NYU professor Amy Webb is coming out with a new book on March 5th, The Big Nine: How the Tech Titans and Their Thinking Machines Could Warp Humanity.
The central tenet of the book is that AI is currently being developed by commercial enterprises (the G-MAFIA–Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, IBM and Apple) in the US and Tencent, Alibaba and Baidu in China, while the US government has decided to turn its back on research funding, and Europe is figuring out the web.
My favorite anecdote from the congressional Facebook hearings is a septuagenarian senator demanding of Mark Zuckerberg, “How do you make money with this thing?” To which a stunned Zuckerberg replied, “…We sell advertising, senator.”
This laissez faire attitude on the part of governments is a mistake, Webb, asserts, because these businesses are only interested (as they should be) in turning these technologies toward profit.
She suggests an international guiding AI body be created, GAIA (Global Alliance on Intelligence Augmentation), to ensure societal benefit from the implementation of AI systems. AI is a wave that has not even created a visible swell on the horizon. It would be far better for governments and societies to be prepared than to let that wave hit the beach at full force without any preparation.
As AI is only currently applied to rule oriented data systems, it feels distant. But as the learning sets grow, and applications increase in complexity, we will see more and more life quality systems subsumed by this nascent wave.