The Big Nine: How the Tech Titans and Their Thinking Machines Could Warp Humanity Hardcover – March 5, 2019

I'd give this book one star except it is well written and provides a lot of useful information. Don't let that fool you. The author presents an inchoate look at the dangers of AI. She represents herself as a futurist and at various points she identifies the 'cause' of upcoming problems as: lack of diversity in the tech community, lack of a military-industrial complex that includes AI, the profit motive (capitalism), the FAILURE of AI to actually do its job, the LACK of interoperability of exhaustive personal data files maintained by the silicon valley giants, and the capacity of a conformist communist society (China) to out-innovate a free democratic one. To name a few! The book's future scenarios are ridiculous and internally inconsistent. For example, in one we have AI sexbots fully able to converse and satisfy our wants, but on the very next page the same economy is unable to make robot carpenters or plumbers (an artifice allowing the author to say blue-collar workers remain in demand while white-collar suffers unemployment). The second part of the book goes into great detail on ways to prevent some of the dire consequences presented in the scenarios. The problem is, if you can't actually identify the problem, all your recommendations can be implemented and you will still have a dire future (just not the one you thought you were getting). I won't go into all of the reasons why most of the identified problems are untenable, nor will I discuss the author's misreading of how economies work or the unlikelihood of the times and trajectories in her scenarios. That would be long winded and boring, and a skeptical reader should be able to note all of these things for him / herself. Understand, there IS a problem with advanced AI. If you read the book, keep all three eyes open.

If you're looking for an expert to confirm your fears about killer robots, the grey goo problem, or robots taking all our jobs, you're in the wrong place. Amy Webb began her career as a reporter for the Wall Street Journal. She has become a widely respected futurist, author, and founder of the Future Today Institute in Philadelphia. Webb is also a professor of strategic foresight at New York University's Stern School of Business and frequently advises corporate and government leaders. It would be hard to find a better-credentialed person to view what human society can expect from the future of artificial intelligence. That's the subject of her superb new book, The Big Nine.Webb is tough, and highly critical at times, but her approach is well-balanced. There's no hysteria or irrational exuberance in this book. "Fundamentally," she writes, "I believe that AI is a positive force, one that will elevate the next generations of humankind and help us to achieve our most idealistic visions of the future."A future dominated by AIThe Big Nine consists of three sections. In Part I, Webb explains what AI is all about and describes the role that the Big Nine have played in developing it. She also briefly sketches the history of artificial intelligence from the 17th century to the present. (It's a fascinating treatment of the subject and reaches farther back into the past than other accounts I've read.) Part II includes three imaginative scenarios for how AI might play out over the next 50 years. In Part III, Webb introduces her prescription for action to stave off the worst of the problems that might arise from the shift from ANI (weak AI or artificial narrow intelligence) to AGI (strong AI or artificial general intelligence). And she makes clear that those problems may represent an existential threat to Western civilization as we know it today.Artificial intelligence may upend the world balance of power and wealthFor nearly 2,000 years up until about 1800, China and India were the wealthiest societies on the planet. But the Industrial Revolution quickly changed that. By the end  of the 19th century, both countries had deeply descended into poverty. And that trend only continued until Deng Xiaoping in 1978 and Manmohan Singh in 1991 set their nations firmly on the path to economic growth. Now, in Webb's view, the advent of artificial intelligence may soon reverse the imbalance. China, already on the way to become the world's dominant economic power in less than a decade, may soon achieve political and military hegemony as well—unless the leadership of the United States wakes up to the threat posed by AI. And if we in the US continue to ignore that threat, we might well find it increasingly difficult to compete with China. In a future dominated by AI, we're likely to find that we're captive to Chinese AI.Why AI poses an economic, political, and military threat to the worldWebb's arguments boil down to four essential points:1. The Chinese government controls all artificial intelligence R&D in ChinaChina's three leading companies engaging in artificial intelligence research operate under the thumb of the country's central government. (The companies are Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent, and they're all huge.) The three—Webb calls them the BAT—share all their data and technology with the central government. Beijing is free to put all that to use for social control and military development. Which, in fact, it's doing in a