Prepare for a ‘technology supercycle,’ with futurist Amy Webb

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0:40They don't wait for HR problems to show up. They build solid systems early on so their company can grow without tripping over itself. JustWorks is one of those systems. JustWorks is the human resources platform that helps you scale without sacrificing your team's needs. It handles automated payroll, benefits, compliance, even international hiring, so you can scale your team without slowing your momentum. JustWorks secures your hiring systems so they don't cost you time, money, or people, which is how you scale with confidence. JustWorks for your people. I was in Tokyo, And I had a phone in the early 2000s that was connected to the Internet.

1:29So Japan and Korea for a while were much further ahead than everybody else in mobile. That's Amy Webb, describing one of the first revelations that put her on a career path to being a futurist, an entrepreneur, and a popular author. It had a camera at the same time that Americans were basically using the old Nokia 5190, right? Very analog. You could play Snake. That was the most thrilling thing you could do with it. But my phone was really advanced. And all I could see was a future where everybody was going to have phones that had cameras that were connected to an internet, where you could take pictures and you could share pictures.

2:06And therefore, given what I knew about technology and components and costs and everything else, like, it just seemed very obvious that the future of the Internet was more distributed. The future of content was less one to many and more sort of many to many. Being early to insights like this has established Amy Webb as a memorable public thinker. As an advisor, her roster of clients includes global companies and governments. Amy's also a highly sought after speaker. People literally camp out to hear her annual talk at South by Southwest. It's kind of like the tech entrepreneur's version of the Taylor Swift Arrows Tour.

2:44In this episode, you'll get a front row seat where you'll hear her latest insights about what the future may hold and how to prepare for it.

2:55You've got to have incredible talent at every position. It's like this huge push. There are fires burning when you're going home. Can you believe it? Such an idiot. and then you go back to, this is totally going to be amazing. There are so many easy ways. I have no idea what to do. Sorry, we made a mistake. But you have to time it right. Oops. Working as a three-bedroom apartment. Stuff that just seems absolutely nut balls. Ten years later, we're like, well, that's just how you do it. We haven't made it. Just how you do it.

3:25This is Masters of Scale.

3:33I'm your host, Jeff Berman. Our guest today has a job title that's not something you'd encounter at a typical career day at a school. She's a futurist. As the founder and CEO of the Future Today Institute, Amy is a global leader in strategic foresight. She teaches her craft at NYU's business school and is the author of several influential books and papers. Her latest work is all about the convergence of innovation that's leading to what she calls a technology super cycle. We'll dig into that in a bit, but first I wanted to learn more about where Amy's obsession with predicting the future began.

4:12Amy, welcome to Masters of Scale. Thank you. I'm super curious about so much of what you do, but I want to start by asking how one becomes a futurist. So there are many paths. You can go to school. There are courses. I actually teach one at Stern, NYU Stern, the MBA program. It's an academic discipline, so you can study it in the United States and Europe. They'll teach you to see the future? So I actually did not study foresight in university. What did you study? Game theory and economics. I thought I would be, actually my dream job, which probably only you and nobody else listening to this podcast will appreciate, was Solicitor General.

4:53Oh, my God. Right? Of the United States of America. That was my dream job when I was in fifth grade. You know, I was like, why would I want to be president? The president just manages things for a handful of years. I want to be the person that makes the laws that are here forever. So from that point forward, everything was about law school. So what took you from game theory and economics away from law and into the world you're in? There is this thing called the LSAT, which is a fun test that you have to take to get into an American law school. and I got through the first two sections without a problem.

5:27And as it turns out, I got a perfect score on those two sections. But I blacked out at the start of the third. I'd had a pretty massive panic attack. It was my first one. I didn't know that's what was happening. You can retake the LSAT, but they average scores. And so I was going to have two really good scores and a zero. So if I played everything forward, I was going to have to figure out a different way to do what I wanted to do, which was shape the future, which I thought was intellectually stimulating and important and fun. I just had to figure out a different avenue for it. So I did not have a plan B because this was the only thing that I had ever planned on doing.

6:02A professor of mine in college saw me agonizing and said, I can connect you to a tiny town in northern Japan. And if you're willing, you can go work for that town, which I did. I went and I was kind of like the town foreigner. So I, it's a real thing, taught some middle school English classes. I hung out with elderly people. I did some service work. I sat in town hall. Did we speak Japanese? We did not at the beginning. I put my head down and learned. So I did that for a few years. I started stringing for the New York Times and for The Economist. Came back, went to grad school, wound up as a journalist for a little bit.

