I highly recommend The Big Nine!

This book is a call-to-arms about the broken nature of artificial intelligence, and the powerful corporations that are turning the human-machine relationship on its head. 

Nine big corporations in the U.S. and China. The American portion of the Big Nine—Amazon, Google, Apple, IBM, Microsoft and Facebook—have big ideas about how to solve some of humanity’s greatest challenges, but they’re beholden to the whims of Wall Street and have only a transactional relationship with Washington.

Meanwhile, China’s portion—Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent—are very much tethered to Beijing and the demands of the Chinese Communist Party.

All of us are caught in the middle, as our data are mined and refined in service of building the future of AI.

In the first part, you’ll learn what AI is and the role the Big Nine have played in developing it.

In Part II, plausible futures over the next fifty years as AI advances with scenarios ranging from optimistic, pragmatic and catastrophic.

In Part III, tactical and strategic solutions are given.

“The future is an endless cycle. It neither begins at a finite point nor ends once something has been accomplished. Likewise, the fluidity of time—not chronological time, but how we experience technological change—must stay at the forefront of our thought processes whenever we’re planning for the future.”

Great framing of AI in the bigger picture of companys' and states' strategies. As an employee of one of the big 9, it's helped me with insight into my own company's decisions and direction when it comes to AI.

Webb does a good job showing the tangible ways AI is already interwoven in our lives, in areas we may not know about or realize. This helps the readier visualize some of the possible futures Webb outlines in her scenario planning exercise.

She's clearly coming from a western-centric viewpoint, using fear of China to spur action, but the insight into Chinese companies' strategies motivations was interesting and new information to me.

Although the manner in which the author naively states her trust in the good intentions of corporations in one breath, and then presents evidence and historical presedent of their complete lack of ethics and trustworthiness a paragraph later is infuriating at times, the core of this book is worthy of consideration in preparing for the future. Thankfully she covers China in detail and includes their advancements and plans in her proposal for how to navigate and regulate AI development.

While her proposed policies are excellent I fear implementation will be exceptionally difficult - still it's an excellent template to work from. I do wish she had spent more time detailing how individuals can take action and be more responsible for implementing the proposed changes.

An excellent book. Should be required reading for computer scientists (especially in AI-related fields) and lawmakers.

4.2 Audio. An interesting look at the small number of companies that control AI and the implications for our future.

Strengths: quick read even with its technical nature. Weakness: pretty demoralizing in the information. Webb does a good job presenting positive, pragmatic, and worst case scenarios toward the later half of the book, but the most interesting information regards the current status of AI and the comparison between the U.S. and China. The differing approaches are strikingly different, and China definitely has an advantage because it actually has a plan. I learned a lot about AI and the different types of AI from this book, and for that, I have to say I appreciate the book.