The Signals Are Talking

Author: Amy Webb
Publisher: PublicAffairs
ISBN: 1610396677
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 335

Book Description
Amy Webb is a noted futurist who combines curiosity, skepticism, colorful storytelling, and deeply reported, real-world analysis in this essential book for understanding the future. The Signals Are Talking reveals a systemic way of evaluating new ideas bubbling up on the horizon-distinguishing what is a real trend from the merely trendy. This book helps us hear which signals are talking sense, and which are simply nonsense, so that we might know today what developments-especially those seemingly random ideas at the fringe as they converge and begin to move toward the mainstream-that have long-term consequence for tomorrow. With the methodology developed in The Signals Are Talking, we learn how to think like a futurist and answer vitally important questions: How will a technology-like artificial intelligence, machine learning, self-driving cars, biohacking, bots, and the Internet of Things-affect us personally? How will it impact 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? Most importantly, Webb persuasively shows that the future isn't something that happens to us passively. Instead, she allows us to see ahead so that we may forecast what's to come-challenging us to create our own preferred futures.

The Signals Are Talking

Author: Amy Webb
Publisher: Public Affairs
ISBN: 1610396669
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 335

Book Description
Counsels business leaders on how to identify clues to recognize important imminent trends and market developments, demonstrating how near-future business events emerge gradually from the fringes of society.

The Big Nine

Author: Amy Webb
Publisher: PublicAffairs
ISBN: 1541773748
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 280

Book Description
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.

Data, a Love Story

Author: Amy Webb
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0142180459
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 306

Book Description
“Amy Webb found her true love after a search that's both charmingly romantic and relentlessly data-driven. Anyone who uses online dating sites must read her funny, fascinating book.”—Gretchen Rubin, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Happiness Project After yet another disastrous date, Amy Webb was preparing to cancel her JDate membership when epiphany struck: her standards weren’t too high, she just wasn’t approaching the process the right way. Using her gift for data strategy, she found which keywords were digital-man magnets, analyzed photos, and then adjusted her (female) profile to make the most of that intel. Then began the deluge—dozens of men who actually met her own stringent requirements wanted to meet her. Among them: her future husband, now the father of her child.

What Babies Say Before They Can Talk

Author: Paul Holinger
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1439123810
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 289

Book Description
In What Babies Say Before They Can Talk, psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Paul C. Holinger, M.D., M.P.H., a explains how infants communicate with us, and we with them, and outlines the nine easily identifiable signals that will help you to decode your baby’s needs and feelings. Dr. Holinger decodes the nine easily identifiable signals—interest, enjoyment, surprise, distress, anger, fear, shame, disgust (a reaction to bad tastes), and dissmell (a reaction to bad smells)—that all babies use to express their needs and wants. These insights will aid parents in discerning what their baby is feeling. This book can help all parents become more confident and self-aware in their interactions with their children, create positive communication, and put the joy back into parenting. This is a unique work. It provides a foundation for understanding feelings and behavior. Based on emerging research, What Babies Say Before They Can Talk offers parents a new perspective on their babies' sense of the world and the people around them. The goal of this book is to help parents enhance their infants' potential, prevent problems, and raise happy, healthy, responsible children.

Honest Signals

Author: Alex Pentland
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262261049
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 205

Book Description
How understanding the signaling within social networks can change the way we make decisions, work with others, and manage organizations. How can you know when someone is bluffing? Paying attention? Genuinely interested? The answer, writes Alex Pentland in Honest Signals, is that subtle patterns in how we interact with other people reveal our attitudes toward them. These unconscious social signals are not just a back channel or a complement to our conscious language; they form a separate communication network. Biologically based “honest signaling,” evolved from ancient primate signaling mechanisms, offers an unmatched window into our intentions, goals, and values. If we understand this ancient channel of communication, Pentland claims, we can accurately predict the outcomes of situations ranging from job interviews to first dates. Pentland, an MIT professor, has used a specially designed digital sensor worn like an ID badge—a “sociometer”—to monitor and analyze the back-and-forth patterns of signaling among groups of people. He and his researchers found that this second channel of communication, revolving not around words but around social relations, profoundly influences major decisions in our lives—even though we are largely unaware of it. Pentland presents the scientific background necessary for understanding this form of communication, applies it to examples of group behavior in real organizations, and shows how by “reading” our social networks we can become more successful at pitching an idea, getting a job, or closing a deal. Using this “network intelligence” theory of social signaling, Pentland describes how we can harness the intelligence of our social network to become better managers, workers, and communicators.

