Luke Robert Mason: You’re lis­ten­ing to the Futures Podcast with me, Luke Robert Mason.

On this episode, I speak to quan­ti­ta­tive futur­ist, Amy Webb.

I would like to see a future in which we all still have agency, and my con­cern is that we are get­ting fur­ther and fur­ther away from a future in which each one of us has the abil­i­ty to make decisions.
Amy Webb, excerpt from interview.

Amy shared her insights into the impor­tance of trend fore­cast­ing, the glob­al chal­lenges faced by mod­ern busi­ness, and the tools you need for think­ing like a futur­ist. This episode was record­ed on loca­tion in London, England, where Amy was due to give a keynote presentation.

Luke Robert Mason: So Amy Webb, you are a futur­ist. What does that term—futurist—mean to you?

Amy Webb: So in my case, as a futur­ist I con­sid­er myself to be a quan­ti­ta­tive futur­ist which is to say that I use data and quan­ti­ta­tive evi­dence and qual­i­ta­tive evi­dence, and use that to mod­el out plau­si­ble, prob­a­ble and pos­si­ble sce­nar­ios in the long term, and then devel­op strate­gies around that. So it’s a data dri­ven process.

Mason: So how did you get inter­est­ed in this thing—the future?

Webb: The future. So the short end of the sto­ry is that this is my sec­ond career. My first career was as a for­eign cor­re­spon­dent. I was liv­ing in Tokyo and China in the mid-90s when a lot of the con­sumer tech­nol­o­gy that we take for grant­ed today was first being pro­to­typed. So I got to see very ear­ly ver­sions of phones that were con­nect­ed to the Internet, phones that had cam­eras, and I remem­ber think­ing how dra­mat­i­cal­ly that tech­nol­o­gy was going to change every day life. I con­tin­u­al­ly had chal­lenges con­vinc­ing the jour­nal­ists that I was work­ing with that some­day in the very near future, we were all going to have the Internet in our pock­et, and have access to news ²⁴⁄₇, and we were gonna prob­a­bly have prob­a­bly have new dis­tri­b­u­tion chan­nels to enable any­body to share news. And by the way, I could take a pho­to which would prob­a­bly mean that I could prob­a­bly some­day be able to take a video and post it from wher­ev­er I hap­pen to be. I got con­stant feed­back and edi­tors say­ing, ​“Who would ever pub­lish a grainy pho­to tak­en from some­body’s phone? Nobody would ever do that—a grainy pho­to will nev­er run in a news­pa­per.” And I remem­ber say­ing, ​“I’m not talk­ing about the phys­i­cal news­pa­per, I’m talk­ing about the Internet.” So I got tired of hav­ing those argu­ments and quite frankly the news­room was tired of me bring­ing up those argu­ments, and we part­ed ways. I start­ed a R&D lab that was pro­to­typ­ing news fea­tures, most­ly in the dis­tri­b­u­tion realm but basi­cal­ly we were work­ing all the time on inter­est­ing and dif­fer­ent ways to col­lect and share news. That was all about the future. At the same time I had dis­cov­ered Alvin Toffler which then led to all of the futur­ists from the late 1800s through the 70s or so. I read every­thing and decid­ed, ​“Wow, there are peo­ple who do this all the time. They think about and mod­el out future sce­nar­ios and they do that for all dif­fer­ent types of pur­pos­es, and that’s what I should be doing next”.

Mason: So your new book The Signals Are Talking is real­ly the method­ol­o­gy for how we analyse and look at the future. Could you share some of those method­olo­gies that you share in the book?

Webb: Sure. So my method­ol­o­gy is six parts, and it was def­i­nite­ly influ­enced by oth­er futur­ists who are in the sort of aca­d­e­m­ic space. My mod­el alter­nates between what Stanford’s D School would have called ​‘flared and focused think­ing.’ It’s been my obser­va­tion that when peo­ple are think­ing about the future—especially when it comes to technology—they tend to focus on just one thing. If they’re try­ing to fig­ure out the future of cars—and I just had a long con­ver­sa­tion with an auto com­pa­ny about this—what they’re try­ing to do is fig­ure out the future of peo­ple mov­ing around. They’re not actu­al­ly try­ing to fig­ure out the future of cars, because that would assume that we will only ever have cars. That nar­row think­ing is the result from not going real­ly broad in a method­i­cal way, and going nar­row when it makes sense.

