Amy Webb – Medium

Apr 27

20 Books and Articles to Get You Started in Strategic Foresight

A futurist is someone who tracks signals using statistics, deep research, and creative thinking and methodically analyzes next-order outcomes. The job is about preparations, not predictions. Given what we know to be true today, we use data and deep research to understand how the future could look different in many…

Future

5 min read

20 Books and Articles to Get You Started in Strategic Foresight

Dec 8, 2021

FTI Annual Letter 2021 Signals Inventory + 2022 Look Ahead

Note: this is a repost of our weekly Future Today Institute Tech Trends newsletter. You can read past issues and subscribe here. This year we grappled with a global pandemic and the avalanche of change reshaped entire landscapes. Artificial intelligence is being applied to speed the discovery of new medicines…

Innovation

24 min read

FTI Annual Letter
2021 Signals Inventory + 2022 Look Ahead

Mar 18, 2021

500 Tech Trends for 2021

Diminished Reality is here: it’s like Augmented Reality in reverse. Synthetic biologists are working on biological teleportation between Earth and Mars. Amazon has been quietly building a massive healthcare ecosystem in the U.S. What do these developments have in common? …

Trends

3 min read

Jul 15, 2020

How (And Why) to Budget Now for Strategic Foresight in 2021

Right now, most companies are working on their budgets for 2021. Given the soul-crushing amount of uncertainty ahead, budget planning for FY21 will be a challenging, arduous process. Making allocations for signal tracking, scenario planning and longer-term visioning might seem frivolous, or outright irresponsible, given the circumstances. There’s a problem…

Management

6 min read

How (And Why) to Budget Now for Strategic Foresight in 2021

Mar 11, 2020

How Futurists Cope With Uncertainty

A simple tool you can use to see plausible future states early — I’ve been fielding lots of questions this week from clients, journalists, researchers and friends working in various parts of the federal government. Everyone is feeling anxious. We’re suddenly dealing with unprecedented, wide-sweeping changes. To the surprise of political analysts, Bernie Sanders lost the Michigan primary last night and it’s looking…

Anxiety

8 min read

Feb 25, 2019

A Better Turing Test: How to measure the strength of AI

By now you’ve heard of the Turing Test. In a paper published in the philosophy journal Mind, Alan Turing proposed a thesis and a test: If someday, a computer was able to answer questions in a manner indistinguishable from humans, then it must be “thinking.” The test was built on…

Artificial Intelligence

4 min read

A Better Turing Test: How to measure the strength of AI

Mar 14, 2018

These Are The World’s Smartest Cities

In the 2018 edition of the Future Today Institute’s annual emerging tech trends report, we wondered what makes smart cities “smart.” What makes a city “smart?” In 2016, 78 cities applied for the U.S. Department of Transportation’s “Smart City” challenge, which would award the winner $40 million in federal grant…

Smart Cities

2 min read

Sep 7, 2016

Announcing the Future Today Summit

We must do a better job of planning for the future. Today. This is the first time in human history when real, fundamental change is taking place within a single generation, and the driving force is technology. Everything new now seems novel, because the changes heading our way seem too…

Artificial Intelligence

4 min read

Mar 17, 2016

The Future, Today

I’m thrilled to announce that today is the launch of The Future Today Institute. We research emerging technologies at the fringes and track them as they move towards the mainstream. Our pioneering, data-driven forecasting methodology and tools enable organization leaders to make better decisions about the future, today. The seeds…

Leadership

3 min read

Nov 6, 2014

Actually, this isn’t the golden age of Japanese whisky.

This week, the World Whiskey Bible guide awarded its top prize to the Yamazaki Single Malt Sherry Cask 2013. Scottish brands didn’t make it into the top five. A frenzy ensued. The Atlantic asks “Is This the Golden Age of Japanese Whiskey?” Fox News says that new Japanese whiskys are…

5 min read

Actually, this isn’t the golden age of Japanese whisky.