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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Let’s talk about AI and kind of specifically about AI, what are the applications and implications of AI that you think are most concerning?
Sure, there’s a lot of misplaced optimism and fear, when it comes to AI, and it very much feels like something out in the distance. In fact, it’s been with us for many years. Most businesses in some ways use AI, whether it’s their risk and compliance systems, or the auto complete and their inboxes. All of us are using AI all of the time. Now, the challenges come into play when we have a consolidation of power among just a few companies with a fairly homogenous group of people, whose job it is to make decisions for all of us and for a lot of businesses that are currently choosing which AI and cloud systems to use, which automated services to use, which frameworks? They’re having to choose now between Microsoft, Amazon, and Google which means that they’re going to have to start making much smarter decisions.
So, you identify in your book a number of players to be concerned with, you mentioned Google and Amazon, so are there just US companies or are there also companies outside the US?
There are nine companies that are essentially, building the future of AI. It doesn’t mean that there aren’t others in the mix. However, these nine have the majority of patent, they own the biggest part of market share, they attract the best talent, they have the most significant amount of funding. So, these nine companies are in China – there are three, ‘The BAT’ – Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent. In the USA, I like to call them the ‘G-Mafia’ so, those six are, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, IBM, Facebook, and Apple.’ It doesn’t mean that Uber and Salesforce and others aren’t in the mix, doing great things, but these nine companies, for the most part, have consolidated power and are pulling the shots.
So, you mentioned regulatory risk and I think for investors the big concern out there has always been regulatory risk. The EU has always been tough on US tech going all the way back to Microsoft and the operating system and now they’re obviously, tough on some of the social media companies, but boy, when you bring Mark Zuckerberg and some of these other CEOs in front of Congress, that’s a different game. Do you think the US Congress has any appetite for regulating big tech?
Well, I think this new Congress certainly does, but that’s a problem for many reasons. First of all, listen, there’s a lot of smart engineers working at these big companies and I actually, don’t believe that any of these companies are intentionally doing anything evil. I think just when you get to be big and you’ve got different business units and staff sometimes, they don’t all talk to each other and you’ve got to start making quick decisions because investors are hungry for high returns and good margin. The challenge is that we’re going to have one too many calls for privacy, one too many sets of constituents who get really upset, and given who’s currently in Congress right now I can guarantee you that they’re looking at regulatory action, which is going to be bad for all of these companies but also for us because any regulations that get constructed now are definitely not going to keep pace with how technology evolves.
Exactly, I think that’s one of the issues we’ve seen some other tech industries that are often behind the terms…
