgia, the fifteenth–sixteenth century Italian ruler who was renowned for his scheming and plotting. He sees political life as a comedy of errors, like an Armando Iannucci show such as ‘Veep’.
The main autocrat discussed is Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia. In 2017 he summoned three hundred rich and powerful men to a posh hotel in Riyadh, where they were held hostage for various periods of time and, among other things, forced to pay a total of $8bn to fund MBS’s plans, which include a massive city powered by renewable energy, and a winter sports resort and floating port. The actions of Nayib Bukele in El Salvador are also discussed, but MBS really does seem to be a bit of a special case.
Da Empoli also sees artificial intelligence as a ‘Borgian technology’, as it can produce shock and awe. It is really a kind of authoritarian intelligence, transforming data into power. AI is not subject to regulatory control and ‘is in the hands of private companies that have elevated themselves to the ranks of nation states.’ Economic elites used to rely on political elites, but the new tech bosses wage war on the old political elites, preferring disruption and chaos. So AI is a political development, not just a technological one, for instance creating massive electoral databases of voters and their likely preferences.
And this is a world of violence, with global military spending increasing by 34 per cent in the last five years. Attack is now cheaper than defence, and an ‘era of limitless violence’ may lie ahead.
The book as a whole contains some interesting observations, but does not provide much by way of conclusions.
Paul Bennett
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