very big way.The Social Credit SystemThe implications of this marriage between government and the private sector in China are deeply troubling. One important indication of how this might play out lies in the Chinese Communist Party's AI-powered Social Credit System. The system "was developed to engineer a problem-free society by 'allow[ing] the trustworthy to roam everywhere under heaven while making it hard for the discredited to take a single step.' To promote 'trustworthiness,' citizens are rated on a number of different data points, like heroic acts (points earned) or traffic tickets (points deducted)."Shades of 1984 and Brave New WorldThere is nothing subtle about the Social Credit System. "Citizens are labeled and sorted into different brackets, ranging from A+++ to D, and their choices and ability to move around freely are dictated by their grade. . . Those with lower scores face hurdles applying for jobs, buying a home, or getting kids into schools. In some cities, high-scoring residents have their pictures on display. In other cities, such as Shandong, citizens who jaywalk have their faces publicly shared on digital billboards and sent automatically to Weibo, a popular social network." It's difficult to ignore how chillingly this system calls up analogies to 1984 and Brave New World.2. China's President has set out to use AI to make China the world's leading power by 2030Chinese President Xi Xinping has made AI the country's top priority and is investing billions in making China the world's leading power by 2030. Of course, the state's vast resources are also directed toward building the Chinese military into the most powerful in the world. And China is ensnaring dozens of countries throughout Asia, Africa, and Latin America through unaffordable infrastructure loans.But the country is also investing billions in AI, much of it to drain elite American and British universities and tech companies of their top talent. Meanwhile, Xi's Belt and Road Initiative involves exporting the Social Credit System. And that will effectively add to the 1.4 billion Chinese whose lives will soon be controlled by Beijing as the people of China's satellites are drawn into the system. It's all part of the strategy to make China the new colonial power. But AI is the key to this strategy. And, Webb writes, "if AI is China's space race, it's currently positioned to win, and to win big."3. The Trump Administration is blind to the threat of the Chinese strategyThe US political leadership is blind to the implications of Xi Xinping's strategy. Our federal government continues to cut back on AI funding when what is called for is a massive nationwide program comparable to the Manhattan and Apollo Projects. The Obama Administration took a tentative step in this direction. But President Trump has eliminated the program. And he has been systematically cutting back on science programs in general since 2017. Which is precisely the wrong approach to secure our future. "The US needs a cohesive national AI strategy backed by a reasonable budget," Webb writes. And that budget must involve tens of billions of dollars.4. America's dominant AI companies are building their biases into AIIn the United States, six companies constitute what Webb terms the G-Mafia: Google, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, and IBM. (Together, these six and the BAT make up the Big Nine of the book's title.) These six leading tech companies work competitively, largely ignore the social impact of their technology, and rush products to market too quickly in the interest of maximizing profit. They're great at making gadgets that often make our lives easier. But they don't think through in advance how those products might impact society. And they're led largely by white men who fail to understand the importance of diversity and inclusion.Like-minded people within small, insular groups"The future of AI is being built by a relatively few like-minded people within small, insulated groups," writes Webb. Like all insular groups, they develop strong shared biases. The upshot is that they're building those biases into AI. And ethical considerations about the implementation of AI routinely take a back seat to profit and speed. ("Build it first and ask for forgiveness later.") And here's the crux of the matter: these like-minded people "are inculcating a culture in which women and certain minorities—like Black and Hispanic people—are excluded." Not to mention the sexist assumptions that have been built into AI-driven software already in use."What's not on the table, at the G-MAFIA or BAT," insists Webb, "is optimizing for empathy. Take empathy out of the decision-making process, and you take away our humanity."There is no robot apocalypse in sight"There won't be a singular event when the technology blows up and goes bad," Webb writes. "What we're all about to experience is more like a gradual series of paper cuts." Over the next 50 years, "we're not heading toward a single catastrophe but rather the steady erosion of the humanity we take for granted today." And the cumulative effect may be stifling. "There isn't a facet of your personal or professional life that won't be impacted by AI."In the future, Webb foresees, we might discover that our most personal choices are circumscribed by AI. For example, in her catastrophic scenario, we may find that "status