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Title details for The Big Nine by Amy Webb - Available

The Big Nine

How the Tech Titans and Their Thinking Machines Could Warp Humanity

by Amy Webb
ebook
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A call-to-arms about the broken nature of artificial intelligence, and the powerful corporations that are turning the human-machine 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 — aren't actually in control of anything. When, for example, we speak with Alexa, we contribute that data to a system we can't 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 Apple—are the new gods of AI and are short-changing 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 don't share our motivations, desires, or hopes for the future of humanity.
Much more than a passionate, human-centered call-to-arms, this book delivers a strategy for changing course, and provides a path for liberating us from algorithmic decision-makers and powerful corporations.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    March 5, 2019

  • Formats

    • Kindle Book

    • OverDrive Read

      • ISBN: 9781541773745

    • EPUB ebook

      • ISBN: 9781541773745
      • File size: 1490 KB

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • Booklist

      February 15, 2019
      NYU professor Webb (The Signals Are Talking, 2016) here explores the roles and directions of artificial intelligence by examining how the "big nine" harness the data that's now being constantly collected, organized, and analyzed by machines. Readers may already be familiar with the big nine companies: IBM, Alibaba, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Tencent, Apple, and Baidu. Using government reports, news-media publications, and scholarly articles, Webb traces the history and trajectory of artificial intelligence. She describes the implications of AI, from personal-data collection to technological advancements, by forecasting what may come from these experiences, particularly in the U.S. and China. Her writing is very clear and accessible, and the interesting analogies she uses to illustrate what may occur when algorithms make decisions for us make for compelling reading. This fascinating look at how AI will continue to revolutionize human experiences in unimaginable ways will appeal to anyone interested in AI, human-computer interactions, and machine learning in the private and public sectors.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)

Formats

  • Kindle Book
  • OverDrive Read
  • EPUB ebook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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