So my method is six steps. It starts with hunt­ing down weak sig­nals at the fringe, so these are changes in tech­nol­o­gy, changes in soci­ety, and what I would call The 10 Modern Sources of Change which involve every­thing from ecol­o­gy to eco­nom­ics and wealth changes. That allows me to cre­ate a map and I call that map a ​‘fringe sketch’, but for peo­ple who have done any kind of sta­tis­tics, it’s just a bunch of notes and con­nec­tions. That essen­tial step—especially when you do it with a team of people—it helps you find all of the dif­fer­ent pieces that you oth­er­wise would have missed. It forces you to change the ques­tion from, ​“What’s the future of cars?” to, ​“What’s the future of peo­ple, pets and objects mov­ing around?” 

From there, the sec­ond step is to focus and do pat­tern recog­ni­tion, and look for pat­terns from those sig­nals. At that point you should have dif­fer­ent trend can­di­dates. Trends are impor­tant because they are way­points to the future. You know, a lot of times peo­ple think iden­ti­fy­ing trends—that’s the whole goal, that’s the end. Really that’s the begin­ning, because once you’ve iden­ti­fied trends you have to do three things. So that’s the next cou­ple of steps of the process. One is you have to make sure you did­n’t screw up. A whole bunch of peo­ple get dis­tract­ed by shiny objects. The exam­ple that I like to use is Foursquare and check­ing in badges. If you can remem­ber way back, many many years ago to 2013 when every­body was check­ing in and earn­ing their badges. Lots of com­pa­nies invest­ed, lots of com­pa­nies made cus­tom badges and every­body thought that the badges and the check-ins were the future. That was­n’t the future. Location based ser­vices, which is real­ly bor­ing—that was the future. That was what was pay­ing atten­tion to. That was the trend.

The third step of the process is to focus, to ask your­self a bunch of ques­tions and to go through data, to go through the mod­els to make sure you did­n’t mess any­thing up.

Then the fourth step is to nar­row once again and think through tim­ing and tra­jec­to­ry, and then you have to take some kind of action. So the fifth and sixth steps have to do with devel­op­ing a strategy.

So it’s a long expla­na­tion, but I should say the rea­son I just explained it all is because as of last month, I have open-sourced all of my IP so all of my research, all of the work I’ve ever done is now freely available.

Mason: What’s the reason?

Webb: That seems nuts! Why on earth would you do that?

Mason: Well when so many futur­ists it seems kind of pro­tect their method­olo­gies. Futurists do this mag­i­cal think­ing back in their offices and yet the first thing they say when they get on the stage is, ​“No-one under­stands what I do.” There’s always this fake mythos that’s cre­at­ed around what I like to call the ​‘medi­a­tised futur­ist.’ The futur­ist who has a keynote speak­ing career but real­ly does­n’t do the hard graft of deal­ing with the dif­fi­cult ques­tions asso­ci­at­ed with this thing called the future.

Webb: Right—excellent point, and good ques­tion. The rea­son is because—well. I’ve always thought it strange that peo­ple who run gov­ern­ments and busi­ness­es are expect­ed to learn how to use a spread­sheet. They’re expect­ed to under­stand basic account­ing, and they’re not expect­ed to under­stand how to think like a futur­ist. I’ve always thought that was real­ly strange because osten­si­bly their jobs are the future.

I think we’re on a new kind of time hori­zon with regards to tech­nol­o­gy. It’s our gen­er­a­tion that is liv­ing through a transition—it just does­n’t feel like it. My daughter—who is pret­ty young—she’s going to be prob­a­bly the last group of human beings who have to learn how to dri­ve. My father—who is in his 70s—is prob­a­bly going to be in the last gen­er­a­tion of peo­ple who still have to type. 

We’re look­ing at a whole bunch of fun­da­men­tal­ly ground­break­ing tech­nolo­gies that range from the var­i­ous facets of arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence, to genom­ic edit­ing, to all kinds of automa­tion. All of these things togeth­er will fun­da­men­tal­ly change what it’s like to be a human. At the same time, we are all also all liv­ing through a geo-politically unsta­ble moment in time. I hope it’s a moment. Part of that is the fault of the per­son run­ning our country—my country—right now. If it was any­body else you could use game the­o­ry to sort of mod­el out what might hap­pen next. We’re in a sit­u­a­tion where we tru­ly don’t know what might get Tweeted next or what might hap­pen next, and I’m con­cerned. What my feel­ing is, now more than ever peo­ple are fetishis­ing the future and they feel very anx­ious about the future, and I want every­body to make smarter deci­sions and to get informed, and to use the tools that I use to make bet­ter deci­sions. I see no harm in open-sourcing every­thing. I see that only as a big ben­e­fit, because if we are all using futur­ist tools and mod­els and we’re doing it in a seri­ous way, that will help everybody.

