Amy Webb
Founder and CEO, Future Today Institute; Professor, NYU Stern School of Business; Author, The Genesis Machine
Amy Webb is founder and CEO of the Future Today Institute, where she pioneered a data-driven foresight methodology used in thousands of organizations, and professor at the NYU Stern School of Business. She serves on the Stewardship Board at the World Economic Forum and its Global Future Council for Media, Entertainment and Culture. Webb is the author of several award-winning books, including 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. Her latest book, The Genesis Machine, explores the future of biotech. Webb was named by Forbes as one of five women changing the world and listed among the BBC’s 100 Women of 2020.
Highlights
This excerpt has been lightly edited for clarity
-
Amy Webb: The people who built the [TSA screening technology] weren’t people who were familiar with enormous hair, or weaves, or bras with underwire...The system wasn’t trained to recognize me. Why? Because somebody like me wasn’t in the room when the data set was built, when the algorithms to use that data were built, when the testing was done, and when the learning was done. That entire chain of decision-making excluded me, which now means that when I go through this stupid machine at the airport I can expect someone to get very familiar with me. That’s a small inconvenience. We could probably spend three hours going through serious infractions in the criminal justice system, and [discover] serious ways in which this is being used to really hurt people.
