For eleven years, Stephen Baker worked for BusinessWeek as a senior technology writer, covering topics such as the data economy, wireless technology, and cloud computing. The Numerati, his first nonfiction work, foreshadowed the Big Data era. He then went on to play Final Jeopardy: Man vs. Machine. Watson, IBM's Jeopardy-playing computer, is the subject of Machine and the Quest to Know Everything. He talked about artificial intelligence and how technology would affect the way people think and interact in the future.

Baker worked as a journalist in New York, Paris, Mexico City, and along the US-Mexico border. He has also contributed to The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Los Angeles Times, in addition to BusinessWeek. He obtained a bachelor's degree in science from the University of Wisconsin and a master's degree in journalism from Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism. His home is in Montclair, New Jersey, where he lives with his family.