Mason: Do you think some of the interest—or at least the pub­lic interest—in notions and pos­si­bil­i­ties of the future comes from an attrac­tion to shiny objects? How do you extract or remove peo­ple from pure­ly that fas­ci­na­tion and help them realise that there’s things a lot more dif­fi­cult to nav­i­gate? We’re told, ​“The future is going to be awe­some.” You get these peo­ple who stand on stage and they sell these incred­i­ble futures. But it always feels like the rea­son why peo­ple are so attract­ed to these futures is because there’s some­thing so fun­da­men­tal­ly wrong with the present, and this feels like a poten­tial to escape into some­thing that will be better.

Webb: I think you’re onto some­thing. I would par­tial­ly blame it on the pat­tern recog­ni­tion parts of our brain that start fir­ing off when we’re look­ing to make sense of some­thing. I think par­tial­ly what attracts peo­ple to tech-utopianism—I think you’re absolute­ly right. I think it’s the same rea­son that we go watch movies in the the­atre. It’s because we want an escape. Maybe it’s also why peo­ple go to church. They want the promise of a bet­ter tomor­row. But there’s also the oth­er side of that coin which is the dystopi­an visions of the future. There’s plen­ty of peo­ple who also stand on stage and talk about the end of the world coming.

A cou­ple of things are going on. As humans, we’ve always been sur­round­ed by a lot of data. We’re espe­cial­ly sur­round­ed by and assault­ed by enor­mous amounts of data today, and the way that our brains our wired is that we’re con­stant­ly look­ing for pat­terns to help us make sense of what’s around, and the eas­i­est way for us to do some­thing with that infor­ma­tion once we’ve recog­nised pat­terns is to fit it into a nar­ra­tive. That’s why sto­ry­telling is so fun­da­men­tal to human­i­ty. It’s because that’s how we pass infor­ma­tion. The peo­ple who tell these crazy sto­ries about the future—whether they’re pos­i­tive or neg­a­tive or strange or whatever—you know, it’s easy to con­nect to them and to what they’re saying.

But the thing to keep in mind is that I am a pro­fes­sion­al futur­ist and I have absolute­ly no idea what the future is. My job isn’t to tell you or to pre­dict what the future is. My job is to fig­ure out, giv­en what we know to be true today—what are the like­ly paths and what does the prob­a­bilis­tic mod­el show? Then we use that infor­ma­tion to make bet­ter deci­sions. But that’s not as eas­i­ly under­stood as some­body stand­ing on stage with a pret­ty pic­ture in the back­ground and space­ships fly­ing over­head and Uber-taxiing it—or what­ev­er they’re call­ing it—these five min­utes and say­ing, ​“Everything is going to be great. Just wait 15 or 20 years for AGI to kick in.”

Mason: Why do you think the cur­rent state of dis­cussing or fram­ing the future sits with­in this bina­ry of either, ​“You’re an eter­nal optimist—AI is going to save us, it’s going to make us more intel­li­gent about our­selves” or, ​“AI is going to be the thing that kills us, if it isn’t nano-tech or if it isn’t some sort thing that falls from space or syn­thet­ic biol­o­gy.” Why do you think it has to sit across these two dichotomies? I’ve always felt that when Elon and Co. say that, ​“Oh AI is going to be our last inven­tion,” it some­times feels like it’s just real­ly good mar­ket­ing. I don’t think that the tech­nol­o­gy is quite there yet, but if they instill that fear in peo­ple, they believe that the future is clos­er than it actu­al­ly is. I think the future itself is being used as a form of lever­age in a weird sort of way.

