PERSON
Amy Webb
The quantitative futurist who replaced crystal-ball prophecy with a rigorous, repeatable discipline for detecting early signals of consequential change—and who turned her method on artificial intelligence to reveal that its trajectory is being set not by technology but by nine corporations answerable to forces that have nothing to do with human welfare.
In a field crowded with prophets, Amy Webb insists on being something less glamorous and far more useful: an analyst. She built her practice on a conviction so simple it sounds almost naive—that the future is not a fixed destination but a space of possibilities, continuously narrowed by decisions most of us never see, and that it can be studied with the same method a scientist applies to any system: gather evidence, form hypotheses, calculate probabilities, revise. Her great contribution to the conversation about artificial intelligence is a question the industry would rather not foreground. Not what can AI do but who is building it, under what pressures, toward whose ends. In The Big Nine, published in 2019, she named the small set of corporations—the G-MAFIA on the American side, the BAT on the Chinese—on whose decisions the entire trajectory of machine
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