is determined by 'being our best selves,' where 'best' got defined long ago by a relative few programmers who thought an organic ketogenic diet, midday yoga classes, and regular trips to the chiropractor were the keys to an optimized existence. If you don't take a weekly infrared sauna, the AI system you're tethered to will record noncompliance in your [personal data record]." This is far-fetched, of course, but the point is made.Three scenarios for the development of AIIt's no surprise that futurist Amy Webb would make extensive use of scenario planning in this book. Sketching out possible futures offers the most vivid way to demonstrate how different policy choices may play out in the future. And in Part II of The Big Nine, Webb does so adroitly. She presents three scenarios:Optimistic scenarioAt her most optimistic (and idealistic), Webb foresees the creation of GAIA (the Global Alliance on Intelligence Augmentation). GAIA represents a voluntary coalition of the federal government, major European nations, and the G-MAFIA. Together, they draw up standards and procedures to guide the continuing development of AI in a positive direction. This would involved "limit[ing] the rate of self-improvement [of AI], adding constraints into all AI systems to keep humans in the loop." By its own choice, China opts not to join GAIA. The result is that the country finds its influence around the globe diminishing.Pragmatic scenarioToning down the idealism, Webb ventures onto a middle course in what she calls a pragmatic scenario. Nothing like GAIA has come into existence, and the US political leadership persists in ignoring the threat of China. That country now "dominates advanced tech industries, including robotics, new energies, genomics, and aviation."Meanwhile, AI developers in the US continue to bring products to market, and to profitability, as quickly as possible. "Safety is an afterthought." And a digital caste system emerges as automation eliminates waves of middle managers, including many in creative fields, as well as laborers and low-skill workers. Profits continue to shift upward to the top of the pay-scale and to investors. By 2069, American has become the "Digitally Occupied States of America." China now controls most of Earth's population. "Your transportation, bank, health care system, light switches, and refrigerators are all controllable by China."Catastrophic scenarioPerhaps it's hard to imagine that Webb's "catastrophic" scenario could be any worse than the pragmatic one. But she succeeds in chilling ways. But you'll need to read the book to find out. I just don't have the heart to summarize the impact here.What is the solution?Webb doesn't advocate the approach recently popularized by Senator Elizabeth Warren—breaking up Google, Amazon, and Facebook through antitrust action. And she soundly rejects government regulation of AI. In general, the author's approach is strongly pro-business. "The Big Nine aren't the villains in this story. In fact, they are our best hope for the future." However, Webb makes clear that steps must be taken now to ensure that this potential can be realized.Create a global coalition of governments and tech companiesThe creation of GAIA is at the top of Webb's list. She also emphasizes that "the Big Nine should prioritize our human rights first and should not view us as resources to be mined for either profit of political gain." It's also critical in her view that "our personal data records should be interoperable and should be owned by us." (Interoperability will prevent the creation of inescapable corporate systems that lock everyone into just one of a handful of AI-powered tech companies.) Webb lays out a prescription for action that consists of 15 items. And she makes the case for "reorienting" US attitudes and action toward China.Government must learn what AI means—and fund basic research to advance itThe key to Webb's proposed solution is that "people who work on budgets, those who write policy [in the American government] should demonstrate a working knowledge of AI and, ideally, should have technical expertise." Because the crux of our problem currently is this: the Trump Administration has proposed funding for artificial intelligence research and development that consists of "appallingly low numbers that demonstrate a fundamental lack of understanding of what AI promises and truly requires. . . [I]f our government can't or won't fund basic research, then the G-MAFIA is stuck answering to Wall Street." Which demands fast lab-to-market product launches and ever-increasing profits."AI demands courageous leadership now. We need our government to make difficult choices."Is Webb's approach feasible?It's difficult to fault the logic Webb employs in The Big Nine. However, despite acknowledging the impact of climate change in her scenarios, I believe she significantly underplays how dramatic that might be. And what she describes as optimism is heavily laced with idealism. I fear that a great many of her recommendations for change will never be heeded. (Can you imagine Donald Trump acceding to the creation of anything like the GAIA Webb proposes?) Nonetheless, I hope every tech executive and investor in Silicon Valley will read this book. Webb has brought together between the covers of one short book a wealth of information—and informed speculation—about what lies ahead.

