Amy Webb Books

Across the globe, the landscape of artificial intelligence—both in technology and capital—is almost completely shaped by nine dominant corporations. The six American firms—Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, and IBM—have built an ecosystem governed by data and algorithms, leveraging immense ...

From Signals: How Everyday Signs Can Help Us Navigate the World

The American AI ecosystem was born from a peculiar fusion of free-market innovation and venture capital. In the mid-twentieth century, the U.S. government laid the foundation for artificial intelligence research, funding universities and laboratories to advance open science. But over subsequent deca...

From Signals: How Everyday Signs Can Help Us Navigate the World

Across the globe, the map of artificial intelligence—both technological and financial—is almost entirely dominated by nine corporate powerhouses. The six American firms—Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, and IBM—have leveraged deep research capacity and longstanding market dominance to buil...

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

The American AI ecosystem emerged from a unique fusion of open innovation and profit-seeking capitalism. In the mid-20th century, the U.S. government funded foundational AI research in university labs, encouraging scientific openness and experimentation. Over subsequent decades, as the Cold War ende...

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

When we first imagined writing The Genesis Machine, we wanted to tell the story of how humanity learned to edit its own blueprint. The first pages trace the lineage of synthetic biology back to the breakthroughs of molecular genetics — to the moment Watson and Crick described DNA as a double helix c...

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

At the heart of synthetic biology lies a profound perspective — that DNA is code. Each strand carries instructions written in a four-letter alphabet: A, T, C, and G. These letters form genes, genes form proteins, and proteins shape everything that lives. In our book, we draw analogies to computer pr...

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