Exponential: Order and Chaos in an Age of Accelerating Technology

Azeem Azhar’s “Exponential” starts out like many a techno-boosting tome: a smart, well-informed and optimistic account of current trends in and impacts of technology, a thesis about how we could better track this progress by using Wright’s Law than the more commonly used Moore’s Law, and a catchy concept - “that we’re living in the Exponential Age” - to hang it all off, perhaps in the hope of coining a term that will be deemed to have been definitive by posterity.As the book progresses, however, it soon becomes apparent that there is more to Azhar than this first impression suggests. As consumers of his excellent weekly “Exponential View” newsletter (and its accompanying podcasts) will know, Azhar is not your average tech evangelist. While he has extensive hands-on experience as both tech journalist and tech entrepreneur - and thus a deep command of his subject - he also has a deep concern for and interest in the real impact that all this tech is having on society. Democratic society, in particular.He’s not afraid to say it, either. As early as Chapter 1 we find him castigating digital engineers for their culturally dominant view that “technology is neutral”. “Technologies are not just neutral tools to be applied (or misapplied) by their users,” Azhar insists. “They are artefacts built by people. And these people direct and design their inventions according to their own preferences [...] And that means that our technologies often recreate the systems of power the exist in the rest of society.” After several decades’ worth of Silicon Valley hubris this is a breath of fresh air.Azhar proceeds to walk a neat line between indulging his admiration for and excitement about the incredible gains that technology is bringing and his awareness of its potential downsides and impact on the structures of power. He allows himself to be enthralled by the idea that “between these four key areas - computing, energy, biology and manufacturing - it is possible to make out the contours of a wholly new era of human society” while remaining continually alert to the very real possibility that such a new era could, if we are not proactive and careful, very easily turn out to be a place in which we wouldn’t want to live.As the book goes on Azhar becomes increasingly critical of the monopolist behaviour of the current tech giants, the manner in which the homophily encouraged by social media is atomising our culture, the fact that AI systems can just as easily embody society's prejudices and offer new and insidious means of social control as they can transform business and science, and the way in which drone warfare is driving extreme asymmetries in military conflict.All these points are made well and loudly elsewhere, for sure. But what’s so refreshing about “Exponential” is that Azhar makes them without losing his enthusiasm for the positive transformations that technology promises, and he uses them to develop a continued and determined case for governments and other social organisations to evolve policies and mechanisms of governance that are equal to the task that this new technological era presents. He even advances a case for more and more effective collective action by workers, a view that is guaranteed to raise hackles at Amazon, Google and Tesla, the point being that if we don’t haul our political structures out of the twentieth century and reform them to be equal to the challenge of controlling technology, it’s a pretty foregone conclusion already that technology and its overlords are going to control us.Whether or not the era in which this battle rages will end up being known as “the exponential age” remains to be seen. What’s certain is that we need more writers and entrepreneurs of Azhar’s calibre around if we’re all going to share in its benefits.

I really enjoyed reading this book - very interesting and informative e.g. regarding how network effects, platform effects and intangibles allow tech businesses to grow bigger and become totally dominant, the rise of cities, localisation of production and impact on developing countries. So many interesting, well made points and great well thought through solutions to many of these issues.However (and a pretty big however) where this book is lacking is what is the actual long term benefit to humanity of many of these exponential firms in the first place? Countless number of human beings are today, spending countless hours looking at their phones, addicted to browsing through Instagram and Facebook, and checking out endless funny videos on Tik Tok etc - on my morning commute for example, on trains no one is paying any attention to the outside world whatsoever. Is this a good thing for human beings and wider mental health of societies in the first place? What about the decline of face to face interaction because everything is online now - you don't need to meet other humans face to face - now you have Zoom, Facebook and Instagram. And then the impact of many of these apps being addictive, forcing users to compete for likes etc. None of this in my view is even a good thing to begin with. It would have been good to have more discussion on this too. Note this does not apply to all technologies discussed in this book e.g. 3D printing and energy storage, but it does many / perhaps most of them.