6:46And the type of reporting that I was doing was more data-driven. And ultimately, I got bored. It just wasn't the right fit. It was reporting on what had already happened, but it wasn't an opportunity to play things forward.

7:05Amy left the news business and started a new company, the Future Today Institute. We are an organization that just does one thing, and that is strategic foresight. Strategic Foresight is a data-driven way of seeing the future for the purpose of making better strategic decisions. So our mission really is to empower businesses, governments to do long-range planning in a way that helps them grow, but also make sure that we all wind up in a good spot. We're also very, very good at disruption, so figuring out where there is risk. And we do that on behalf of organizations all over the world. We have no debt.

7:47There were never any investors. And I do not look, I come from a very modest background. There was no family money whatsoever. For so many of our audience, there's this cold start problem. It's OK. I have the idea, but I don't have the resources personally. I can't afford to go spend a year not taking salary. How did you even figure out who to go talk to, what to ask for? I think this is actually pretty important for this audience. I run across so many founders right now who's, and I'm sure you already know what I'm going to say because you're smiling. I run across way too many people whose sole desire is to exit.

8:24If your desire in life is to exit, then you should be doing something else because your motivation is in the wrong spot. And that means you're going to be making decisions that are never in the best interests of the one great thing that must be created. Your motivation is always going to be making a pitch deck, getting to the right VC, getting to the right private equity guy so you can get that exit done. That seems to me like a terrible way to go through life. Among the things that you do to shape public discourse, but also to market your work is you publish. You have a paper that just came out.

8:57Yep. Can you tell us about the paper? So suddenly, a decade later than they should have been talking about, everybody's finally aware of AI. And they're certainly talking a lot about GPT. There's actually a different GPT that's very important. That GPT is a general purpose technology. And I bring that up because it turns out that artificial intelligence, while important, is actually not the only technology shaping the future. There are two others. And if you were to look at each one in a silo, you could start mapping productivity. You could start mapping impact on GDP and things like that. But most businesses, most governments would discount a lot of what's happening because it feels too far away, which is the same story of what happened to AI.

9:42So it turns out in the course of our research, artificial intelligence is a general purpose technology, which is defined as something that has a profound and lasting impact on the economy. So if you go back in time, the steam engine is a general purpose technology. Electricity, you know, the Internet. And so artificial intelligence qualifies similarly. OK, there's two others. It's advanced sensor technology and biotechnology. If you look at them and the impact and think about them as platforms, we're starting to see some of the same patterns. The reason that all of this matters is because you might be an investment banker or have a digital media company and not think biotech has anything at all to do with you.

10:31It does. Individually, these groupings of technologies, these general purpose technologies aren't important. It's the convergence we discovered that matters. And what's happening is improvements in one begets improvements in the other. So there's the sort of flywheel effect. Before we get into the convergence, I'm going to be Denzel Washington from the movie Philadelphia and ask you to explain the biotech and the sensors as if I'm a five-year-old. So advanced sensor technologies is, you know, all the stuff in your phone. We are surrounded by literally millions of sensors. So for as much as everybody was talking about large language models, which you build using publicly available data to train, that only gets you so far.

11:15You don't have any behavioral data or real world data. So for that, you need sensor data. There are more sensors now than there ever have been before. You can pull data from that, which leads us to a large action model, which predicts what we might do next, how we might behave next, and just creates a much richer tapestry. And that sensor data is not publicly available. I mean, no. Some of it. Some of it is, but it's mostly within the domain of the OEMs and the technology companies. Right. Right. So there's that. Within biotech, it's synthetic biology and generative biology that matters. So just as with ChatGPT, you can type in a prompt and get out whatever, a LinkedIn post that's been optimized for you, whatever you need.

12:01There's a biological equivalent. So you can type in a molecular structure you might want or a function you might want and get the formula on the other end. Why does all of this matter? Because it gives us optionality for materials. And that matters to everybody. So it's not just health. So I'll give you an example. So nitrile. Nitrile is an alternative to latex. Gloves, nitrile gloves are sort of everywhere, but they're always in demand. And that's because post-COVID, restaurants are using them. Everybody needs these gloves now. The problem is all of the materials come from one spot. You've got supply chain issues.

12:44You've got shipping problems. You know, all these different issues, which means there's a shortage, not just because there's not enough supply, but because the means of production are all screwed up. What if there was a way to formulate those gloves and print out that material in a much easier way without having to extract it? So that's what can be done now. I know that doesn't seem all that thrilling, but you can do something similar with meat that we consume. So rather than having to, you know, have a giant chicken warehouse, it's unclean. You have to use a lot of hormones and things to keep those chickens alive.

