As we prepare to turn the calendar from one decade to the next, Big Tech looms larger than ever. And that’s not necessarily a good thing.

The first names that leapt to mind were all tech leaders. And looking through the replies, I was hardly alone.

So my next question was, naturally, which of them could actually become a supervillain?

Here are a few who are either fine or just not quite evil enough to do it: Tim Cook (Apple), Jack Dorsey (Twitter), Susan Wojcicki (YouTube), Satya Nadella (Microsoft), Marc Benioff (Salesforce), and Sundar Pichai (Google).

There are others – like former Uber chief Travis Kalanick and ousted WeWork head Adam Neumann – who have yet to prove their longevity.

Mark Zuckerberg gets a dishonorable mention. Facebook has been evil, enabling harassment, violence in Sri Lanka and Myanmar, the spread of fake news in 2016, the Cambridge Analytica scandal, and, well, take your pick, really. But for all the stupid things Zuckerberg has done or allowed to happen, it’s just that, bless his heart, he just doesn’t have what it takes to become a supervillain.

He talks about curbing hate speech but then twists himself in knots talking about free speech. He partners with ultra-right-wing outlet Breitbart and then walks face first into getting excoriated by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on national television. He careens from one side of an issue to the other so fast, it’s amazing he can keep the lights on at Facebook at all. He’s a bumbling CEO who’s lost control.

In the end, there are three tech leaders that stand at the precipice of supervillainy heading into the 2020s and they’re all three pretty damn powerful.

Elon Musk (CEO of Tesla and SpaceX)

Of the three people on this list, Musk is probably the least likely to become a supervillain. His worst transgressions fall into pretty ho-hum corporate misdeed categories like union-busting, the occasional copyright violation, defamation claims, and smoking weed.

And he’s certainly earned the right to say, “I told you so,” if AI takes over the world.

But Musk could still become a supervillain (maybe controlling the AI!). It’s not hard to imagine him biding his time, waiting for Tesla cars to become more prevalent, and then: BAM.

He takes control of all Teslas on the road. He uses SpaceX to take over President Trump’s Space Force and his ground forces utilize Cybertrucks as tanks. And his army’s weapons? Those flamethrowers, of course. Meanwhile, he uses all his tunnels to move from one base to the other, always evading capture thanks to his Hyperloop trains.

Musk has been sending weird tweets and Baby Yoda memes as a smokescreen all along, laying the groundwork for his takeover.

Jeff Bezos (CEO of Amazon, founder of Blue Origin)

Admit it: Jeff Bezos was either the first or second person that came to your mind for this list, partly due to his Amazon empire, but also because he physically resembles Lex Luthor.

Depending on the day (or hour), Jeff Bezos is the richest person in the world. And yet Amazon workers face horrible working conditions, Amazon has participated in union-busting, and part-time employees at Amazon-owned Whole Foods recently had their benefits cut.

He’s already dumping money by the truck-load into his SpaceX competitor, Blue Origin. And he could pour billions into developing supervillain tech and not make a dent in his savings. And given what’s already out there, that’s a scary thought.

And let’s try not to think about how a supervillain could wield the surveillance capabilities of Amazon’s Alexa or Ring. Or the fact that Bezos and Amazon have already strong-armed Seattle over taxes (not to say anything about that HQ2 mess).

Is Bezos evil? I don’t know. But I do know that Bezos’ stranglehold on our daily lives continues to grow: from Amazon’s retail dominance to its growing influence in entertainment with Prime Video to his ownership of The Washington Post, one of the most storied newspapers in the country.

All we can really judge Bezos on is the available evidence of how he treats people. And, so far, it’s not great.

Is Peter Thiel the tech leader most likely to become a supervillain?

Enough money to fund a dozen armies? Check.

In favor of monopolies? Check.

Holds a position of influence with Facebook? Check.

Is leveraging that position to stop Facebook from fact-checking political ads? Check.

Founded a company that, like Facebook, has become notorious for the way it mines data and tracks people? Check.

Has a relationship with a much-maligned presidential administration that seems intent on limiting the free press? Check.

Once wrote the sentence, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible”? Check.

Has a doomsday escape in the far corner of the globe? Check.

Look, I’m not saying Peter Thiel is definitely going to become a supervillain. (I’ve seen what he does to things on the internet that he does not like.)

I’m just saying I disagree with suggestions to the contrary.

That’s all.

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The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) issued a unanimous ruling against Cambridge Analytica on Friday, saying the company engaged in “deceptive practices” by harvesting personal data from millions of Facebook users leading up to the 2016 election.

In its official opinion, approved by FTC commissioners in a 5-0 vote, the agency determined that Cambridge Analytica violated federal law by deceiving Facebook users about what data would be collected and how it would be used. The data was collected via an app built by the company to survey U.S.-based Facebook users.

The FTC ordered the company to stop making “misrepresentations” about how data is collected and said it needs to delete the personal data it gathered through the app.

FTC Commissioner Noah Phillips tweeted on Friday that “this enforcement action reflects our ongoing commitment to hold firms accountable to their privacy promises to American consumers.”

But the practical impact of the FTC’s order is unclear given that Cambridge Analytica closed its doors in 2018 shortly after filing for bankruptcy.

