
The Big Nine
How the Tech Titans and Their Thinking Machines Could Warp Humanity
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Narrated by:
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Amanda Dolan
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By:
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Amy Webb
About this listen
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.
We like to think that we are in control of the future of "artificial" intelligence. The reality, though, is that we - the everyday people whose data powers AI - aren't actually in control of anything. When, for example, we speak with Alexa, we contribute that data to a system we can't see and have no input into - one largely free from regulation or oversight. The big nine corporations - Amazon, Google, Facebook, Tencent, Baidu, Alibaba, Microsoft, IBM and Apple - are the new gods of AI and are short-changing our futures to reap immediate financial gain.
In this book, Amy Webb reveals the pervasive, invisible ways in which the foundations of AI - the people working on the system, their motivations, the technology itself - is broken. Within our lifetimes, AI will, by design, begin to behave unpredictably, thinking and acting in ways which defy human logic. The big nine corporations may be inadvertently building and enabling vast arrays of intelligent systems that don't share our motivations, desires, or hopes for the future of humanity.
Much more than a passionate, human-centered call-to-arms, this book delivers a strategy for changing course, and provides a path for liberating us from algorithmic decision-makers and powerful corporations.
©2019 Amy Webb (P)2019 Hachette AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
"Rather than questioning the character of thinking machines, futurist Amy Webb turns a critical eye on the humans behind the computers. With AI's development overwhelmingly driven by nine tech powerhouses, she asks: Is it possible for the technology to serve the best interests of everyone?"—Wired
"Webb's assessments are based on analyses of patent filings, policy briefings, interviews and other sources. She paints vivid pictures of how AI could benefit the average person, via precision medicine or smarter dating apps...Her forecasts are provocative and unsettlingly plausible."—Science News
"Instead of predicting the future, Webb lays out scenarios for optimistic, pragmatic, and catastrophic outcomes -- all extrapolated from current facts. However impractical you may find the idea of a common Apple-Amazon operating system named Applezon, considering potential scenarios is a fantastically healthy exercise, because anyone who tells you they know how AI is going to turn out is lying."—VentureBeat
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In the popular imagination, superhuman artificial intelligence is an approaching tidal wave that threatens not just jobs and human relationships, but civilization itself. Conflict between humans and machines is seen as inevitable and its outcome all too predictable. In this groundbreaking audiobook, distinguished AI researcher Stuart Russell argues that this scenario can be avoided, but only if we rethink AI from the ground up. Russell begins by exploring the idea of intelligence in humans and in machines.
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Good General Introduction to AI Topic
- By Catherine Puma on 03-26-20
By: Stuart Russell
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The Age of Surveillance Capitalism
- The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power
- By: Shoshana Zuboff
- Narrated by: Nicol Zanzarella
- Length: 24 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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The Age of Surveillance Capitalism is neither a hand-wringing narrative of danger and decline nor a digital fairy tale. Rather, it offers a deeply reasoned and evocative examination of the contests over the next chapter of capitalism that will decide the meaning of information civilization in the 21st century. The stark issue at hand is whether we will be the masters of information and machines or its slaves.
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Book Editors failed to trim the word count
- By Todd B on 07-14-19
By: Shoshana Zuboff
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Algorithms of Oppression
- How Search Engines Reinforce Racism
- By: Safiya Umoja Noble
- Narrated by: Shayna Small
- Length: 6 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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Run a Google search for “black girls” - what will you find? “Big Booty” and other sexually explicit terms are likely to come up as top search terms. But, if you type in “white girls”, the results are radically different. The suggested porn sites and un-moderated discussions about “why black women are so sassy” or “why black women are so angry” presents a disturbing portrait of black womanhood in modern society. In Algorithms of Oppression, Safiya Umoja Noble challenges the idea that search engines like Google offer an equal playing field for all forms of ideas, identities, and activities.
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Read this book. Tell everyone you know about it.
