The Atlanta Journal-Constitution presents A Fireside Chat with Amy Webb - Author of The Genesis Machine
Quantitative futurist Amy Webb shares insights about what may lie ahead for industries and issues vital to Atlanta. Plus, Georgia Tech Scheller College of Business faculty detail how AI could shape our world.
Internationally renowned futurist and author Amy Webb joins The Atlanta Journal-Constitution to discuss what's next for Georgia and industries vital to its future. Founder and CEO of the Future Today Institute, Webb pioneered a data-driven foresight methodology used within hundreds of organizations worldwide. She packs the house as a keynote speaker at SXSW; advises Fortune 500 companies, Hollywood, and the Pentagon; and is a professor of strategic foresight at New York University's Stern School of Business.
With an eye toward Atlanta industries, Webb shares examples of potential disruptions that she details in her 2023 Emerging Tech Trend Report. Rodney Gibbs, the AJC's senior director of strategy and innovation, moderates the conversation.
Preceding Webb's keynote discussion, Georgia Tech's Scheller College of Business faculty members discuss how AI may affect business in Atlanta and beyond.
A Cappella Books will have copies of Webb's books, "The Genesis Machine: Our Quest to Rewrite Life in the Age of Synthetic Biology" and "The Big Nine: How the Tech Titans and Their Thinking Machines Could Warp Humanity," available for purchase at the event.
About the Event
Internationally renowned futurist and author Amy Webb joins The Atlanta Journal-Constitution to discuss what's next for Georgia and industries vital to its future. Founder and CEO of the Future Today Institute, Webb pioneered a data-driven foresight methodology used within hundreds of organizations worldwide. She packs the house as a keynote speaker at SXSW; advises Fortune 500 companies, Hollywood, and the Pentagon; and is a professor of strategic foresight at New York University's Stern School of Business.
With an eye toward Atlanta industries, Webb shares examples of potential disruptions that she details in her 2023 Emerging Tech Trend Report. Rodney Gibbs, the AJC's senior director of strategy and innovation, moderates the conversation.
Preceding Webb's keynote discussion, Georgia Tech's Scheller College of Business faculty members discuss how AI may affect business in Atlanta and beyond.
About "The Genesis Machine"
A breakthrough investigation of synthetic biology: the promising and controversial technology platform that combines biology and artificial intelligence and has the potential to program biological systems like we program computers.
Synthetic biology is the technique that enables us not just to read and edit but also to write DNA to program living biological structures as though they were tiny computers. Unlike cloning Dolly the sheep-which cut and copied existing genetic material-the future of synthetic biology might be something like an app store, where you could download and add new capabilities into any cell, microbe, plant, or animal.
This breakthrough science has the potential to mitigate, perhaps solve, humanity's immediate and longer-term existential challenges: climate change; the feeding, clothing, housing, and caring for billions of humans; fighting the next viral outbreak before it becomes a global pandemic; old age as a treatable pathology; bringing back extinct animals.
It could also be anarchic and socially destructive. With our governing structures created in an era before startling advances in technology, we are not prepared for a future in which life could be manipulated or programmed.
As futurist Amy Webb and synthetic biologist Andrew Hessel show in this book, within the next decade, we will need to make important decisions: whether to program novel viruses to fight diseases, what genetic privacy will look like, who will "own" living organisms, how companies should earn revenue from engineered cells, and how to contain a synthetic organism in a lab. "The Genesis Machine" provides the background for us to understand and grapple with these issues and consider the religious, philosophical, and ethical implications for the future.
About "The Big Nine"
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 that 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.
About the Author
Amy Webb advises CEOs of the world's most admired companies, three-star admirals and generals, and the senior leadership of central banks and intergovernmental organizations on the future of technology and science. A quantitative futurist, Amy is the CEO of the Future Today Institute, a leading foresight and management consulting firm. She is a professor of strategic foresight at New York University's Stern School of Business and a Visiting Fellow at Oxford University's Säid School of Business. She was elected a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations, is a member of the Bretton Woods Committee, and serves as a Steward and Steering Committee member of the World Economic Forum. She was also a Delegate on the former U.S.-Russia Bilateral Presidential Commission, where she worked on the future of technology and international diplomacy. Amy was named by Forbes as "one of the five women changing the world," honored as one of the BBC's 100 Women of 2020, and is ranked by Thinkers50 as one of the most influential business minds in the world. Amy is the award-winning author of "The Big Nine: How the Tech Titans and Their Thinking Machines Could Warp Humanity" and "The Signals are Talking: Why Today's Fringe is Tomorrow's Mainstream."
