The world’s leading tech futurist and founder of the Future Today Institute, Amy Webb, discusses the future of work with Quartz contributor Felix Zeltner: how AI is moving beyond hype, why focus is key to long-term success, and what threatens her own profession as a futurist.
This March, when you launched your annual trend report, you listed no less than 666 trends, many of them connected to AI. Could you share any developments that have surprised you or challenged your predictions over the past six months?
My job is never to be surprised. But over the past six months, I’ve observed increased activity and investment in artificial intelligence, especially in generative AI. OpenAI’s release of GPT-3 to the public last year has generated significant interest and funding in the field. Companies are now taking a platform approach to AI, moving beyond chatbots to AI wearables designed for conversational computing.
Can you clarify what phase of AI disruption we find ourselves in right now?
AI is a long-term technology, with a history dating back centuries. The term “AI” was coined in 1956, and we’ve experienced cycles of hype and innovation followed by periods of stagnation. We’re currently in a phase of increased attention, investment, and business activity related to AI. However, it’s important to remember that AI’s full potential will unfold over decades. We may see regulation become a significant factor in shaping AI’s future. It’s crucial for businesses to align short-term decisions with long-term strategies when it comes to AI.
As a mother and a professor, what advice do you have for parents and educators on preparing kids for the AI era?
We should approach technology and AI with a sense of mindfulness. Often, people either fear technology or have a fear of missing out on it. We need to find a practical balance. In our household, we’ve built our own network to allow our daughter limited access to certain things. She doesn’t have her own phone—at 13 years old—but we do encourage her to use and learn about these tools. For example, she was an early user of GPT-3, and she learned to be skeptical of its responses. She knows how to check the source of information and has been taught digital literacy since kindergarten. My concern isn’t for her; it’s for the children who lack digital street smartness or access to these tools, widening the digital divide.
You often say in interviews that you are a futurist, but you don’t predict the future—you build scenarios. However, these days there is a growing number of people calling themselves futurists. Your profession is not protected, just like journalism. What is your take on the growing group of people that claim your job description?
This is my second career. I started out as a journalist. I worked for the Wall Street Journal and for Newsweek many, many years ago and back then, the commercial Internet was becoming a thing. You may remember, there was this moment in time when there were a bunch of “citizen journalists” and bloggers, and there was this sort of fissure within the journalism community: what is journalism and what isn’t? And who can we trust? Throughout history, there was a positive correlation between big moments of deep uncertainty and the number of people calling themselves futurists. So it’s not a surprise to me at all that right now we’re seeing this bump up again.
And there is a significant difference between somebody interested in technology and pontificating on what they think is next. Then there is the work that myself and my colleagues do, which is super boring, for the most part, and tedious, and involves us sitting in comfy clothing in an office somewhere, pulling more data than you would ever want to look at, and building a model with this data. I often say that we don’t make predictions, but that’s also a little bit of a lie, because we do some predictive work. The key difference is: I refuse to tell you things I don’t know. I think the reports that we’ve all seen about AI that’s going to give 300 trillion dollars to the economy, and 400 trillion people will be out of work—it’s bullshit. Sorry, it’s nonsense. My sincere hope is that someday, in the very near future, the job of a futurist is about as sexy-sounding as an accountant.
So if we stumble across someone in our Linkedin feed who’s very loud, calling themselves a futurist but doesn’t crunch a lot of data, we should be skeptical.
This is a moment in time where there’s gonna be a lot of snake oil salesmen selling you either thought leadership or wild speculative ideas about the future, or reports. You really need to be careful right now about who you’re listening to, especially if you’re a business person.
What is the next big thing after AI? What’s a ‘next next’ that you can share with us?
If you were to ask me what’s the most important technology platform going forward, I would actually say it’s biology. Biology can be reduced down to ACTG, which are the letters that make up DNA, much like you can reduce computing down to ones and zeros. We now have access to the code of life; we can use various different tools within the umbrella of biotech and synthetic biology to edit genetic code right from scratch, and that unlocks new opportunities for us to address things like climate change, human longevity, and overall health. There is also a space where AI and biology overlap interestingly: a lot of the same people funding AI and some of the same companies doing the fundamental basic research in AI are also the same folks in the space of biology. My concern is that biology is much more controversial than basic technology because it does call into question philosophical and moral questions about life, and where it comes from. I hope we have conversations leading up to that, so that it’s less of a shock to people.
Fittingly, you wrote a book about that.
Now, I will offer one last caveat: we have very short attention spans, so don’t forget as much as it may feel like everything is AI right now, five years ago everything was blockchain, and then everything was crypto, and then we cycled back to blockchain again, then web3, then metaverse. And now here we are with AI business that has become capricious and fickle. So if you are a leader, it all has to do with focus. If you don’t dedicate yourself to maintaining focus, and if you do not have data-driven scenarios which help you create a vision for a plausible future, it’s going to be very hard for you to manage, and there’s a high probability that you’re going to get dragged into somebody else’s idea of what the future ought to look like. The good news is, we have autonomy. The future doesn’t just show up—you have to insert yourself and take actions based on real-world practical information.
This interview is based on a conversation with Amy Webb and her colleague Christina von Messling on October 10, 2023 on Remote Daily. It has been edited for length and clarity and is available as video here.