Why AI is a threat to democracy--and what we can do to stop it

Amy Webb, futurist, NYU professor, and award-winning author, has spent much of the last decade researching, discussing, and meeting with people and organizations about artificial intelligence. "We've reached a fever pitch in all things AI," she says. Now it's time to step back to see where it's going. This is the task of her new book, The Big Nine: How the Tech Titans and Their Thinking Machines Could Warp Humanity, where she takes a bird's-eye view of trends that, she warns, have put the development of technology on a dangerous path. In the US, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, IBM, and Apple (the "G-MAFIA") are hamstrung by the relentless short-term demands of a capitalistic market, making long-term, thoughtful planning for AI impossible. In China, Tencent, Alibaba, and Baidu are consolidating and mining massive amounts of data to fuel the government's authoritarian ambitions.