The Big Nine: How The Tech Titans and Their Thinking Machines Could Warp Humanity by Amy Webb

Awards:
FT & McKinsey Business Book of the Year Longlist
Thinkers50 Digital Thinking Award Shortlist
Winner, 2020 Gold Axiom Award
Fast Company’s Best Books of 2020
Amazon’s Best Books of 2020

The Big Nine: How The Tech Titans and Their Thinking Machines Could Warp Humanity 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. AI’s destiny is in the control of 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.