Around a decade and a half ago, Azeem Azhar – what a wonderfully alliterative name – and I served together as members of the Consumer Panel of Ofcom. the UK’s regulator of telecommunications and broadcasting. He is much younger and much smarter than me and went on to become a tech entrepreneur and tech analyst. Now he has written as good a book as you will find on the current state of technological change and the profound issues raised by the technology.Azhar’s main thesis can be simply stated: some of our most fundamental technologies are changing at an ever-faster pace so that, if plotted on a graph, they would follow a steeply-rising or exponential curve, while our institutions – whether governments, corporations, service providers or armed services – are responding in a much slower fashion that, again if represented on a graph, would show essentially a straight or incremental line. The result is what he calls the ‘exponential gap’.Of course, rates of change are hard to measure but he concentrates on technologies such as microelectronics where change can be measured and he defines an exponential technology as one that can, for a roughly fixed cost, improve at a rate of more than 10% per year for several decades. He writes particularly about change in four key sectors: computing, energy, biology and manufacturing.He explains what is driving this exponential revolution: the power of learning by doing, the increasing interaction and combination of new technologies, and the emergence of new networks of information and trade.One very visible outcome is superstar companies or tech giants – the likes of Amazon and Google – who may be serving consumers well but are – in his view – exploiting smaller-scale producers and making economies progressively less dynamic. Additionally, of course, they do not pay their fair share of taxes, they control access to information and opinion, and they act beyond the control of governments and regulators.Azhar is a first-time author but this is a really impressive work. He has been well-served by both his editor (it is immensely readable) and his research team (the range of sources is considerable). The sub-title of the book is ‘How Accelerating Technology Is Leaving Us Behind And What To Do about It’. As with all such books, there is much more on the ‘How’ and than on the ‘What’.Azhar proposes a range of sensible suggestions – such as the mandation of interoperability between comparable networks, the adoption of the Danish system of ‘flexicurity’ and the devolution of political power to cities – but is hesitant about other ideas – such as a universal basic income or a digital bill of rights.I cannot help feeling that the totality of Azhar’s policy proposals are not adequate to the huge challenges that he so eloquently describes. It seems to me that, as well as an ‘exponential gap’, there is a ‘comprehension gap’. Most tech analysts do really understand politics or like politicians, while almost all politicians have very little understanding of technology and are rather in awe of technologists.Ultimately these tech challenges require some big and bold political and regulatory solutions with radically new approaches to taxing corporate income and personal wealth, the empowering of worker and consumer bodies, and clever integration of human and artificial intelligence in a whole range of sectors including child care, education, training, health and social care.

Good perspective by the author and a must read to understand the macro changes that are occurring around us with technology evolution.

Honestly, I think the book would benefit by reducing the page amount by 100. I barely finished it. It has many valuable insights about changes in business, work and society but most of them you probably know if you have a very basic understanding of current technologies.

Azeem has effectively brought out the increasing gap between past and future thanks to technology. A developmental mindset can act as a bridge. The book makes for good reading in understanding the finer nuances and ensuring that development is all that it is supposed to be.

Exponential growth refers to an increase that compounds consistently over timeWhen a technology takes off, its effects can be enormous, stretching across all the areas of human life: our jobs, the wars we fight, the nature of our politics, even our manners and habitsThe argument of this book by Azeem Azhar is that we are living through a time of unusually fast change–and this change is being brought about by sudden technological advancesOur society is being propelled forward by several new innovations–computing and artificial intelligence, renewable electricity and energy storage, breakthroughs in biology and manufacturingThese innovations are improving in ways that we don’t yet fully understandAs in previous periods of rapid technological change, their impact is felt across society–not only leading to new services and products, but also altering the relationship between old and new companies, employers and workers, city and country, citizens and the marketThe argument of Exponential:1. new technologies are being invented and scaled at an ever-faster pace, all while decreasing rapidly in price. If we were to plot the rise of these technologies on a graph, they would follow a curved, exponential line2. our institutions–from our political norms, to our systems of economic organisation, to the ways we forge relationships–are changing more slowly. If we plotted the adaptation of these institutions on a graph, they would follow a straight, incremental line3. the result is the ‘exponential gap’. The chasm between new forms of technology–along with the fresh approaches to business, work, politics and civil society they bring about–and the corporations, employees, politics and wider social norms that get left behind-> The book sketches out ways harness the power of tech to serve our real needs. The result is a holistic new way to make sense of the modern worldWow! This was a great read. I can highly recommend it. For me, it offered a fantastic opportunity to reframe my perspective on innovation, technology and irs impact on society

Il libro ripercorre territori noti a chi si occupa di tecnologia, ma offre spunti interessanti per le decisioni che dovremo prendere come società e le scelte di policy che dovranno fare i legislatori. Lo stile è accessibile e la trattazione è sempre aderente a interpretazioni realistiche dei fenomeni, senza sensazionalismi né allarmi indebiti. Una lettura da consigliare sia ai policymakers sia a chi voglia semplicemente essere cittadino/a consapevole.