Webb: Yeah that’s a real­ly, real­ly good per­spec­tive. It’s the third step of my methodology—once you’ve heard some­thing or you’ve decid­ed some­thing is—like a technology—is a thing, and even if it’s bina­ry at that point, step num­ber three says, ​“Eviscerate every­thing that you know. Tear it all apart, and if at the end of you pok­ing holes into every sin­gle thing, you still believe that, then fine—and if you’ve got evi­dence to back it up.” What I would say is that every­body has—usually—different rea­sons for offer­ing polar­is­ing views, and usu­al­ly those rea­sons have to do with some kind of gain, and so that’s part of it. The oth­er part of it is we live in a world where infor­ma­tion is every­where, and in the dig­i­tal realm, atten­tion is cur­ren­cy. It’s hard­er and hard­er to get peo­ple’s atten­tion with­out say­ing some­thing salacious.

So Marvin Minsky, one of the founders of mod­ern AI and one of the peo­ple who coined the term in the 60s calls AI a ​‘suit­case word’ and the rea­son is because you can pack a lot of stuff in a suit­case, and it is a suit­case. But once you open the suit­case up you can have a thou­sand dif­fer­ent things in it. AI—artificial intelligence—is a suit­case word, because inside that suit­case is any­thing from machine read­ing com­pre­hen­sion to deep nets, and machine learn­ing and com­pu­ta­tion­al linguistics—I mean there’s a lot that’s in there. To try and have a con­ver­sa­tion with some­one who is not a tech­nol­o­gist or who does­n’t fol­low what’s hap­pen­ing, their eyes are going to gloss over. Therefore it’s either, ​“AI is going to kill us all,” or, ​“AI is going to save us all.” That’s what grabs the atten­tion. In real­i­ty, AI—artificial and nar­row intelligence—is already here. We all already use it and inter­act with it every sin­gle day. Anything in life, the sub­tleties are what always get missed. But those are usu­al­ly the most impor­tant com­po­nents to be pay­ing atten­tion to.

Mason: So what is the role, then, of the futur­ist? To bet­ter edu­cate the gen­er­al pub­lic around the lan­guage asso­ci­at­ed with poten­tial new forms of tech­nol­o­gy? It always feels like there’s a lan­guage issue, with the exam­ple of AI and the suit­case. People are very con­fused as to what this tech­nol­o­gy is capa­ble of doing and what it does right now. There’s a mis­com­mu­ni­ca­tion between what con­sti­tutes arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence ver­sus what is essen­tial­ly intel­li­gence aug­men­ta­tion. How can the futur­ist bet­ter help aver­age Joe or Jane nav­i­gate these com­plex times?

Webb: I see my role as part­ly edu­ca­tion­al for that rea­son. To help the pub­lic make sense of tech­nol­o­gy in their lives and the deci­sions that we’re mak­ing with regards to that tech­nol­o­gy. Part of it is edu­ca­tion­al, part of it is advi­so­ry. So I do advise the United States gov­ern­ment, and the mil­i­tary, and dif­fer­ent com­pa­nies. I think that there are sort of dual pur­pos­es. There are cer­tain­ly futur­ists who work in a con­sul­ta­tive capac­i­ty and I don’t think do the pub­lic edu­ca­tion. I view myself as a pub­lic intel­lec­tu­al as much as any­thing and I feel like I have an oblig­a­tion to not just tell peo­ple, ​“This is what I see,” but to show them my work. Especially now when every­thing is poten­tial­ly con­sid­ered fake news, the last thing we need is fake futures news. That would be a real problem.

Mason: Do you think we are in a sit­u­a­tion where we’re being shown a cer­tain degree of fake futures? It goes back to that issue around lever­age and future being used as leverage—either because there’s per­son­al gain or there’s prof­itabil­i­ty or there’s some sort of polit­i­cal gain there. That’s been since the 60s where old Kennedy was going, ​“We’re not doing it ​’cause it’s easy, we’re doing it ​’cause it’s hard,” and went off to space to prove that they owned both the future and the present, ver­sus the Russians. I just won­der when either per­son­al agen­das, prof­itabil­i­ty agen­das or polit­i­cal agen­das col­lide with the future, the inevitable out­come is fake futures in the same way that we have fake news.

Webb: That’s right and that is what we called the AI win­ter in the 60s. So the answer to your ques­tion is, ​“Yeah”—and that’s not good when that hap­pens. So for peo­ple who aren’t famil­iar with this already, lead­ing up to the 1960s there was a lot of activ­i­ty hap­pen­ing with new kinds of com­put­ers and com­put­ers mov­ing from the first era of com­put­ing to the sec­ond era of com­put­ing. If the first era real­ly just was tab­u­la­tion, the sec­ond was more about com­pu­ta­tion and com­plex computation.

