Have you heard of the LessWrong community? They have been discussing AI ethics for quite some time, and it is a whole field unto itself. You seem generally nervous, but it’s good to learn what specifically can be dangerous about AI. The main concern is a warning of a military artificial intelligence arms race with offensive autonomous weapons. Of which, billionaires have been taking note and are helping to make sure AI will remain good.

You can also take a look at the Effective Altruism community that is interested in maximizing the most good for the most amount of people. There is a group that meets here at Stanford. Billions of dollars are donated from Silicon Valley to cure diseases, bring free internet to the world which brings free education, and create solutions to provide for our basic needs.

Also the big tech company behemoths that you discuss as a threat, why is that? Usually they have open APIs for third party development, and also many are involved in philanthropy, so there are ways to get involved. There are also hundreds of AI startups that can be bought out by these larger companies (or not). Either road — don’t waste one’s time and resources with the Not Invented Here Syndrome and build on the shoulders of giants.

I wouldn’t worry about the AI taking our jobs either, if that’s your concern. “Then it’s odd to see so many news articles talking about AI killing jobs, when plain old non-AI computer programming and the Internet have affected many more jobs than that. The buyer ordering books over the Internet, the spreadsheet replacing the accountant — these processes are not strongly relying on the sort of algorithms that we would usually call ‘AI’ or ‘machine learning’ or ‘robotics’. The main role I can think of for actual AI algorithms being involved, is in computer vision enabling more automation. And many manufacturing jobs were already automated by robotic arms even before robotic vision came along.” — Eliezer Yudkowsky

I have high hopes for AI and believe that self-driving cars will reduce car accidents by 90%. I also adore AI that has computer vision and can learn a picture of a “tree”, then “paint” it’s own tree — it’s adorable. All those big tech companies you mentioned are creating good design — and I can’t wait to be more a part of it.