I believe that this book is, so far, among the most important I have read in 2024. For several reasons, but the main one is that it manages to establish a direct and critical position on the current state of competition for the dominance of research and production of Artificial Intelligence platforms, enabling the main geopolitical advantage of the next global era: technology as a weapon, culture and master of the decisions that will take over the next 30 years in the world.
At first, Amy avoids the expectation that we will eventually have a dominating superintelligence that will subjugate all the inhabitants of the earth, and moves on to a more realistic metaphor: we will have a death by a thousand paper cuts. As we give up to autonomous systems and algorithms our power to decide what we eat, watch, who we hire, which route we take to work, which partners we will have, where we will invest, how much we pay and receive for services, we are dominated by the decisions of teams that do not know us, and believe they are doing something good for humanity. Although we are ending the Tyranny of Choice , we are becoming puppets for 9 large companies in the world.
More and more algorithms are responsible for our lives, and in the next decade they will be in our work functions: generating financial reports, analyzing team performance, summarizing meetings, suggesting strategic decisions and analyzing supplier contracts, analyzing candidate pools for hiring. Little by little, many of our daily tasks will be automated and we will be unaware of their impact, after all, these systems are being built by a select group of people, in a tiny group of companies.
We are facing a new modern arms race, in which autonomous software will be behind everything that can be produced in the world: the products you consume, how much you earn for your work, the services you receive, the content you consume, will at some point have been influenced by some algorithm using AI. As a country, we are almost out of this race, far from the investments needed to create new real Artificial Intelligence platforms, either due to a lack of political will or a venture capital ecosystem that makes research and development in the area viable. We must learn about and evaluate the two hegemonic models currently being implemented in the world: the centralizing model of the Chinese government, and the American market model - we are, in this new Technofeudal reality, just vassals of kingdoms that have already been formed.
Well, if that sounds a bit far-fetched, that’s because it is! We’re already facing the cultural challenges that AI presents, particularly in the form of misinformation , democracy , and systemic racism . It also poses more direct risks to the world, not just by impacting our lives through social media: it puts the planet at risk by impacting the energy used to train new models . And recent attempts by governments in developing countries to influence the work of these companies have yielded no results.
In the book, the author delves into the case of the two investment models, and how they have been responsible for the total hegemony of all AI research and development in the world: universities, professionals and projects interconnect through the exchange of the same professionals, venture capital and companies. She calls these companies The 9 Titans of AI: Baidu, Tencent, Alibaba in China driven by the CCP, and Google, Meta, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft and IBM in the USA.
“Humanity faces an existential crisis in the broadest sense of the word, because no one is addressing a simple question that has been central to AI from the beginning: What happens to society when we transfer power to a system built by a small group of people that was designed to make decisions on behalf of all of us?” - Amy Webb
What makes AI fair? Fair to whom? Studying the common values of humanity is, in itself, a challenge for today: how to incorporate different perspectives on life into algorithms that decide what we see, what we buy, who we hire and who we arrest? What happens when the decision to build systems that collect huge amounts of data for autonomous decision-making is made by a few leaders?
In this context, two models of AI sovereignty are analyzed, with their detailed impacts: The Chinese Model, centralizing and long-term, which directs the Chinese positioning of geopolitical dominance in the world, and the American Model of “non-interference” and without coordination of companies, relegating to the market and to the short term the decision of momentary dominance of the technology.
Amy Webb presents the US as a country unprepared to deal with any coordinated advance in technological leadership that another country may have. The counterpoint here is represented by the Chinese policy of becoming a global leader in AI in the near future, using all its financial and industrial resources to influence the world in the use of its technologies. The future belongs to the country that manages to use the maximum possible data. In this geopolitical discussion, two approaches are quite clear: the capitalist decentralization of the US completely hinders a consensus and the creation of alliances for the development of real policies to encourage industry, and the centralized and coordinated approach of China, with the real risk of a surveillance state and control of the population.
China's position as a world economic and technological leader is indisputable and is dealt with in depth in the book, unlike Martin Ford's Rule of the Robots , which treats China as a bogeyman. By critically analyzing China's plan to become the leader in AI by 2030 , the author outlines important and compelling arguments about its expansion plan, and how this coordinated action of data collection, investment in research and development, and control of technology will impact the world in the coming years, in addition to drawing a parallel with another Chinese plan to integrate the world into a new trade route, called the Belt and Road , or the New China Route. By enabling the use of its technology in partner countries, we can already see a change in the global geopolitical scenario.