There was a lot of activ­i­ty in the 40s, 50s and 60s around con­cep­tu­al­is­ing a frame­work where humans could teach machines to think, and so that was the gen­e­sis of all this. All the the­o­ries were fas­ci­nat­ing. Especially now, it’s real­ly inter­est­ing to go back and read some of those ear­ly aca­d­e­m­ic papers about whether or not humans might some­day teach machines to think and what the machines might do. Minsky actu­al­ly had a paper…he had obvi­ous­ly sev­er­al papers, but one of the papers he wrote talked about whether or not machines could maybe gain con­scious­ness. So there was a lot of real­ly inter­est­ing debate and dis­cus­sion at the same time that com­put­ers were get­ting faster com­po­nents, the price of com­po­nents were drop­ping. We had addi­tion­al com­put­er pow­er, we had more peo­ple who knew what to do with com­put­ers, we had the birth of mod­ern com­put­er sci­ence as an aca­d­e­m­ic discipline—and then every­body start­ed mak­ing a lot of promis­es. So one of the promis­es that got made in the United States was—and this is at the height of the Cold War—that arti­fi­cial­ly intel­li­gent machines could be used to simul­ta­ne­ous­ly trans­late Russian into English, which would have been a game chang­er. To sort of mon­i­tor con­ver­sa­tions that were hap­pen­ing and to simul­ta­ne­ous­ly trans­late those mes­sages. The ulti­mate spy­ing tool. But there was no way that that was going to work, so there was a lot of over­promis­ing about the future, a lot of fake news about the future of AI in the 60s, and when a lot of that failed to mate­ri­alise, all of that exu­ber­ance and excite­ment and most impor­tant­ly fund­ing dried up. The fake news about the future actu­al­ly wound up dra­mat­i­cal­ly impact­ing the future and we set our­selves back.

There’s a lot of excite­ment again and every­body’s talk­ing about AI now, and there’s a lot of the same exu­ber­ance, a lot of the same insane fund­ing cycles, you know.

Mason: So do you think we’re due anoth­er win­ter? Another AI winter?

Webb: I mean I would hope not. There’s always going to be a pock­et of peo­ple that push the tech­nol­o­gy for­ward. I think at this point it’s too big to fail. There’s so much fund­ing tied up. China has promised a chunk of it’s sov­er­eign wealth fund. I don’t see AI, the field, going through the same thing it did dur­ing that first AI win­ter. However, I see a lot of peo­ple get­ting dis­tract­ed by the shiny. The shiny object I think in this case is a lot of what you see celebri­ties talk­ing about, and celebri­ty tech­nol­o­gists talk­ing about. But also, we’re heav­i­ly influ­enced by enter­tain­ment media and a lot of these images are indeli­ble. So Her—the movie Her -

Mason: - And Black Mirror, and Humans in the UK, Westworld in the US?

Webb: Absolutely. Now some of those, I don’t think I’ve… Westworld, by the way, is my favourite show ever. Most of the Black Mirror episodes are my sec­ond favourite. I haven’t come across any­body who believes that Westworld is like­ly in our future. I have, how­ev­er, heard a bunch of peo­ple ref­er­ence the movie Her, and Samantha—the char­ac­ter in it, on a pret­ty reg­u­lar basis, which means that when peo­ple think about the prospect of talk­ing to machines, that movie is so stuck in their heads that that’s what they’ve envi­sioned for the future. That’s prob­a­bly not what the future is going to look like in the near-term but it’s a good reminder that we influ­ence the out­comes of the future through effec­tive storytelling.

Mason: Do you think there is cer­tain memet­ic pow­er in sci­ence fic­tion that actu­al­ly under­lines cer­tain tra­jec­to­ries towards the future? We have less peo­ple read­ing sci­ence fiction—more peo­ple know Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror than they do William Gibson’s Neuromancer.

Webb: You think so?

Mason: Oh yeah, yeah.

Webb: As you were say­ing that I was­n’t think­ing of Gibson. I was think­ing more of Asimov, or of Philip K. Dick.

Mason: It feels like that guides most indi­vid­u­al’s think­ing, and Black Mirror is an inter­est­ing exam­ple ​’cause it feels so close.