The Genesis Machine

Author: Amy Webb
Publisher: Hachette UK
ISBN: 1541797930
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 368

Book Description
Named one of The New Yorker's BEST BOOKS OF 2022 SO FAR The next frontier in technology is inside our own bodies. Synthetic biology will revolutionize how we define family, how we identify disease and treat aging, where we make our homes, and how we nourish ourselves. This fast-growing field—which uses computers to modify or rewrite genetic code—has created revolutionary, groundbreaking solutions such as the mRNA COVID vaccines, IVF, and lab-grown hamburger that tastes like the real thing. It gives us options to deal with existential threats: climate change, food insecurity, and access to fuel. But there are significant risks. 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? What cyber-biological risks are looming? Could a future biological war, using engineered organisms, cause a mass extinction event? 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.

The Definitive Book of Body Language

Author: Barbara Pease
Publisher: Bantam
ISBN: 030748369X
Category : Self-Help
Languages : en
Pages : 402

Book Description
Available for the first time in the United States, this international bestseller reveals the secrets of nonverbal communication to give you confidence and control in any face-to-face encounter—from making a great first impression and acing a job interview to finding the right partner. It is a scientific fact that people’s gestures give away their true intentions. Yet most of us don’t know how to read body language– and don’t realize how our own physical movements speak to others. Now the world’s foremost experts on the subject share their techniques for reading body language signals to achieve success in every area of life. Drawing upon more than thirty years in the field, as well as cutting-edge research from evolutionary biology, psychology, and medical technologies that demonstrate what happens in the brain, the authors examine each component of body language and give you the basic vocabulary to read attitudes and emotions through behavior. Discover: • How palms and handshakes are used to gain control • The most common gestures of liars • How the legs reveal what the mind wants to do • The most common male and female courtship gestures and signals • The secret signals of cigarettes, glasses, and makeup • The magic of smiles–including smiling advice for women • How to use nonverbal cues and signals to communicate more effectively and get the reactions you want Filled with fascinating insights, humorous observations, and simple strategies that you can apply to any situation, this intriguing book will enrich your communication with and understanding of others–as well as yourself.

No One Is Talking About This

Author: Patricia Lockwood
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0593189604
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 224

Book Description
FINALIST FOR THE 2021 BOOKER PRIZE & A NEW YORK TIMES TOP 10 BOOK OF 2021 WINNER OF THE DYLAN THOMAS PRIZE “A book that reads like a prose poem, at once sublime, profane, intimate, philosophical, witty and, eventually, deeply moving.” —New York Times Book Review, Editors’ Choice “Wow. I can’t remember the last time I laughed so much reading a book. What an inventive and startling writer…I’m so glad I read this. I really think this book is remarkable.” —David Sedaris From "a formidably gifted writer" (The New York Times Book Review), a book that asks: Is there life after the internet? As this urgent, genre-defying book opens, a woman who has recently been elevated to prominence for her social media posts travels around the world to meet her adoring fans. She is overwhelmed by navigating the new language and etiquette of what she terms "the portal," where she grapples with an unshakable conviction that a vast chorus of voices is now dictating her thoughts. When existential threats--from climate change and economic precariousness to the rise of an unnamed dictator and an epidemic of loneliness--begin to loom, she posts her way deeper into the portal's void. An avalanche of images, details, and references accumulate to form a landscape that is post-sense, post-irony, post-everything. "Are we in hell?" the people of the portal ask themselves. "Are we all just going to keep doing this until we die?" Suddenly, two texts from her mother pierce the fray: "Something has gone wrong," and "How soon can you get here?" As real life and its stakes collide with the increasingly absurd antics of the portal, the woman confronts a world that seems to contain both an abundance of proof that there is goodness, empathy, and justice in the universe, and a deluge of evidence to the contrary. Fragmentary and omniscient, incisive and sincere, No One Is Talking About This is at once a love letter to the endless scroll and a profound, modern meditation on love, language, and human connection from a singular voice in American literature.

Summary of Amy Webb's The Signals Are Talking

Author: Everest Media,
Publisher: Everest Media LLC
ISBN: 1669386937
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 40

Book Description
Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Sample Book Insights: #1 In 2015, two civilians using drones to shoot video inadvertently prevented firefighters from putting out a rapidly spreading California wildfire. The FAA was estimating that a million drones would be sold that year, but no government agency had yet decided on regulations for how everyday Americans could use them. #2 A future scenario in which drone highways are built over unoccupied land could lead to a shift in how our cities are built and maintained. Without proper city planning, these new centers will suffer from traffic jams and a lack of sustainable basic civic resources. #3 Futurists are skilled at listening to and interpreting the signals talking. They know that most patterns will come to nothing, and so they watch and wait for those few that will evolve into genuine trends. #4 We must dedicate time and effort to planning for the future. However, our fear and rejection of the unknown has been an ongoing thread throughout human history. We continue to struggle with this problem, from generation to generation, suggesting that we’ve internalized a belief that the future is something that happens to us, rather than something that we create.