Azeem Azhar - Exponential: How Accelerating Technology Is Leaving Us Behind and What to Do About It

PENGUIN BOOKS

UK | USA | Canada | Ireland | Australia
New Zealand | India | South Africa

Penguin Books is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.

First published in the United Kingdom by Random House Business in 2021

Copyright Azeem Azhar 2021

The moral right of the author has been asserted

Cover images Shutterstock

ISBN: 978-1-473-57885-2

This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the authors and publishers rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

To Salman, Sophie and Jasmine
and the Exponential View community

My home lies between the neighbourhoods of Cricklewood and Golders Green in north-west London. It is a suburban house in a suburban street of a type familiar across Europe and the United States. And it is a relatively recent addition to the landscape. Look at a map of the area from 1920, and all youll see is farmland. The plot of my semi-detached house is right in the middle of a field. A bridleway is shown where an access road now runs, and a few gates and hedgerows demarcate what is now my neighbourhood. A couple of hundred metres to the north lies a blacksmiths.

Just a few years later, the area had transformed. Pick up a map of the same area from 1936 and youll see the farmland has become the streets that I walk through daily. The blacksmiths has disappeared, replaced by a mechanical workshop. The brick-built interwar-era homes are arranged on the same plots they occupy now, perhaps lacking the odd glass extension. It is a remarkable metamorphosis, which reflects the emergence of a recognisably modern way of life.

As late as the 1880s, life in London resembled that of a much earlier era horses plied the roads, leaving piles of manure in the streets as they did so; most domestic tasks were powered by hand; much of the population inhabited crowded, centuries-old slum buildings. But beginning in the 1890s, and in many cases completed by the 1920s, the key technologies of the twentieth century took hold. Pictures of central London streets in 1925 show them free of horses, replaced by cars and buses. A network of cables would have carried electricity from coal-fired power stations to offices and homes. Telephone lines ran into many houses and allowed people to talk to distant friends.

These changes in turn brought social upheaval. As modern systems of production developed, so too did full-time employment contracts with benefits; new forms of transport brought with them the commute; the electrification of factories helped the rise of large companies with recognisable brand names. Someone living in the 1980s who stepped into a time machine and went back to the 1880s would have seen little they were familiar with. If they travelled back to just the 1930s they would have recognised much more.

This two-decade transformation reflects the sudden, dramatic changes that technology can bring. Since the days of flint axes and wooden digging sticks, humans have been technologists. We seek to make life easier for ourselves; and to do so, we build tools technologies that help us achieve our goals. These technologies have long allowed humans to redefine the world around us. They let us farm and then build; travel on land, then through air, then into space; move from nomadic life to villages to cities.

But, as my predecessors in what is now north-west London learnt, the technologies we build can take society in unexpected directions. When 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 habits. To borrow a word from economics, technology is not exogenous to the other forces that define our lives it combines with political, cultural and social systems, often in dramatic and unforeseen ways.

The unpredictable ways that technology combines with wider forces sometimes moving slowly, sometimes causing rapid and seismic transformations are what makes it so difficult to analyse. The emerging discipline of complexity science tries to make sense of the ways in which the different elements of a complicated system interact how different species relate to each other to make up an ecosystem, for example. Human society is the ultimate complex system; it is made up of countless, constantly interacting elements individuals, households, governments, companies, beliefs, technologies.

According to complexity science, the connections between different elements mean that small changes in one area of a system can ripple across the whole. And these changes can be chaotic, sudden and profound. A new technology might at first cause a small social change but one that eventually spirals into major repercussions for the whole of society.

When these ripples or feedback loops, in the jargon of complexity science start to spread, they can feel uncomfortable. One need only glance at the pages of a newspaper from the turn of the twentieth century to realise that sudden change is anxiety-inducing. A quick survey of New York Times articles from a century ago reveals that Americans were apprehensive about elevators, the telephone, the television and more.

Of course, jitters in the elevator were rarely the real issue. Rather, these innovations came to symbolise peoples fears about the pace of change. We know intuitively that technological changes rarely remain enclosed within one sphere. By allowing us to build ever-taller buildings, elevators revolutionised the layout and economies of cities. By making contact between people easier, the telephone drastically altered how humans interacted with colleagues and friends. After a technology has taken off, its effects are felt everywhere.

Today, we are undergoing another period of dramatic transformation. The clearest sign of this is the way people talk about technology. The PR company Edelman runs a renowned annual survey on trust in the public sphere. One of their key questions put to 30,000 people in 20 countries is whether they feel comfortable with how quickly technology was moving. In 2020, more than 60 per cent of respondents felt the pace of change was too fast, a number that had been creeping upwards for several years.

Its tempting to assume that people always feel technological and social change is too fast. They thought so a century ago, and they think so again now. But the argument of this book is that we are indeed living through a time of unusually fast change and this change is being brought about by sudden technological advances. In the early twenty-first century, the defining technologies of the industrial age are metamorphosing. Our society is being propelled forward by several new innovations computing and artificial intelligence, renewable electricity and energy storage, breakthroughs in biology and manufacturing.