Amy Webb

“The Genesis Machine” (2022)

The Genesis Machine

“The Big Nine: How the Tech Titans and Their Thinking Machines Could Warp Humanity” (2019)

A call-to-arms about the broken nature of artificial intelligence, and the powerful corporations that are turning the human-machine relationship on its head.We like to think that we are in control of the future of "artificial" intelligence. The reality, though, is that we--the everyday people whose data powers AI--aren't actually in control of anything. When, for example, we speak with Alexa, we contribute that data to a system we can't see and have no input into--one largely free from regulation or oversight. The big nine corporations--Amazon, Google, Facebook, Tencent, Baidu, Alibaba, Microsoft, IBM and Apple--are the new gods of AI and are short-changing our futures to reap immediate financial gain. In this book, Amy Webb reveals the pervasive, invisible ways in which the foundations of AI--the people working on the system, their motivations, the technology itself--is broken. Within our lifetimes, AI will, by design, begin to behave unpredictably, thinking and acting in ways which defy human logic. The big nine corporations may be inadvertently building and enabling vast arrays of intelligent systems that don't share our motivations, desires, or hopes for the future of humanity.Much more than a passionate, human-centered call-to-arms, this book delivers a strategy for changing course, and provides a path for liberating us from algorithmic decision-makers and powerful corporations.

“The Signals Are Talking: Why Today's Fringe Is Tomorrow's Mainstream” (2018)

A Fast Company best book of the yearA Washington Post bestsellerWinner of the 2017 Axiom Business Book Award in Business TechnologyHow do you tell a real trend from the merely trendy? How, for example, will a technology--like artificial intelligence, machine learning, self-driving cars, biohacking, bots, and the Internet of Things--affect us, our businesses, and workplaces? How will it eventually change the way we live, work, play, and think--and how should we prepare for it now?In The Signals Are Talking, noted futurist Amy Webb shows us how to analyze the "true signals"--those patterns that will coalesce into a trend with the potential to change everything-and land on the right side of disruption. The future, Webb shows, isn't something that happens to us passively. Using a proven, tested methodology, she enables us to see ahead and forecast what's to come--challenging us to create our own preferred futures.

“Data, A Love Story: How I Gamed Online Dating to Meet My Match” (2013)