The Big Nine: How the Tech Titans and Their Thinking Machines Could Warp Humanity

A calltoarms about the broken nature of artificial intelligence, and the powerful corporations that are turning the humanmachine relationship on its head.We like to think that we are in control of the future of artificial intelligence. The reality, though, is that we the everyday people whose data powers AI arent actually in control of anything. When, for example, we speak with Alexa, we contribute that data to a system we cant see and have no input into one largely free from regulation or oversight. The big nine corporations Amazon, Google, Facebook, Tencent, Baidu, Alibaba, Microsoft, IBM and Appleare the new gods of AI and are shortchanging our futures to reap immediate financial gain.In this book, Amy Webb reveals the pervasive, invisible ways in which the foundations of AI the people working on the system, their motivations, the technology itself is broken. Within our lifetimes, AI will, by design, begin to behave unpredictably, thinking and acting in ways which defy human logic. The big nine corporations may be inadvertently building and enabling vast arrays of intelligent systems that dont share our motivations, desires, or hopes for the future of humanity.Much more than a passionate, humancentered calltoarms, this book delivers a strategy for changing course, and provides a path for liberating us from algorithmic decisionmakers and powerful corporations.