Google is not alone in this quest to build a future out of A.I. Its parent company, Alphabet, is spending billions to inject machine intelligence into much of the global economy, from self-driving cars to health care.

Then there are the other members of the Frightful Five — Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft — which are also spending heavily on the intelligent future. Collectively, the five are among the biggest investors in research and development on the planet. According to their earnings reports, they are on track to spend more than $60 billion this year on research and development. By comparison, in 2015, the United States federal government spent about $67 billion on all nondefense-related scientific research.

There are two ways to respond to the tech industry’s huge investments in the intelligent future. On the one hand, you could greet the news with optimism and even gratitude. The technologies that Google and other tech giants are working on will have a huge impact on society. Self-driving cars could save tens of thousands of lives a year, for instance, while computerized methods for diagnosing and treating disease could improve our health and cut the cost of care.

What’s more, experts in the field say that many tech giants are currently approaching A.I. with a kind of academic ethos. For instance, they regularly publish papers on their findings, and — through their cloud server businesses — they are allowing third-party companies to access some of their latest A.I. tech.

But the tech industry’s huge investments in A.I. might also be cause for alarm, because they are not balanced by anywhere near that level of investment by the government.

In the waning days of the Obama administration, the White House published a report examining the ways artificial intelligence would alter the world. The report found that the federal government spent only $1.1 billion on unclassified A.I. research in 2015. It argued for increasing spending on artificial intelligence by several times. With greater federal funding, the report said, researchers could focus more on basic research — more tenuous, potentially less immediately applicable areas of A.I. — and through the grant-making process, the government would have a greater say in how the technology develops.

Greg Brockman, a founder and chief technology officer of OpenAI, an artificial intelligence research firm, echoed this idea.