13:25Antibiotics. Right. It's not great for humans. It's definitely not great for the chickens. Or for the environment. Or for the environment. So instead, what if you had a small two-gram tissue sample, and instead of growing chickens, you grew that sample in a bioreactor, which is something like a giant pressure cooker, and yield 250 tons of chicken meat. And as population explodes around the world and more and more areas become inhabitable and are not arable, sources of protein are going to be more and more critical. So, and that's actually already been done in Singapore. So this meat has already gone on sale.

14:00It's a chicken cutlet. It's 17 bucks. So like you might be able to get a frozen chicken cutlet for a dollar. So the margins are a little off, right? However, Singapore is a tiny nation state that is densely populated, it's not like they have space for chicken farms. So they're growing chicken inside of an office building. Singapore could become a net exporter of chicken to Malaysia, to other places around Southeast Asia. That is really interesting because it means that the local economy there changes. It changes the geoeconomic dynamics. All these countries now don't have to rely on China, for example, or some other place for their chicken.

14:38Right. It shortens the cold chain. Like, so just imagine that tiny example on a planetary scale. So the reason that all of these things are connected is because this year some of these new tools became available. DeepMind just released a new equivalent of like a large language model, but for biology. Right. And with the advanced sensors that are coming to market, you now have options now in creating the technology to support the creation of synthetically produced or cultured meats, for example, or new materials. You know, we may not have to have plastic going forward. We could have something different.

15:17So we have been set on this other course. And as advancements happen in one area, they beget advancements in the other. So they really are connected. And the convergence is what everybody is missing. What's an example where the sensors come into play as well? The sensor data. Yes, I can use myself as an example. So I, this will, I'm sure, come as a shock to you. I track everything. And I am a competitive cyclist. And I was also in college after saying I was not a college athlete. I wasn't really competing for the university that I went to. But back then, you were just on a bike and trying to figure out how out of breath you were.

15:55Right. Today, I race on gravel and road. My gravel and road bikes are full of sensors. I've got computers on both. Those are connected to heart rate monitors. And I'm looking at my levels while I'm riding. But I also have my coach lives in a different state. Like we're looking at all of these different data points. And it's not like I'm, you know, going to ride the Tour de France. Right. I'm just like a lady who likes to ride her bike, you know. But I have access to all of that. Now, interestingly, I don't know if this is actually going to happen, but the enhanced games have been proposed. Have you heard about this at all?

16:33No. So this is meant to be an alternative to the Olympics and to accusations of professional athletes doping. There's a group of people that were like, look, we can track data on everything now. Everybody is starting to experiment with different types of dosing, different types of nutraceuticals or pharmaceuticals, whatever. Why don't we just allow people to push themselves to the absolute extreme limits and see what happens? So there is the enhanced games coming out where you are actually encouraged to do all of this. So that's like a contradiction, right? But in my world, contradictions are very important.

17:10It's one of the ways that we track signals and start to think about what are trends. And I think it's interesting that that's on the horizon. You know, all of these weight loss drugs, that is also a product of AI and biotechnology. Yep. So that's another convergence. So I should backtrack a little bit. The work that I do is very much in the commercial sector. So we publish a lot of thought leadership. We make that available for free. I run a very for-profit company, though. And the work that we do is primarily with the world's largest corporations and governments. we've been looking a lot at health and changes to health for the past several years because as this technology super cycle spins up, I think that's one of the places we're going to see the most impact because it's the most vulnerable to disruption.

17:58This is the right time for healthcare to really think through what does growth look like? Where are we vulnerable? How are we going to be disrupted? And for people in the startup space to be looking very carefully at these convergences to start thinking through what the new businesses could be. Coming up, once you have a vision of the future, what do you do with it? We'll have more actionable insights from Amy Webb in just a minute.

18:30Real leaders don't back down when the stakes are high. They innovate, they push forward, and then they take the stage at the Masters of Scale Summit. Join us in San Francisco, October 7th to 9th, to hear from the CEO of the New York Times, scientists using cutting-edge technology to find cures, the leader of crypto powerhouse Coinbase, a retired four-star general, and many, many more. Apply now at mastersofscale.com slash apply25. That's mastersofscale.com slash apply25. If you're ready to take your startup from idea to impact, then AWS is your launchpad. From data storage to machine learning to secure app hosting, AWS gives you the tech trusted by the world's fastest scaling startups.

