Facebook, Amazon, Google, IBM and Microsoft Create Partnership on AI

Should there be? I'm not quite sure. I mean, personally I feel a lot safer managing my own data privacy with what I give these companies, rather than having a government do it for me. And I'm not exactly a libertarian, I just think it's rational that this should be decentralized, the risk of a company turning against "us" is a lot less than a government, given history.

"I've switched away from Facebook, and now I've lost touch with a lot of friends. They are my friends, why can't I export them? Why can't I export the data that belongs to me, and use it in some open-source format that allows me to reap the benefits of all the work that I spent tracking them down inside of Facebook's private garden?"

You can. https://developers.facebook.com/docs/graph-api/reference

All those "What does your friend list say about your love life?" type surveys use it.

"As a society, we need to start addressing these things, or we are going to end up with Internet giants that we don't have the means to get rid of, and that aren't at risk of being out-competed."

We've heard this a lot over the years, but I've really never seen a case of a company that can't be out-competed. Who is it up to to "get rid" of an organization? On what basis? People stop using their services, and they stop making money is generally how it works. Otherwise, Antitrust law is the main mechanism today, isn't that sufficient?

People forget that Google didn't ask permission or get oversight or contact copyright holders when building a search engine. They hooked a couple servers on the web and started crawling it with their algorithm, and replaced other search engines pretty quickly because they had a better service. One could say that it's impossible to compete with Google, but I'm not so sure: Bing is doing fine (if small share), DuckDuckGo is growing, etc. Adding more oversight/regs to the Web just makes it harder to replace these companies.

I'm sure plenty wanted to "get rid" of Microsoft in the 90s because of their attitude and growing monopoly, and certainly they were fettered by the U.S DOJ., but looking back, the calls to break them up were a bit silly. No one would have predicted Apple was going to become much, much bigger (some still can't believe it).

What could possibly go wrong ?

What I'd like to see is all of the consortium members sign a pledge that none of them will sell or use their AI technology for defense/military purposes (mainly looking at you Microsoft/IBM/Amazon).

I could see how 10 years down the line, the US government tries to co-opt the group to help it in its wars. This needs to be preempted now, in the same way they should've preempted calls for encryption backdoors by adopting end-to-end encryption years before and making it the status quo, before the government even gets a chance to think about it. They mostly failed in doing that, but I hope they won't fail with this.

2. Why do I feel certain people's information has been looked at, scrutinized, cross checked, collated, etc. by certain savvy insiders. Warren buffet, George Sorrows, any of the financial movers and shakers, information is sitting on a server somewhere, unless you're a Clinton. If I had access, I could help but look at it.

Before you made an investment, bought a stock, bought realeste, took over a company; wouldn't you be tempted to peak at some of that information?.

3. I feel certain individual information has been used as research for financial gain.

3. I belive it's basically insider trading without the other guy knowing he/she gave away any information.

4. I believe it will be exposed, and will be the next huge Financial scandal.

5. I believe this move might be a smoke screen. "We know some of us have already abused private information for personal/financial gain. Let's combine the data. It might put some reigns on what we all know some of our insiders have been doing. Let the people think we are doing this to better society.

6. I don't have any evidence, I just have a hard time believing no one is looking at juicy date pouring in from some high profile people.

7. I believe it will be on the front page of Forbes in less than a year.