Webb: Yeah. I think the con­trol and nostalgia—they’re incred­i­bly pow­er­ful feel­ings and so there’s a sense of not hav­ing any con­trol when it comes to the future because you don’t know exact­ly what’s going to hap­pen next unless you think that we are liv­ing in Elon Musk’s robot world, right. So that sense of not hav­ing con­trol is incred­i­bly pow­er­ful and dis­ori­en­tat­ing. It engages our lim­bic sys­tems and our lim­bic sys­tems start fir­ing off, and the squishy com­put­ers inside of our heads—our brains—enter fight or flight mode and we feel anx­ious and then we start making…you know. The sto­ries we tell our­selves in our heads are always worse than real life. They always are.

So I think that’s one com­po­nent and if you think about just every­day tech­nol­o­gy, I would posit that a very small sliv­er of the gen­er­al pop­u­la­tion feels 100% com­fort­able any time they get a new tele­vi­sion or get a new tele­phone or some­thing. They realise they’re not going to break it and they’re okay mak­ing mis­takes and tin­ker­ing and fid­dling around, and it’s not a big deal. I would argue that prob­a­bly 90% of the pop­u­la­tion feels some sense of anx­i­ety every time they have to replace their mobile device, their mobile phone, or they have to get a new com­put­er or they have to do some­thing dif­fer­ent with email. It fires off that lim­bic sys­tem, and there is this sense that you don’t have con­trol. And to be fair—we don’t. We don’t real­ly con­trol any of the devices in our lives, some­body else does. Amazon does, Google does, Twitter does, Facebook does…pick a com­pa­ny. So I think that’s a big piece of it.

But as you were talk­ing, I’m won­der­ing if we’re always yearn­ing for sim­pler times when we were kids. That’s a theme, right? Simpler times when we were kids. I don’t know when I was a kid my life was any sim­pler nec­es­sar­i­ly than it is now, but I think we all think that it was. I won­der if part of that sto­ry­telling that goes on inside of our heads sort of feeds into that, ​“Life is going to be much more com­pli­cat­ed.” Technology is part of every sin­gle thing that we do. There is no way to extract it. My hunch is that there is this under­ly­ing sense of anx­i­ety that every­body feels because of tech­nol­o­gy. All the time.

Mason: Anxiety and also depres­sion. Do you think we’re in this weird lim­i­nal space at the moment where we haven’t quite gone through what we were promised and we’re not entire­ly sure as to what may emerge? Do you think it takes us a lot longer to deal with the impact of these devices or these tools in our lives?

Webb: Yes—to what you just said. The answer is yes, but let me explain why. You made me think of a cou­ple of inter­est­ing things. One thing that you made me think of was that I was at an event a cou­ple of months ago with Ev Williams, one of the founders of Twitter, and there were about 2000 jour­nal­ists in the room. One of the things…he did­n’t address what has become of Twitter. He did­n’t talk about it, and he did­n’t address Twitter’s impact on geo-politics, he did­n’t talk about any of it. Okay I under­stand that. He’s on the Board, he’s got a fidu­cia­ry respon­si­bil­i­ty to make sure that Twitter does­n’t tank because of some­thing he said. But a jour­nal­ist, final­ly dur­ing the Q and A, did ask him, ​“Did you ever stop and think that Twitter may be hijacked by bots or by peo­ple who would want to spread mis­in­for­ma­tion?” and his answer to that, I thought, was real­ly telling. His answer was, ​“It nev­er occurred to us because we weren’t think­ing about it, we were just try­ing to build a cool prod­uct,” right? If I had a nick­el for every time I heard some­one say, ​“We’re just work­ing on the prod­uct right now,” that’s bull­shit. The prob­lem is I either think that’s untrue, or wild­ly irre­spon­si­ble. I can­not fath­om that. Especially because before Twitter, Ev had anoth­er project. Do you know what else he found­ed before that? Have you ever heard of Blogger? It’s not as though he had nev­er seen some­body use a free plat­form to spread ill right around the world. 

My point is we’re past a time when you can just work on the prod­uct and not think about any­thing else, because any tech­nol­o­gy that comes into the media space is sub­ject to mis­use and use for good and all of these oth­er things, but you have to start think­ing through the sec­ond, third, fourth, fifth order impli­ca­tions of what­ev­er it is that you’re build­ing. If you’ve done that and you acknowl­edge, but then you choose to not wor­ry about it—fine. But just own up to it, you know.