The New York Times and The Guardian first reported in early 2018 that Cambridge Analytica had mined the data of around 50 million Facebook users without their permission to build profiles to pinpoint voters, part of the firm’s role as consultants for President Trump’s 2016 campaign.

The data collection ended up becoming one of the largest data breaches of customer information in Facebook’s history.

Shortly after the story broke in 2018, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg posted an update on his Facebook page listing steps the social media giant intended to take to ensure a similar incident did not occur again. Zuckerberg vowed that Facebook would “learn from this experience.”

Facebook settled with the FTC in July, and was ordered to pay $5 billion stemming from its failure to adequately protect user data. The company was then ordered to pay a separate $645,000 fine to the British government in October, also due to data privacy concerns stemming from the Cambridge Analytica incident.

The opinion and final order were issued as a result of an administrative complaint FTC staff filed about Cambridge Analytica in July, alleging the firm engaged in deceptive practices.

At the same time the complaint was filed, the FTC settled with former Cambridge Analytica CEO Alexander Nix and app developer Aleksandr Kogan for their involvement with the data mining. Nix and Kogan agreed to delete or destroy any personal data they acquired.

The FTC said Friday that Cambridge Analytica never responded to the complaint filed by FTC staff earlier this year.

Nix and other executives for Cambridge Analytica could not immediately be reached for comment.

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If 2017 was the year artificial intelligence rose to prominence, 2018 is when we’re seeing it go mainstream. Whichever area you work in, it’s likely AI will become increasingly prevalent in your everyday activity. Wherever you are in the world – whether you are an expert in AI, someone whose job increasingly uses AI or simply an interested reader we would like to hear from you.

Earlier this year, the Guardian published a long read that asked: Has technology evolved beyond our control? Its author, James Bridle, argued that “our technologies are extensions of ourselves, codified in machines and infrastructures, in frameworks of knowledge and action. Computers are not here to give us all the answers, but to allow us to put new questions, in new ways, to the universe.”

This is a topic of high priority on the international stage. Vladimir Putin has said he believes “the leader of AI will be the ruler of the world”, and China has stated its ambition to be the global AI leader. Meanwhile, Elon Musk has said he fears the threat of unregulated AI and autonomous weaponry and sent a petition to the United Nations calling for regulations on how AI weapons are developed. Mark Zuckerberg has said that Facebook will use artificial intelligence to fight against a vast variety of platform-spoiling misbehaviour, including fake news, hate speech, discriminatory ads and terrorist propaganda. But are governments acting quickly enough? What is the real threat here and what’s the existing framework of governance for AI technology?

With robots increasingly being used to replace the work of humans, what does the future hold? A new report from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) looked at the extent to which jobs may soon be automated in 32 different countries and found that 66 million people are at risk of losing their job to machines. That means 14% of jobs currently held by humans could soon be managed by robots. But in the UK, a report from PricewaterhouseCoopers argued that AI would create slightly more jobs (7.2m) than it displaced (7m) by boosting economic growth. So what will it mean for those industries whose employees are being replacedwith robots? Could an AI ever answer questions about the universe that scientists have worked their entire life trying to answer? Are we already seeing changes beginning to happen?

AI is now also being used in healthcare to support the work of medical staff, in surveillance, navigation, gambling and gaming, in banking and finance to predict market trends, in the art world as a tool to spot forgeries, in education and even in care for the elderly.

How do we ensure this new technology remains ethically sound, and that our data remains secure? Are we doing enough to prepare ourselves for the changes that are coming our way? And how will this impact future generations?

The Guardian’s science editor, Ian Sample, will be part of a panel discussion on this topic, and together he and a selection of industry experts and insiders will answer questions from Guardian supporters. We would love to hear from you.

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Despite Facebook’s aggressive stance on improving identification and removal of inappropriate content, the company admitted its artificial intelligence has a hard time finding hate speech.

In a blog post, the company said Tuesday it removed 2.5 million pieces of hate speech content during the first quarter of the year. However, only 38 percent of the problematic items were identified by its technology.

“It’s partly that technology like artificial intelligence, while promising, is still years away from being effective for most bad content because context is so important,” Facebook vice president of data analytics Alex Schultz wrote in the blog post. “For example, artificial intelligence isn’t good enough yet to determine whether someone is pushing hate or describing something that happened to them so they can raise awareness of the issue.”

Facebook also said in the posting that it took down 21 million pieces of adult nudity and sexual activity during the period, 96 percent of which was flagged by its artificial intelligence. About 7 to 9 views of every 10,000 pieces of content viewed were part of that category. Around 3.5 million pieces of violent content were taken down or noted with a warning label, with its technology finding 86 percent of the questionable content.

It deleted 583 million fake accounts during the first three months of the year, most of which were found minutes after they were created. About 3 to 4 percent of its monthly active users are false accounts, it said. In addition, Facebook removed 837 million pieces of spam during the same period, and almost all were identified before it was reported by a user.

Facebook has said it will hire 10,000 more people to review content on its platforms by the end of 2018. The Wall Street Journal reported that Facebook’s community operations and community-integrity team, which develops technology to find inappropriate items, asked for a budget of $770 million for this year. A source told the publication CEO Mark Zuckerberg allocated even more than that amount. For comparison, the community operations team had a budget of only $220 million in 2017, according to the Journal.

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