- By Joshua Daniel-Wariya on 06-06-19
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Prediction Machines
- The Simple Economics of Artificial Intelligence
- By: Ajay Agrawal, Joshua Gans, Avi Goldfarb
- Narrated by: LJ Ganser
- Length: 7 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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Artificial intelligence does the seemingly impossible - driving cars, trading stocks, and teaching children. But facing the sea change that AI will bring can be paralyzing. How should companies set strategies, governments design policies, and people plan their lives for a world so different from what we know? In Prediction Machines, three eminent economists recast the rise of AI as a drop in the cost of prediction. With this single, masterful stroke, they lift the curtain on the AI-is-magic hype and show how basic tools from economics provide clarity about the AI revolution and a basis for action by CEOs, managers, policy makers, investors, and entrepreneurs.
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Not sure what I was expecting, but underwhelmed
- By William J Brown on 09-27-18
By: Ajay Agrawal, and others
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Human + Machine (Updated and Expanded)
- Reimagining Work in the Age of AI
- By: Paul R. Daugherty, H. James Wilson
- Narrated by: Jamie Renell
- Length: 7 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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In this updated and expanded edition of Human + Machine—including a new chapter on gen AI—Daugherty and Wilson show that the essence of the AI paradigm shift is the transformation of all business processes within an organization, whether related to breakthrough innovation, everyday customer service, or personal productivity habits. As humans and smart machines collaborate ever more closely, work processes become more fluid and adaptive, enabling companies to change them on the fly—or completely reimagine them.
By: Paul R. Daugherty, and others
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Competing in the Age of AI
- Strategy and Leadership When Algorithms and Networks Run the World
- By: Marco Iansiti, Karim R. Lakhani
- Narrated by: Steven Jay Cohen
- Length: 9 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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In industry after industry, data, analytics, and AI-driven processes are transforming the nature of work. While we often still treat AI as the domain of a specific skill, business function, or sector, we have entered a new era in which AI is challenging the very concept of the firm. AI-centric organizations exhibit a new operating architecture, redefining how they create, capture, share, and deliver value.
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Good writing but disappointing reading
- By YBNRML on 04-13-20
By: Marco Iansiti, and others
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The Inevitable
- Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future
- By: Kevin Kelly
- Narrated by: George Newbern
- Length: 11 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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From one of our leading technology thinkers and writers, a guide through the 12 technological imperatives that will shape the next 30 years and transform our lives. Much of what will happen in the next 30 years is inevitable, driven by technological trends that are already in motion. In this fascinating, provocative new book, Kevin Kelly provides an optimistic road map for the future, showing how the coming changes in our lives - from virtual reality in the home to an on-demand economy to artificial intelligence embedded in everything we manufacture.
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Predicting is hard, especially about the future
- By Michael on 02-20-17
By: Kevin Kelly
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Power and Prediction
- The Disruptive Economics of Artificial Intelligence
- By: Ajay Agrawal, Joshua Gans, Avi Goldfarb
- Narrated by: Tom Beyer
- Length: 10 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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In their bestselling first book, Prediction Machines, eminent economists Ajay Agrawal, Joshua Gans, and Avi Goldfarb explained the simple yet game-changing economics of AI. Now, in Power and Prediction, they go deeper, examining the most basic unit of analysis: the decision. The authors explain that the two key decision-making ingredients are prediction and judgment, and we perform both together in our minds, often without realizing it.
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Inspire system thinking with informative examples
- By Lucy A. Pithecus on 11-16-22
By: Ajay Agrawal, and others
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Mastering AI
- A Survival Guide to Our Superpowered Future
- By: Jeremy Kahn
- Narrated by: Kyle Tait
- Length: 10 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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Within the next five years, Jeremy Kahn predicts, AI will disrupt almost every industry and enterprise, with vastly increased efficiency and productivity. It will restructure the workforce, making AI copilots a must for every knowledge worker. It will compel us to reimagine how we make art, compose music, and write and publish books. The potential of generative AI to extend our skills, talents, and creativity as humans is undeniably exciting and promising. But while this new technology has a bright future, it also casts a dark and fearful shadow.
