Amy Webb > Quotes

“We’ve made a devil’s pact, swapping convenience and efficiency for an ever-increasing tyranny of information and choice.”
― Amy Webb, The Signals Are Talking: Why Today's Fringe Is Tomorrow's Mainstream

“Futurists are skilled at listening to and interpreting the signals talking. It’s a learnable skill, and a process anyone can master. Futurists look for early patterns—pre-trends, if you will—as the scattered points on the fringe converge and begin moving toward the mainstream. They know most patterns will come to nothing, and so they watch and wait and test the patterns to find those few that will evolve into genuine trends. Each trend is a looking glass into the future, a way to see over time’s horizon. The advantage of forecasting the future in this way is obvious. Organizations that can see trends early enough to take action have first-mover influence. But they can also help to inform and shape the broader context, conversing and collaborating with those in other fields to plan ahead.”
― Amy Webb, The Signals Are Talking: Why Today's Fringe Is Tomorrow's Mainstream

“You are a:
Woman seeking man

Regrettably, "Woman seeking man who's not a lying asshole" wasn't an option.”
― Amy Webb, Data, A Love Story: How I Gamed Online Dating to Meet My Match

“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it is hitched to everything else in the universe.”70”
― Amy Webb, The Signals Are Talking: Why Today's Fringe Is Tomorrow's Mainstream

“While plenty of smart people advocate AI for the public good, we are not yet discussing artificial intelligence as a public good. This is a mistake.”
― Amy Webb, The Big Nine: How the Tech Titans and Their Thinking Machines Could Warp Humanity

“Success is a lousy teacher,”
― Amy Webb, The Signals Are Talking: Why Today's Fringe Is Tomorrow's Mainstream

“Find the Fringe:”
― Amy Webb, The Signals Are Talking: Why Today's Fringe Is Tomorrow's Mainstream

“There would be no way to create a set of commandments for AI. We couldn’t write out all of the rules to correctly optimize for humanity, and that’s because while thinking machines may be fast and powerful, they lack flexibility.”
― Amy Webb, The Big Nine: How the Tech Titans and Their Thinking Machines Could Warp Humanity

“Right now, there is no other country on Earth with as much data as China, as many people as China, and as many electronics per capita. No other country is positioned to have a bigger economy than America’s within our lifetimes. No other country has more potential to influence our planet’s ecosystem, climate, and weather patterns—leading to survival or catastrophe—than China. No other country bridges both the developed and developing world like China does.”
― Amy Webb, The Big Nine: How the Tech Titans and Their Thinking Machines Could Warp Humanity

“It’s the future-fallacy trap: when your inflexibility on details causes mistakes in your planning for the future.”
― Amy Webb, The Signals Are Talking: Why Today's Fringe Is Tomorrow's Mainstream

“The main problem, when an organization wants to map the future of x, is that it too often defines x far too narrowly, using the old market research paradigm.”
― Amy Webb, The Signals Are Talking: Why Today's Fringe Is Tomorrow's Mainstream

“1. Find the Fringe: Cast a wide enough net to harness information from the fringe. This involves creating a map showing nodes and the relationships between them, and rounding up what you will later refer to as “the unusual suspects.” 2. Use CIPHER: Uncover hidden patterns by categorizing data from the fringe. Patterns indicate a trend, so you’ll do an exhaustive search for Contradictions, Inflections, Practices, Hacks, Extremes, and Rarities. 3. Ask the Right Questions: Determine whether a pattern really is a trend. You will be tempted to stop looking once you’ve spotted a pattern, but you will soon learn that creating counterarguments is an essential part of the forecasting process, even though most forecasters never force themselves to poke holes into every single assumption and assertion they make. 4. Calculate the ETA: Interpret the trend and ensure that the timing is right. This isn’t just about finding a typical S-curve and the point of inflection. As technology trends move along their trajectory, there are two forces in play—internal developments within tech companies, and external developments within the government, adjacent businesses, and the like—and both must be calculated. 5. Create Scenarios and Strategies: Build scenarios to create probable, plausible, and possible futures and accompanying strategies. This step requires thinking about both the timeline of a technology’s development and your emotional reactions to all of the outcomes. You’ll give each scenario a score, and based on your analysis, you will create a corresponding strategy for taking action. 6. Pressure-Test Your Action: But what if the action you choose to take on a trend is the wrong one? In this final step, you must make sure the strategy you take on a trend will deliver the desired outcome, and that requires asking difficult questions about both the present and the future.”
― Amy Webb, The Signals Are Talking: Why Today's Fringe Is Tomorrow's Mainstream

“The car is only one of many clues we must consider, starting with what is arguably a more important question: Why would an internet company build a car that can drive itself? In forecasting, the second step tells us that we need to do some more digging. Why is Google—a nineteen-year-old company that for much of its history has specialized only in products to help us use the web better—hiring teams of researchers to develop self-driving cars?”
― Amy Webb, The Signals Are Talking: Why Today's Fringe Is Tomorrow's Mainstream

“Because trends and time zones are a different way of seeing and interpreting our current reality, they provide a useful framework for organizing our thinking, especially when we’re hunting for the unknown and trying to find answers to questions we do not yet even know how to ask.”
― Amy Webb, The Signals Are Talking: Why Today's Fringe Is Tomorrow's Mainstream

