The Big Nine

by Amy Webb

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2019 by Amy Webb

  Cover design by Pete Garceau

  Cover copyright © 2019 Hachette Book Group, Inc.

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  First Edition: March 2019

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Webb, Amy, 1974- author.

  Title: The Big Nine : how the tech titans and their thinking machines could warp humanity / Amy Webb.

  Description: New York : PublicAffairs, [2019] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018048107| ISBN 9781541773752 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781541773745 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Artificial intelligence—Social aspects. | Artificial intelligence—Economic aspects. | Internet industry—Social aspects. | Social responsibility of business.

  Classification: LCC Q334.7 .W43 2019 | DDC 006.301—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018048107

  ISBNs: 978-1-5417-7375-2 (hardcover); 978-1-5417-7374-5 (ebook); 978-1-5417-2441-9 (international)

  E3-20190122-JV-NF-ORI

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Introduction: Before It’s Too Late

  Part I: Ghosts in the Machine

  1 Mind and Machine: A Very Brief History of AI

  2 The Insular World of AI’s Tribes

  3 A Thousand Paper Cuts: AI’s Unintended Consequences

  Part II: Our Futures

  4 From Here to Artificial Superintelligence: The Warning Signs

  5 Thriving in the Third Age of Computing: The Optimistic Scenario

  6 Learning to Live with Millions of Paper Cuts: The Pragmatic Scenario

  7 The Réngōng Zhìnéng Dynasty: The Catastrophic Scenario

  Part III: Solving the Problems

  8 Pebbles and Boulders: How to Fix AI’s Future

  Acknowledgments

  Discover More Amy Webb

  About the Author

  Praise for The Big Nine

  Bibliography

  Notes

  Index

  To my father, Don Webb, the most authentically intelligent person I’ve ever known.

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  INTRODUCTION

  BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE

  Artificial intelligence is already here, but it didn’t show up as we all expected. It is the quiet backbone of our financial systems, the power grid, and the retail supply chain. It is the invisible infrastructure that directs us through traffic, finds the right meaning in our mistyped words, and determines what we should buy, watch, listen to, and read. It is technology upon which our future is being built because it intersects with every aspect of our lives: health and medicine, housing, agriculture, transportation, sports, and even love, sex, and death.

  AI isn’t a tech trend, a buzzword, or a temporary distraction—it is the third era of computing. We are in the midst of significant transformation, not unlike the generation who lived through the Industrial Revolution. At the beginning, no one recognized the transition they were in because the change happened gradually, relative to their lifespans. By the end, the world looked different: Great Britain and the United States had become the world’s two dominant powers, with enough industrial, military, and political capital to shape the course of the next century.

  Everyone is debating AI and what it will mean for our futures ad nauseam. You’re already familiar with the usual arguments: the robots are coming to take our jobs, the robots will upend the economy, the robots will end up killing humans. Substitute “machine” for “robot,” and we’re cycling back to the same debates people had 200 years ago. It’s natural to think about the impact of new technology on our jobs and our ability to earn money, since we’ve seen disruption across so many industries. It’s understandable that when thinking about AI, our minds inevitably wander to HAL 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey, WOPR from War Games, Skynet from The Terminator, Rosie from The Jetsons, Delores from Westworld, or any of the other hundreds of anthropomorphized AIs from popular culture. If you’re not working directly inside of the AI ecosystem, the future seems either fantastical or frightening, and for all the wrong reasons.

  Those who aren’t steeped in the day-to-day research and development of AI can’t see signals clearly, which is why public debate about AI references the robot overlords you’ve seen in recent movies. Or it reflects a kind of manic, unbridled optimism. The lack of nuance is one part of AI’s genesis problem: some dramatically overestimate the applicability of AI, while others argue it will become an unstoppable weapon.

  I know this because I’ve spent much of the past decade researching AI and meeting with people and organizations both inside and outside of the AI ecosystem. I’ve advised a wide variety of companies at the epicenter of artificial intelligence, which include Microsoft and IBM. I’ve met with and advised stakeholders on the outside: venture capitalists and private equity managers, leaders within the Department of Defense and State Department, and various lawmakers who think regulation is the only way forward. I’ve also had hundreds of meetings with academic researchers and technologists working directly in the trenches. Rarely do those working directly in AI share the extreme apocalyptic or utopian visions of the future we tend to hear about in the news.

  That’s because, like researchers in other areas of science, those actually building the future of AI want to temper expectations. Achieving huge milestones takes patience, time, money, and resilience—this is something we repeatedly forget. They are slogging away, working bit by bit on wildly complicated problems, sometimes making very little progress. These people are smart, worldly, and, in my experience, compassionate and thoughtful.

