Page 64 - Monocle Quarterly Journal Vol 3 Issue 2 Spring

MONOCLE QUARTERLY JOURNAL | DEEP LEARNING
a path of nearly 200 kilometres through the Egyptian desert to create a waterway between the Mediterranean and the Red Sea. This waterway was to be the Suez Canal.
Having convinced the ruler of Egypt at the time, Sa’id Pasha, to grant a concession for the Canal to be built, Ferdinand de Lesseps successfully negotiated the privatisation of a critical passageway from Europe to
information to the nefarious and politically manipulative data analytics firm Cambridge Analytica.
To grasp the extent to which these giant tech firms have dominated their industries and centralised power, Galloway notes that together Facebook, Google, Amazon and Apple have a collective market capitalisation equivalent to India’s GDP, but a population size equiva- lent to the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Even more worryingly, many experts believe that the newly- bourgeoning field of artificial intelligence will only serve to further concentrate power in the hands of these four tech giants. And the enormous significance of AI for every conceivable industry is something that is certainly not lost on the leaders of “The Four”, with Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai believing that “AI is one of the most important things humanity is working on. It is more profound than, I dunno, electricity or fire.”
Recognising that AI will result in sweeping changes to the way the world works in the next few decades was the first step that Big Tech needed to take to consolidate their dominance in the digital world. From that point on, it was inevitable that the best minds in AI would naturally flock to these hubs of power, thanks to several factors that are essential to the development of the most advanced artificial intelligence technologies. The first of these factors is the scarcity of true AI experts across the world, a fact that has made these experts extremely valuable. Establishing a team of these specialist computer scientists is subsequently near-impossible in financial terms for corporations aside from the very biggest of the tech firms.
The other critically important factors that feed this concentration of power are the necessity for extremely powerful computing resources and the very large data
What this meant was that whoever controlled the Suez
Canal effectively became the gatekeeper of intercontinental
trade, with that single waterway yielding untold power
to its possessor.
Asia that would change the shape of the global economy forever. On 17 November 1869, the Suez Canal opened under the control of the Compagnie Universelle du Canal Maritime de Suez – the Suez Canal Company. In conjunction with the completion of the American Transcontinental Railroad just six months earlier, the opening of the Canal had an immediate and dramatic effect on world trade, facilitating the movement of goods around the globe in timeframes never before realised. What this meant was that whoever controlled the Suez Canal effectively became the gatekeeper of intercontinental trade, with that single waterway yielding untold power to its possessor.
Much in the same way, the flow of data in today’s digital age has become the critical waterway that facilitates the mode of modern business. And the contemporary gatekeepers of this new data canal are “The Four”, as Scott Galloway calls them in his book The Four: The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google (2017). The global dominance of these tech giants has been growing for years, but only recently have the public and lawmakers started taking notice of the near-unchallengeable nature of these companies and the centralised control they have secured over the world’s digital data. The above-the-law and unapologetic attitude of Big Tech was perhaps best captured in the rather soulless and disturbingly robotic display of Facebook’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, when appearing before Congress in April of 2018 to answer for his company’s massive data leak of millions of users’
...many experts believe that the newly-bourgeoning field of
artificial intelligence will only serve to further concentrate power
in the hands of these four tech giants.
sets required by the most promising artificial intelligence methods. One such method that requires an inordinate amount of resources in terms of data and processing power, for example, is the use of unsupervised learning
62