“English mathematician Ada Lovelace and scientist Charles Babbage invented a machine called the “Difference Engine” and then later postulated a more advanced “Analytical Engine,” which used a series of predetermined steps to solve mathematical problems. Babbage hadn’t conceived that the machine could do anything beyond calculating numbers. It was Lovelace who, in the footnotes of a scientific paper she was translating, went off on a brilliant tangent speculating that a more powerful version of the Engine could be used in other ways.13 If the machine could manipulate symbols, which themselves could be assigned to different things (such as musical notes), then the Engine could be used to “think” outside of mathematics. While she didn’t believe that a computer would ever be able to create original thought, she did envision a complex system that could follow instructions and thus mimic a lot of what everyday people did. It seemed unremarkable to some at the time, but Ada had written the first complete computer program for a future, powerful machine—decades before the light bulb was invented. A”
― Amy Webb, The Big Nine: How the Tech Titans and Their Thinking Machines Could Warp Humanity

“THE FINAL STEP of our forecasting process is to pressure-test any strategy created to address a technology trend. Scenarios, as we’ve seen, help inform strategy; they fill in the necessary details in order to tell a complete story. However, in our zeal to pursue what’s new and what’s next, critical questions and details can be overlooked.”
― Amy Webb, The Signals Are Talking: Why Today's Fringe Is Tomorrow's Mainstream

“Just as we rent and share cars to get around today, we’ll pick up a body near our destination”
― Amy Webb, The Signals Are Talking: Why Today's Fringe Is Tomorrow's Mainstream

“Often, future game-changing trends enter society without attracting media attention or interest from the general public during the early years of development out on the fringe.”
― Amy Webb, The Signals Are Talking: Why Today's Fringe Is Tomorrow's Mainstream

“A trend is timely, but it persists.”
― Amy Webb, The Signals Are Talking: Why Today's Fringe Is Tomorrow's Mainstream

“Put another way, what would have been the value of DEC’s lead engineers dreaming big about the artificially intelligent computers of the far future? No one at DEC could have built one of these machines. But in pursuit of the future, they would have recognized emerging trends. That foresight might have led them to develop the first laptop. With a constant push, they might have envisioned the fourth era of computing—and perhaps beyond.”
― Amy Webb, The Signals Are Talking: Why Today's Fringe Is Tomorrow's Mainstream

“Kennedy acknowledged that nine years was an extremely aggressive time frame, but reminded the country that the Soviet Union had a significant head start. “If we were to go only half way, or reduce our sights in the face of difficulty, it would be better not to go at all,” he said. “While we cannot guarantee that we shall one day be first, we can guarantee that any failure to make this effort will make us last.”
― Amy Webb, The Signals Are Talking: Why Today's Fringe Is Tomorrow's Mainstream

“The tools and built environments of hair salons and the platforms powering the airline industry are examples of something called Conway’s law, which says that in absence of stated rules and instructions, the choices teams make tend to reflect the implicit values of their tribe.”
― Amy Webb, The Big Nine: How the Tech Titans and Their Thinking Machines Could Warp Humanity

“What’s not on the table, at the G-MAFIA or BAT, is optimizing for empathy. Take empathy out of the decision-making process, and you take away our humanity. Sometimes what might make no logical sense at all is the best possible choice for us at a particular moment. Like blowing off work to spend time with a sick family member, or helping someone out of a burning car, even if that action puts your own life in jeopardy.”
― Amy Webb, The Big Nine: How the Tech Titans and Their Thinking Machines Could Warp Humanity

“A trend is driven by a basic human need, one that is catalyzed by new technology.”
― Amy Webb, The Signals Are Talking: Why Today's Fringe Is Tomorrow's Mainstream

“Possible futures. In our lifetime, we probably won’t ever get beamed up like the Enterprise crew of Star Trek. But it’s certainly thrilling to think about. We know that the rate of change in technology progresses exponentially: it took humans 2,000 years to get from horse-drawn chariots to self-driving Google cars, but only 20 years to advance from landlines to iPhones.”
― Amy Webb, The Signals Are Talking: Why Today's Fringe Is Tomorrow's Mainstream

“The main problem, when an organization wants to map the future of x, is that it too often defines x far too narrowly, using the old market research paradigm. To identify emerging trends, you must gather information and observations from the fringe. But you must also broaden your definition of x.”
― Amy Webb, The Signals Are Talking: Why Today's Fringe Is Tomorrow's Mainstream

“This fringe sketch is fairly straightforward. The same approach can be used to map the fringe for a product—for example, what is the future of credit cards? Or an entire industry, such as what is the future of book publishing?”
― Amy Webb, The Signals Are Talking: Why Today's Fringe Is Tomorrow's Mainstream

“Google was early to recognize and act on trends. Google’s former rival, Yahoo, had a ten-year head start and at one point far more capital, but it waited too long to act. Even if it had been granted unlimited resources in 2015, many would argue that was just too late for Yahoo to put up a respectable fight.”
― Amy Webb, The Signals Are Talking: Why Today's Fringe Is Tomorrow's Mainstream

“Internal waypoints are visible, but only when you are intentionally tracking them. Compared to the establishment of a new federal agency, waypoints are boring, or involve technical language.”
― Amy Webb, The Signals Are Talking: Why Today's Fringe Is Tomorrow's Mainstream

“Even the most forward-thinking innovators are still grounded in reality, tethered to other areas of society.”
― Amy Webb, The Signals Are Talking: Why Today's Fringe Is Tomorrow's Mainstream