  Overwhelmingly, they work at nine tech giants—Google, Amazon, Apple, IBM, Microsoft, and Facebook in the United States and Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent in China—that are building AI in order to usher in a better, brighter future for us all. I firmly believe that the leaders of these nine companies are driven by a profound sense of altruism and a desire to serve the greater good: they clearly see the potential of AI to improve health care and longevity, to solve our impending climate issues, and to lift millions of people out of poverty. We are already seeing the positive and tangible benefits of their work across all industries and everyday life.

  The problem is that external forces pressuring the nine big tech giants—and by extension, those working inside the ecosystem—are conspiring against their best intentions for our futures. There’s a lot of blame to pass around.

  In the US, r
elentless market demands and unrealistic expectations for new products and services have made long-term planning impossible. We expect Google, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, and IBM to make bold new AI product announcements at their annual conferences, as though R&D breakthroughs can be scheduled. If these companies don’t present us with shinier products than the previous year, we talk about them as if they’re failures. Or we question whether AI is over. Or we question their leadership. Not once have we given these companies a few years to hunker down and work without requiring them to dazzle us at regular intervals. God forbid one of these companies decides not to make any official announcements for a few months—we assume that their silence implies a skunkworks project that will invariably upset us.

  The US government has no grand strategy for AI nor for our longer-term futures. So in place of coordinated national strategies to build organizational capacity inside the government, to build and strengthen our international alliances, and to prepare our military for the future of warfare, the United States has subjugated AI to the revolving door of politics. Instead of funding basic research into AI, the federal government has effectively outsourced R&D to the commercial sector and the whims of Wall Street. Rather than treating AI as an opportunity for new job creation and growth, American lawmakers see only widespread technological unemployment. In turn they blame US tech giants, when they could invite these companies to participate in the uppermost levels of strategic planning (such as it exists) within the government. Our AI pioneers have no choice but to constantly compete with each other for a trusted, direct connection with you, me, our schools, our hospitals, our cities, and our businesses.

  In the United States, we suffer from a tragic lack of foresight. We operate with a “nowist” mindset, planning for the next few years of our lives more than any other timeframe. Nowist thinking champions short-term technological achievements, but it absolves us from taking responsibility for how technology might evolve and for the next-order implications and outcomes of our actions. We too easily forget that what we do in the present could have serious consequences in the future. Is it any wonder, therefore, that we’ve effectively outsourced the future development of AI to six publicly traded companies whose achievements are remarkable but whose financial interests do not always align with what’s best for our individual liberties, our communities, and our democratic ideals?

  Meanwhile, in China, AI’s developmental track is tethered to the grand ambitions of government. China is quickly laying the groundwork to become the world’s unchallenged AI hegemon. In July 2017, the Chinese government unveiled its Next Generation Artificial Intelligence Development Plan to become the global leader in AI by the year 2030 with a domestic industry worth at least $150 billion,1 which involved devoting part of its sovereign wealth fund to new labs and startups, as well as new schools launching specifically to train China’s next generation of AI talent.2 In October of that same year, China’s President Xi Jinping explained his plans for AI and big data during a detailed speech to thousands of party officials. AI, he said, would help China transition into one of the most advanced economies in the world. Already, China’s economy is 30 times larger than it was just three decades ago. Baidu, Tencent, and Alibaba may be publicly traded giants, but typical of all large Chinese companies, they must bend to the will of Beijing.

  China’s massive population of 1.4 billion citizens puts it in control of the largest, and possibly most important, natural resource in the era of AI: human data. Voluminous amounts of data are required to refine pattern recognition algorithms—which is why Chinese face recognition systems like Megvii and SenseTime are so attractive to investors. All the data that China’s citizens are generating as they make phone calls, buy things online, and post photos to social networks are helping Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent to create best-in-class AI systems. One big advantage for China: it doesn’t have the privacy and security restrictions that might hinder progress in the United States.

  We must consider the developmental track of AI within the broader context of China’s grand plans for the future. In April 2018, Xi gave a major speech outlining his vision of China as the global cyber superpower. China’s state-run Xinhua news service published portions of the speech, in which he described a new cyberspace governance network and an internet that would “spread positive information, uphold the correct political direction, and guide public opinion and values towards the right direction.”3 The authoritarian rules China would have us all live by are a divergence from the free speech, market-driven economy, and distributed control that we cherish in the West.