I kind of wish Alvin Toffler was alive today, you know. Unfortunately he just passed, recent­ly passed. I wish that he was alive today and that he had­n’t yet writ­ten Future Shock. I won­der what the 2017 ver­sion of his book Future Shock would sound like. My gut tells me it would sound a lot like it did in the 60s, right—but prob­a­bly with more urgency. Humans go through cycles, so it may feel right now like life is mov­ing very fast and we don’t have a lot of con­trol, and we feel very anx­ious and peo­ple are mak­ing bad deci­sions. But if you look at a lot of the lit­er­a­ture and movies, and shows and stuff that was being writ­ten in the 60s, peo­ple felt the exact same way. If you go back to the 40s—the same, and the 20s—the same. There’s a his­to­ry of this.

Mason: I won­der if we’ve always been in this feel­ing of increas­ing accel­er­a­tion. Whether we’ve always felt like tech­nol­o­gy, the movie cam­era and all of these oth­er things have always been in this con­stant state of flux. I won­der if this is a nor­mal sit­u­a­tion. All that changes is the medi­um of transmission.

Webb: Well but that’s an impor­tant piece of it. I actu­al­ly think—and plen­ty of peo­ple would argue with me—I agree that we have always been in this state of flux. However, we have nev­er in human his­to­ry cre­at­ed this much data. Nor have we in human his­to­ry had the abil­i­ty to ingest as much data as we do every sin­gle day. So if you think back to the 60s, there was tele­vi­sion, there was radio, there were news­pa­pers and there were mag­a­zines, and that was it…and books, right…and movies. That was still rel­a­tive­ly slow. So you could have break­ing news­casts but for the most part if you want­ed to find out, you can go to the Washington Post and the New York Times in the United States. Both have archives that are open and eas­i­ly search­able. If you look at the vol­ume of news being report­ed about AI when it was new and ter­ri­fy­ing and inter­est­ing, and the reac­tions to that were all over the place in sci­ence fic­tion. If you go back, there was­n’t a tonne of insan­i­ty. There was­n’t a tonne of writ­ing. Today, it’s inescapable. You can­not get through the day unless you com­plete­ly unplug from every­thing, right? Which most peo­ple don’t do. You can­not get through the day with­out hear­ing some kind of news about change, right? Whether that’s tech­no­log­i­cal change, or eco­nom­ic change, or dis­en­fran­chise­ment, or some­thing nut­ty hap­pen­ing with pol­i­tics some­where in the world. I think that’s the key dif­fer­ence, but that’s an impor­tant dif­fer­ence because if our sense of change and anx­i­ety is that much more height­ened then the sto­ries we tell our­selves about the future get that much cra­zier and I think that it has this cas­cad­ing effect where we wind up hav­ing these polar­is­ing, bina­ry respons­es to any­thing hap­pen­ing to do with tech­nol­o­gy. Then—at least in my country—all of it gets politi­cised, and so you wind up with peo­ple say­ing, ​“Climate change,” or, ​“There is no cli­mate change,” or, ​“AI is com­ing,” or ​“Our cab­i­net offi­cials being AI deniers.” You know, you wind up with all kinds of crazy infor­ma­tion and thought.

Mason: Is that because we’re try­ing to aim to work at the same speed as cap­i­tal? So to go back to Ev Williams, they’re turn­ing Twitter—which a lot of indi­vid­u­als are say­ing should be hand­ed over as a pub­lic service—into a busi­ness that now has to return a hun­dred X return. But the num­bers don’t make sense.

Webb: The busi­ness mod­el does­n’t make sense.

Mason: The busi­ness mod­el does­n’t make sense. Part of the speed with­in news and media is because they have to cre­ate click-through to actu­al­ly sell and ser­vice the ads. Are we los­ing some­thing very human to cap­i­tal? If sud­den­ly Twitter start­ed to slow down in how much return on ad invest­ment it was mak­ing, it would slow­ly but sure­ly die as an organ­i­sa­tion. I always feel like the best thing Jack could do is hand it over to the gen­er­al pub­lic and go, ​“Look -”

Webb: Oh no, no, no. Don’t give it to the gen­er­al pub­lic. That would be worse. I think it should become a um -

Mason: Platform coop­er­a­tive. I’m fully -

Webb: Well, okay so a cou­ple of things -

Mason: It’s a pub­lic ser­vice, it’s a pub­lic good. It should be used in that way.

