Audiobooks by Amy Webb

The Genesis Machine: Our Quest to Rewrite Life in the Age of Synthetic Biology

What if the miracle that created mRNA vaccines is less a once-in-lifetime event and more the harbinger of the emerging age of synthetic biology? This fusion of biology and computers has a singular goal: to gain access to cells in order to write new--and possibly better--biological code. Synthetic biology promises to reveal how life is created and how it can be re-created, enabling scientists to rewrite the rules of our reality. It could help us, for example, heal without prescription medications, grow meat without harvesting animals, or confront our looming climate catastrophe. Synthetic biology will determine the ways in which we conceive future generations and how we define family, how we identify disease and treat aging, where we make our homes, and how we nourish ourselves. Soon, we will program living, biological structures as though they were tiny computers. But who should decide how to engineer living organisms? Whether engineered organisms should be planted, farmed, and released into the wild? Should there be limits to human enhancements? Amy Webb and Andrew Hessel's riveting examination of synthetic biology and the bioeconomy provide the background for thinking through the upcoming risks and moral dilemmas posed by redesigning life, as well as the vast opportunities waiting for us on the horizon.

Amy Webb, Andrew Hessel (Author), Amanda Dolan, Amy Webb, Andrew Hessel, Landon Woodson, Tim Campbell (Narrator)

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The Big Nine: How the Tech Titans and Their Thinking Machines Could Warp Humanity

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 which 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.

Amy Webb (Author), Amanda Dolan (Narrator)

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The Signals Are Talking: Why Today's Fringe Is Tomorrow's Mainstream

A Fast Company best book of the year A Washington Post bestseller Winner of the 2017 Axiom Business Book Award in Business Technology How do you tell a real trend from the merely trendy? How, for example, will a technology-like artificial intelligence, machine learning, self-driving cars, biohacking, bots, and the Internet of Things-affect us, our businesses, and workplaces? How will it eventually change the way we live, work, play, and think-and how should we prepare for it now? In The Signals Are Talking, noted futurist Amy Webb shows us how to analyze the "true signals"-those patterns that will coalesce into a trend with the potential to change everything-and land on the right side of disruption. The future, Webb shows, isn't something that happens to us passively. Using a proven, tested methodology, she enables us to see ahead and forecast what's to come-challenging us to create our own preferred futures. **Contact Customer Service for Additional Material**

Amy Webb (Author), Tiffany Morgan (Narrator)

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Data, A Love Story

A lively, thought-provoking memoir about how one woman "gamed" online dating sites like JDate, OKCupid and eHarmony - and met her eventual husband. After yet another online dating disaster, Amy Webb was about to cancel her JDate membership when an epiphany struck: It wasn't that her standards were too high, as women are often told, but that she wasn't evaluating the right data in suitors' profiles. That night Webb, an award-winning journalist and digital-strategy expert, made a detailed, exhaustive list of what she did and didn't want in a mate. The result: seventy-two requirements ranging from the expected (smart, funny) to the super-specific (likes selected musicals: Chess, Les Misérables. Not Cats. Must not like Cats!). Next she turned to her own profile. In order to craft the most compelling online presentation, she needed to assess the competition-so she signed on to JDate again, this time as a man. Using the same gift for data strategy that made her company the top in its field, she found the key words that were digital man magnets, analyzed photos, and studied the timing of women's messages, then adjusted her (female) profile to make the most of that intel. Then began the deluge-dozens of men wanted to meet her, men who actually met her requirements. Among them: her future husband, now the father of her child. Forty million people date online each year. Most don't find true love. Thanks to Data, a Love Story, their odds just got a whole lot better.

Amy Webb (Author), Amy Webb, Brian Woolf (Narrator)

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