Only 9 Tech Giants building our AI future – It’s changing humanity

LONDON — We are waking up to the fact that barely anything we do online is private. I had a stark wake-up call when friends were talking about the European ski season on a WhatsApp group and ideas to borrow ski jackets were discussed; one brand name came up and hey presto, next moment we all saw ads for the brand on our Facebook pages. So, is Facebook actually using our private conversations to target ads on its other apps, could it be a coincidence? Facebook owns both Instagram and WhatsApp. And now Mark Zuckerberg talks about a privacy-focused new branded Facebook with 'simple, intimate' places where no one else can see your data. Or does he mean, no one else but Facebook and its apps can and will use it as they see fit. And to make our new-found fear of privacy even worse is the warning from Prof Amy Webb, she is a professor of strategic foresight at the NYU Stern School of Business. Prof Webb says only nine tech titans, three from China and the rest from the US are deciding the future of Artificial Intelligence for all of us. She discusses her book The Big Nine: How the Tech Titans and their thinking Machines could Warp Humanity with Bloomberg's Paul Sweeney. – Linda van Tilburg

I think the pieces of this that everybody needs to understand is that for a very long time our free-market economy has enabled big tech companies to flourish and to deliver great returns for their investors. The challenge is that during that process often times there have been decisions made in relation to privacy and automation, a bunch of other things that have started to make the general public a little nervous and that is sending ripples throughout 'the hill.' So, what we could be facing, I think, in the future is regulation coming from new places, which is neither good for investors, nor good for all of us who are going to be living with the future of AI.

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