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.

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.