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Worth the read
- By Richard Heimann on 09-16-24
By: Jeremy Kahn
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Data, A Love Story
- How I Gamed Online Dating to Meet My Match
- By: Amy Webb
- Narrated by: Amy Webb, Brian Woolf
- Length: 8 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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After yet another online dating disaster, Amy Webb was about to cancel her JDate membership when an epiphany struck: It wasn’t that her standards were too high, as women are often told, but that she wasn’t evaluating the right data in suitors’ profiles. That night Webb, an award-winning journalist and digital-strategy expert, made a detailed, exhaustive list of what she did and didn’t want in a mate.
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Fun story, but not a how-to
- By Lisa on 02-20-13
By: Amy Webb
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Superintelligence
- Paths, Dangers, Strategies
- By: Nick Bostrom
- Narrated by: Napoleon Ryan
- Length: 14 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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Superintelligence asks the questions: What happens when machines surpass humans in general intelligence? Will artificial agents save or destroy us? Nick Bostrom lays the foundation for understanding the future of humanity and intelligent life. The human brain has some capabilities that the brains of other animals lack. It is to these distinctive capabilities that our species owes its dominant position. If machine brains surpassed human brains in general intelligence, then this new superintelligence could become extremely powerful - possibly beyond our control.
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Colossus: The Forbin Project is coming
- By Gary on 09-12-14
By: Nick Bostrom
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The Coming Wave
- AI, Power, and Our Future
- By: Mustafa Suleyman, Michael Bhaskar - contributor
- Narrated by: Mustafa Suleyman
- Length: 12 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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We are approaching a critical threshold in the history of our species. Everything is about to change. Soon you will live surrounded by AIs. They will organize your life, operate your business, and run core government services. You will live in a world of DNA printers and quantum computers, engineered pathogens and autonomous weapons, robot assistants and abundant energy.
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Click bait
- By Buyer on 09-11-23
By: Mustafa Suleyman, and others
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AI 2041
- Ten Visions for Our Future
- By: Kai-Fu Lee, Chen Qiufan
- Narrated by: Feodor Chin, Justin Chien, Soneela Nankani, and others
- Length: 18 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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AI will be the defining development of the 21st century. Within two decades, aspects of daily human life will be unrecognizable. AI will generate unprecedented wealth, revolutionize medicine and education through human-machine symbiosis, and create brand-new forms of communication and entertainment. In liberating us from routine work, however, AI will also challenge the organizing principles of our economic and social order.
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Good concept, poor execution
- By Amazon Customer on 12-08-21
By: Kai-Fu Lee, and others
Informative
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Even more relevant with Carona SARSv2
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Best AI book I've read since Bostrom
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Important and Timely
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It starts well with some good introduction and concepts of AI but then the author starts depcting fictional scenarios on what she thinks could be the impacts of AI. 70% of the book is about listening to this. It barely talks about the big nine, what they are doing or how they are doing it.
Would not recommend it, just finished it because I couldnt return it any longer
Misleading title
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Informative and Distressing
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My other main gripe with this book is that China's soon to be preeminence in AI is used to justify nearly every proposed course of action. I for one am certainly terrified of China's AI plan, but I don't think that it justifies throwing caution to the wind by simply trusting the G-MAFIA to fight the good fight if they pick up enough diversity (this is the only mechanism of changing the G-MAFIA that the author argues for).
All-in-all, the author gives a decent run-down of current AI capabilities and provides some thoughtful discussion of where AI is headed, but the very premise of the argument seems, to me at least, to be up for debate. It would have been nice to see at least some of that debate in this work.
Trusting to a Fault
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Comprehensive view of AI
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Highly Accesible Discussion - The big Issies of AI
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Enjoyed it.
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