Interestingly, the book positions Microsoft and NVIDIA as less prominent in the world of AI, obviously because the book was written before the events of recent years, which have made both companies global leaders in AI research and development efforts . The real difficulty with futuristic books and authors is that they usually get more wrong than they get right. Unaware that eventually the AI processing infrastructure and the most influential company in the world today (OpenAI) would be under the control of these two companies, Amy Webb did not give much importance to the development of specific AI processors, led by NVIDIA . Perhaps today the book would be a little different, but not much. So be skeptical of the scenarios listed here.
Our market seeks to optimize costs and maximize profits, and this happens so intensely that we do not realize how much it influences what we consume daily. What happens when the incentive to produce safe and fair AIs clashes with the valuation of large companies? The incentive to reduce costs across the board, with a culture of unhealthy efficiency, will put our society at risk. The Boeing case is there to be evaluated: deliberate actions to increase the value of the share that put the company's planes at risk were taken by the leadership, with little concern for the result.
In the name of making profits possible in a short period of time, we are creating perverse incentives for researchers who should have greater scrutiny regarding the impact of the systems they create. Commercial use of AI is designed to optimize profits, not to question and provide transparency. Black-box algorithms exclude the general public from understanding and rationalizing the decisions made by algorithms, amplifying the harm that such systems can cause.
We are building a world for money to live in, not necessarily for human beings. In the name of making profits possible in a short time, we are creating perverse incentives for researchers who should have greater scrutiny regarding the impact of the systems they create.
Artificial Intelligence allows companies to make more inferences about you, using the data they are already collecting. A neural network is an empty bag that will reach a decision if you feed it data. In a way, it is the way to decouple the judgment of difficult decisions from humans, assigning rules to what has always been complex. It is a way to create an aura of objectivity in a sea of data, without you really being able to question it: after all: it was an algorithm that did it. The fact that we are automating art and not the tasks we all hate says a lot about our current market moment.
The book, in its final part, presents three possible scenarios for our future, which describe positive, pragmatic and negative visions for the future, using the strategy that Amy Webb's company, Future Today Institute .
The whole future revolves around PDRs, Personal Data Registries, which will become digital twins controlled by people directly, or maintained by companies - which already exist today in a fragmented and embryonic form: your browsing, shopping, entertainment, dating and daily commute data are already stored and managed by companies. It is worth reading how she addresses these issues. In addition, we are already seeing an explosion of connected devices that expand the individual information about your life: how much you sleep, what your heart rate is and how much you exercise.
The positive scenario is utopian, with companies and governments connecting through a global alliance to make AI a universal good for the benefit of humanity, with the universal right to access and control one's own data. The book ends with a case for establishing a Global Alliance to make Artificial Intelligence a global public good.
The pragmatic scenario describes how soon everything we see, hear and use will be connected to a network of data that builds your PDRs without your will, and how companies with corporate agreements will use all this for and against you - will you eat cake? Your health plan is priced according to your ability to stay in shape. Algorithms trained to maximize health management capacity become a weapon against our will and humanity, in the end, we will all be in a giant paper clip factory . Learned helplessness is the result of the excessive use of AI to do all routine activities, driven by nudging and our disinterest in critically discussing the use of technology: dystopian and probable
In the pessimistic scenario: knowledge work, intellectual work, is replaced. We thought drivers, baristas, and carpenters would be replaced, but it is we: developers, economists, project managers, and administrators who will lose our jobs as AI makes decisions for us, analyzes automatically generated data, and determines what we will work on.
Amy Webb believes that it is the role of higher education institutions to expand the training of technology professionals: any degree in technology must also be a degree in social sciences, philosophy and sociology. There is no longer any way to wait for short-term market demands to dictate the organization and study of specialties that will impact the world from now on. Understanding that the systems we are building, and that we will implement, bring an inherent and inseparable moral and cultural bias to the professionals who build them is crucial, and therefore an adequate study is necessary.
This book taught me a lot and gave me a deeper understanding of the size of the future challenge.
I highly recommend reading it.
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