Webb: I think, so…there was a world­wide con­sor­tium of jour­nal­ists who have been doing phe­nom­e­nal inves­tiga­tive work that result­ed in some­thing called the Panama Papers and now the Paradise Papers. One of the things that I recent­ly said was that Twitter is the wire ser­vice of the 21^st cen­tu­ry. I did not…and the con­text around that was that news goes over the tran­som as quick­ly as it did at the begin­ning of the ear­ly days of wire services.

However, unlike the AP of Reuters, or the AFP which only allowed qual­i­ty jour­nal­ism that had been vet­ted and report­ed and sourced and edit­ed, any­body can put their stuff out through Twitter. That’s actu­al­ly not a good thing. It can be used as a 21^st cen­tu­ry wire ser­vice if there’s a glob­al con­sor­tium of news organ­i­sa­tions that get it, some­how. I don’t think it’s pur­chasable by any­body. And they allow the pub­lic to con­tin­ue using it.

However, there are plen­ty of ways to make sure that net­works aren’t tak­en over by bot­nets and that mis­in­for­ma­tion does­n’t spread. I could lit­er­al­ly talk to you for about an hour in very, very deeply tech­ni­cal terms and explain to you exact­ly how that would work. 

To your ques­tion about cap­i­tal­ism ver­sus the future, which I think is actu­al­ly an inter­est­ing debate and sort of right on. Twitter is not a good use case for that because they’re not mak­ing mon­ey out­side of a hand­ful of licens­ing deals and I’m not sure how sus­tain­able their mod­el is in the longer term. However Google and Amazon, and Tencent in China, and Baidu and Alibaba—there are plen­ty of com­pa­nies that are very, very large, that are in the per­son­al and pub­lic infor­ma­tion busi­ness. Now in that case, those are all publicly…well not in the Chinese com­pa­nies but in the United States…those are all pub­licly trad­ed com­pa­nies and the eco­nom­ic inter­ests don’t always align with what’s best for soci­ety in the longer term. But you could also argue that in a cap­i­tal­is­tic soci­ety, you know a busi­ness which has a respon­si­bil­i­ty, a fidu­cia­ry respon­si­bil­i­ty to shareholders—has to put it’s busi­ness inter­ests first. So you could argue that these com­pa­nies are doing exact­ly what they are set up to do, and they are doing it well. The chal­lenge is that we now see some of the effects of Silicon Valley essen­tial­ly oper­at­ing inde­pen­dent­ly of what the rest of our coun­try, or the rest of the world is doing.

Mason: You as an individual—beyond the work that you do in terms of pre­dict­ing oth­er peo­ple’s or oth­er busi­ness­es’ future—what’s the sort of future that you would like to see?

Webb: That’s an easy ques­tion to answer. I would like to see a future in which we all still have agency, and my con­cern is that we are get­ting fur­ther and fur­ther away from a future in which each one of us has the abil­i­ty to make deci­sions, and that’s because we con­trol less and less of the data—our own per­son­al data.

We are fur­ther and fur­ther removed from the algo­rithms that both mine and refine and process that data, and we have very lit­tle insight into how deci­sions are being made on our behalf—when that’s even hap­pen­ing. There’s no trans­paren­cy around how deci­sions are being made and that may not sound like a tech­ni­cal issue, how­ev­er all of the tech­nol­o­gy that you use in your life whether that is your tele­phone, your smart­phone, or your email or the game that you’re playing…you have almost no say or con­trol in how you use that device and how that device uses you.

The chal­lenge is that the more our tech­nol­o­gy gets sophis­ti­cat­ed in it’s approach, the clos­er that we move to a zero UI real­i­ty where things hap­pen more seam­less­ly; the more that we are allow­ing peo­ple to pro­gramme machines to make machines to make deci­sions for us. That sci-fi future ter­ri­fies me more than any­thing I have seen on Black Mirror, because that’s every­day life. So the best that I can hope for is that every­body starts think­ing through the impli­ca­tions of all the tech­nol­o­gy that we have access to and comes to a uni­fied deci­sion that we are about to an enable enor­mous tragedy of the com­mons. We are the com­mons, right—and that we col­lec­tive­ly decide that we want some­thing bet­ter for ourselves.

Mason: Well on that note, Amy Webb, thank you for your time.

Webb: Thank you, this was a lot of fun.

Mason: Thank you to Amy for shar­ing her thoughts on how we can think more crit­i­cal­ly and deeply about the future. You can find out more by pur­chas­ing Amy’s books, or down­load­ing her open source fore­cast­ing tools at Amy Webb dot io.

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