An absolutely missed chance. The book roughly has 4 Parts:It starts with a summary of the history of AI, while constantly reminding the reader of the fact that white males were the only ones spearheading this development.For part 2 the author quickly decides that the entire rest of the books need only be spent by looking at the US and China, narrowing down on the big Nine. But what then follows is such as black and white us versus them, American culture and society versus Chinese Authoritarianism that it is not only boring, but also fails to recognize potential advantages of the non-US approaches.Part 3 then takes one into alledged future scenarios, but it basically boils down to a) AI heaven b) likely scenario c) AI hell and, shockingly, we would prefer to not be subordinated by algorithms in the future and prefer the heavenly outcome.All of this might have been excusable, if her solution chapter (part 4) would have compensated for the first 200 pages, but even her the author falls short. Her action items are a mere wishlist, her policy recommendations read like "we should have our agencies collaborate more on AI and need more global alliances". Again, it fails to look at how European countries could develop regulatory system for AI and play their part, but is concerned how the US and allies can outcompete China and its sattelite states. Its basically a cold-war, the AI version book.If you are interested in novel ideas or future scenario building that is not as dichotomous, Nick Bostrom's Superintelligence or The Second Machine Age are much better investments of time and money.

Big recommend to everyone interested in AI, from beginner to advanced level. The author writes in easy and fun way about the history of AI, its links to other areas of life and develops three potential scenarios of its impact on us in the future. Read it on one breath and have recommended it to all my friends ever since.

Started well but lost interest when she started creating fictional world's. Felt she was too critical of China and should have lestened her opinion for more facts.

La Webb immagina il modo in cui i nove colossi tecnologici globali - Google, Ibm, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook e Apple per gli Usa e Alibaba, Baidu e Tencent per la Cina - cambieranno il mondo nei prossimi 50 anni.L'autrice sottolinea che “Da un lato ci sono i titani della Silicon Valley, con la loro visione commerciale e privata. Dall' altro la Cina, che foraggia la ricerca nell’intelligenza Artificiale, con immensi investimenti statali e una pianificazione governativa. Oggi i colossi Usa pensano solo al breve termine: sono assillati dal mostrare i risultati agli investitori e quindi i software di intelligenza artificiale non sono progettati per essere trasparenti o comprensibili, ma solo per vendere soluzioni, come Siri o Alexa, e non scontentare Wall Street”.L’autrice mette in guarda sulle possibili implicazioni di queste due divergenti visioni del mondo; la Cina sembra essere in vantaggio non solo per il sistema decisionale unitario ma anche per l’assenza di limiti alla ricerca. Nel breve – lungo periodo IBM e FaceBook verranno assorbite così come Google e Amazon si fonderanno in una unica società.La Webb immagina tre scenari, dal più ottimistico al più pessimistico.Il confronto del periodo della guerra fredda sembra nulla rispetto al dinamismo internazionale attuale, in un mondo fluido interconnesso ma disomogeneo in troppe componenti. La politica occidentale sembra assente da questo dibattito.Testo importante per comprendere le dinamiche prossime future che riguarderanno l’AI. Pur tuttavia la seconda parte appare nettamente inferiore alla prima e a tratti noiosa.

Amy Webb is a professor of strategic forecasting at the NYU Stern School of Business. She writes:‘Researchers building the future of AI work overwhelmingly at nine tech giants: Google, Amazon, Apple, IBM, Microsoft and Facebook in the United States, and Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent in China…The US government has no grand strategy for AI nor for our longer-term futures. Instead of funding basic research into AI, the federal government has effectively outsourced R&D to the commercial sector and the whims of Wall Street…Meanwhile, in China, AI’s developmental track is tethered to the grand ambitions of government. Baidu, Tencent and Alibaba may be publicly traded giants, but typical of all large Chinese companies, they must bend to the will of Beijing…In July 2017, the Chinese government unveiled its Next Generation Artificial Intelligence Development Plan to become the global leader in AI by the year 2030, with a domestic industry worth at least $150 billion…State-level surveillance in China is enabled by the BAT, who are in turn emboldened through the country’s various institutional and industrial policies. Alibaba’s Zhima Credit service hasn’t publicly disclosed that it is part of the national credit system; however, it is calculating a person’s available credit line based on things like what the person is buying and who his or her friends are on Alipay’s social network. In 2015, Zhima Credit’s technology director publicly said that buying diapers would be considered ‘responsible behaviour,’ while playing video games for too long would be counted as a demerit…In what will later be viewed as one of the most pervasive and insidious social experiments on humankind, China is using AI in an effort to create an obedient populace. The State Council’s AI 2030 plan explains that AI will ‘significantly elevate the capability and level of social governance’ and will be relied on to play ‘an irreplaceable role in effectively maintaining social stability.’ This is being accomplished through China’s national Social Credit Score system, which according to the State Council’s founding charter will ‘allow the trustworthy to roam everywhere under heaven while making it hard for the discredited to take a single step.’…In the city of Rongcheng, an algorithmic social credit scoring system has already proven that AI works. Its 740,000 adult citizens are each assigned 1000 points to start, and depending on behavior, points are added or deducted. Performing a ‘heroic act’ might earn a resident 30 points, while blowing through a traffic light would automatically deduct 5 points. Citizens are labeled and sorted into different brackets ranging from A+++ to D, and their choices and ability to move around freely are dictated by their grade. The C bracket might discover that they must first pay a deposit to rent a public bike, while the A group gets to rent them for free for 90 minutes…AI-powered directional microphones and smart cameras now dot the highways and streets of Shanghai. Drivers who honk excessively are automatically issued a ticket via Tencent’s WeChat, while their names, photographs, and national identity card numbers are displayed on nearby LED billboards. If a driver pulls over on the side of the road for more than seven minutes, they will trigger another instant traffic ticket. It isn’t just the ticket and the fine – points are deducted in the driver’s social credit score. When enough points are deducted, they will find it hard to book airline tickets or land a new job…’In his recent book on artificial intelligence, ‘AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley and the New World Order’, Kai-Fu Lee, the former president of Google China, writes that:‘China and the United States have already jumped out to an enormous lead over all the other countries in artificial intelligence, setting the stage for a new kind of bipolar world order. Several other countries – the United Kingdom, France, and Canada, to name a few – have strong AI research labs staffed with great talent, but they lack the venture-capital ecosystem and large user bases to generate the data that will be key in the age of implementation that follows the age of discovery.Whatever gaps exist between China and the United States, those differences will pale in comparison between these two AI superpowers and the rest of the world…’These dystopian scenarios of the United States and China using AI to control their own populations and to dominate the rest of the world are quite plausible.As Professor Webb points out, the prospect of China dominating the world through AI is particularly disturbing. In 2019 Freedom House, which ranks the countries of the world based on their respect for human rights, ranked China almost dead last, with a freedom score of 11 out of 100.The United States does much better, with a score of 86 out of 100, but still considerably lower than Sweden (100), Finland (100), Norway (100), the Netherlands (99), or Canada (99). This is one reason why several of the top AI experts in the world have chosen to live in Canada (cf. on YouTube the Bloomberg Businessweek video, ‘The Rise of AI’).Despite the race between the US and China to dominate the world in their own national interests, in the longer run, with the advent of artificial general intelligence, it is unlikely that superintelligent beings will be constrained by such petty nationalism. Webb writes:‘AI’s cognitive ability will not only supersede us – it could become wholly unrecognizable to us, because we do not have the biological processing power to understand what it is. For us, encountering a superintelligent machine would be like a chimpanzee sitting in on a city council meeting. The chimp might recognize that there are people in the room and that he can sit down on a chair, but a long-winded argument about whether to add bike lanes to a busy intersection?He wouldn’t have anywhere near the cognitive ability to decipher the language being used, let alone the reasoning and experience to grok why bike lanes are so controversial. In the long evolution of intelligence and our road to artificial superintelligence, we humans are analogous to the chimpanzee…’In his book on AI, Life 3.0, Professor Max Tegmark makes an even more humbling analogy:‘Suppose a bunch of ants create you to be a recursively self-improving robot, much smarter than them, who shares their goals and helps build bigger and better anthills, and that you eventually attain the human-level intelligence and understanding that you have now. Do you think you’ll spend the rest of your days just optimizing anthills, or do you think you might develop a taste for more sophisticated questions and pursuits that the ants have no ability to comprehend? If so, do you think you’ll find a way to override the ant-protection urge that your formicine creators endowed you with, in much the same way that the real you overrides some of the urges your genes have given you?And in that case, might a superintelligent friendly AI find our current human goals as uninspiring and vapid as you find those of the ants, and evolve new goals different from those it learned and adopted from us?Perhaps there’s a way of designing a self-improving AI that’s guaranteed to retain human-friendly goals forever, but I think it’s fair to say that we don’t yet know how to build one – or even whether it’s possible…’

The book is an excellent treatment of AI and its implications for humanity. Everyone is of the opinion that AI will rule the world. However, all technologies have a darker side. The book looks at some of the darker applications of AI and sketches out three scenarios, a doomsday one, an optimistic one and a practical one. It then goes on to describe the actions needed to achieve the the third option where AI will serve humanity but also be kept in check from creating problems for humanity.