  AI is part of a series of national edicts and laws that aim to control all information generated within China and to monitor the data of its residents as well as the citizens of its various strategic partners. One of those edicts requires all foreign companies to store Chinese citizens’ data on servers within Chinese borders. This allows government security agencies to access personal data as they wish. Another initiative—China’s Police Cloud—was designed to monitor and track people with mental health problems, those who have publicly criticized the government, and a Muslim ethnic minority called the Uighurs. In August 2018, the United Nations said that it had credible reports that China had been holding millions of Uighurs in secret camps in the far western region of China.4 China’s Integrated Joint Operations Program uses AI to detect pattern deviations—to learn whether someone has been late paying bills. An AI-powered Social Credit System, according to a slogan in official planning documents, was developed to engineer a problem-free society by “allow(ing) the trustworthy to roam everywhere under heaven while making it hard for the discredited to take a single step.”5 To promote “trustworthiness,” citizens are rated on a number of different data points, like heroic acts (points earned) or traffic tickets (points deducted). Those with lower scores face hurdles applying for jobs, buying a home, or getting kids into schools. In some cities, high-scoring residents have their pictures on display.6 In other cities, such as Shandong, citizens who jaywalk have their faces publicly shared on digital billboards and sent automatically to Weibo, a popular social network.7 If all this seems too fantastical to believe, keep in mind that China once successfully instituted a one-child policy to forcibly cull its population.

  These policies and initiatives are the brainchild of President Xi Jinping’s inner circle, which for the past decade has been singularly focused on rebranding and rebuilding China into our predominant global superpower. China is more authoritarian today than under any previous leaders since Chairman Mao Zedong, and advancing and leveraging AI are fundamental to the cause. The Belt and Road Initiative is a massive geoeconomic strategy masquerading as an infrastructure plan following the old Silk Road routes that connected China with Europe via the Middle East and Africa. China isn’t just building bridges and highways—it’s exporting surveillance technology and collecting data in the process as it increases the CCP’s influence around the world in opposition to our current liberal democratic order. The Global Energy Interconnection is yet another national strategy championed by Xi that aims to create the world’s first global electricity grid, which it would manage. China has already figured out how to scale a new kind of ultra-high-voltage cable technology that can deliver power from the far western regions to Shanghai—and it’s striking deals to become a power provider to neighboring countries.

  These initiatives, along with many others, are clever ways to gain soft power over a long period of time. It’s a brilliant move by Xi, whose political party voted in March 2018 to abolish term limits and effectively allowed him to remain president for life. Xi’s endgame is abundantly clear: to create a new world order in which China is the de facto leader. And yet during this time of Chinese diplomatic expansion, the United States inextricably turned its back on longstanding global alliances and agreements as President Trump erected a new bamboo curtain.

  The future of AI is currently moving along two developmental tracks that are often at odds with what’s best fo
r humanity. China’s AI push is part of a coordinated attempt to create a new world order led by President Xi, while market forces and consumerism are the primary drivers in America. This dichotomy is a serious blind spot for us all. Resolving it is the crux of our looming AI problem, and it is the purpose of this book. The Big Nine companies may be after the same noble goals—cracking the code of machine intelligence to build systems capable of humanlike thought—but the eventual outcome of that work could irrevocably harm humanity.

  Fundamentally, I believe that AI is a positive force, one that will elevate the next generations of humankind and help us to achieve our most idealistic visions of the future.

  But I’m a pragmatist. We all know that even the best-intentioned people can inadvertently cause great harm. Within technology, and especially when it comes to AI, we must continually remember to plan for both intended use and unintended misuse. This is especially important today and for the foreseeable future, as AI intersects with everything: the global economy, the workforce, agriculture, transportation, banking, environmental monitoring, education, the military, and national security. This is why if AI stays on its current developmental tracks in the United States and China, the year 2069 could look vastly different than it does in the year 2019. As the structures and systems that govern society come to rely on AI, we will find that decisions being made on our behalf make perfect sense to machines—just not to us.

  We humans are rapidly losing our awareness just as machines are waking up. We’ve started to pass some major milestones in the technical and geopolitical development of AI, yet with every new advancement, AI becomes more invisible to us. The ways in which our data is being mined and refined is less obvious, while our ability to understand how autonomous systems make decisions grows less transparent. We have, therefore, a chasm in understanding of how AI is impacting daily life in the present, one growing exponentially as we move years and decades into the future. Shrinking that distance as much as possible through a critique of the developmental track that AI is currently on is my mission for this book. My goal is to democratize the conversations about artificial intelligence and make you smarter about what’s ahead—and to make the real-world future implications of AI tangible and relevant to you personally, before it’s too late.