We humans prefer to believe that we have a hand in shaping what comes next for “artificial” intelligence. We regular folks, whose data feeds AI, aren’t really in charge of anything, though.

While using a service like Alexa, users are contributing data to an opaque system over which they have no control and which is generally immune to monitoring and legislation. The new gods of artificial intelligence are the big nine tech companies: Amazon, Google, Facebook, Tencent, Baidu, Alibaba, Microsoft, IBM, and Apple.