19:20And here's the best part. Join AWS Activate today and you could score up to$100 ,000 in AWS credits tailored to your stage and network. Go to aws.amazon.com slash activate and start building. Expanding your business in the U.S. can feel like a maze. Every state has its own payroll, benefits, and compliance rules, which can pull your focus away from growth. That's why founders use Deal. Deal is the professional employer organization, or PEO, that gives you a dedicated HR expert plus Fortune 500 level benefits for your team. The National Association of PEOs says businesses can grow twice as fast if they use one.

20:03So if you're scaling, make it simple with Deal. Go to deel.com slash MOS and get up to three months free.

20:16Welcome back to Masters of Scale. You can find this interview and more on our YouTube channel. You know, we have a broad range of audience, a lot of early stage founders and a lot of people who work at big companies who are or aspire to be entrepreneurs. I'm imagining them listening to you and going and reading your paper and then trying to figure out what do I do with this? What's your advice to them about how do they take what you're putting out there and actually make it actionable? Sure. So there's a framework in the last page of the it's like a 30 page paper describing this phenomenon of what we're actually calling living intelligence, which we think is what comes next.

20:57There is a framework that can be used within an organization to start tracking convergences and also to sort of benchmark yourselves. But being aware of the technology super cycle isn't enough. You have to start developing capabilities in foresight. Having the idea isn't enough because the idea can be wrong or can be influenced by bias or recency, you know, phenomena. You need to make sure that you're heading in a good direction. So for that, it's a matter of tracking signals, knowing the difference between what's a trend and what's trendy, opening yourselves up to uncertainty, which means what are all of the things that your organization can't control.

21:40Signals and trends are what we can know. Uncertainties are what we cannot know. And then using that information to map out scenarios. There are a lot of companies out there that make a ton of money, that are making a ton of money for a long time. They do things the way they do them. They evolve really incrementally. And yes, we know some of them. Right. And you were in it as a journalist banging your head against the wall. Why won't anyone pay attention to what's coming and even have the conversation? What have you found to be effective in moving leaders who are stuck in the old way of doing things to open the door to your way of thinking?

22:17So let's go back to Herman Kahn. So Herman Kahn was early days at Rand Corporation being tasked with helping advise the U.S. military. It was the Air Force specifically on how to make decisions during the Cold War. So he had all of this data. And at that point, his colleagues were saying, well, you've got a 90 percent chance of this and a 20 percent chance of that. And these were sort of probabilistic mathematical outlooks that bored everybody to tears. Herman Kahn decided to do something different. He imagined what would happen in the aftermath of dropping a nuclear bomb. not like here's how the world like it'll destroy 20 you know all these homes and all these people will die not that what would it look like let's say a year afterwards and so he started telling these stories that were so visceral every milk carton in every school child's lunch will have a list of how much radiation is in that you know milk container and how much you can you know and Here's how to keep track, you know, using arithmetic of how much radiation you've had.

23:31You recommended daily allowance of radiation. So these were stories that were immediately understandable and relevant to his end consumer who were military leaders, right? And they were incredibly effective as a result. Let me give you another example of where this is not effective. We've got climate change. As you and I are talking recently, there have been annual climate COP 20, whatever number we're on right now, 29. For the longest time, we've all been hearing the magic number 1.5 degrees Celsius. The moment that things click over to 1.5 degrees Celsius, you know, we are all doomed. And then it became, I think, 2 degrees Celsius.

24:16Question for you. How many Americans know what that is? It's a rounding error. We have a problem, right? So, like, let's put aside the fact that nobody in this country knows what that is. The other problem is 1.5 is very small. So there's too much contrast between a tiny number, which seems insignificant, and this absolute catastrophic outcome. What if you instead told the story of climate change through the app on your phone? So everybody has a weather app, you know, and you've got sunny, 69, whatever. We've had wildfires in New York City, right? Right. So imagine telling that story differently.

24:52People will understand that. That's a different type of story. So my point is the way to get past incremental change. And by the way, this does not mean that everybody should drop what you're doing and totally change. You know, you have to create a sense of urgency. What creates that sense of urgency? It has to be immediately relevant to the consumer of that information. Yeah. I mean, what I hear you saying, and it's so obvious as you say it, and yet a coin hadn't dropped for me before, is you also have to be a student of behavioral psychology. So historically in the world, in my world of strategic foresight, futurists have put together scenarios that present these interesting, like the future could be really horrible or the future could be really great or here's the future.