I originally met Azeem Azhar, the English journalist, startup founder and investor, through his Podcasts and newslettersExponential View. My research and teaching revolve around the identical intersection of latest technologies, business and society, and his newsletter soon developed into a very important weekly briefing on the subject.
This made me very curious to see his first bookExponential: Order and Chaos in an Age of Accelerating Technology, which was released in 2021 to great acclaim, including be listed as one in every of the Financial Times' best tech books of the yr. I read it in a number of days and was even compelled to design a brand new course around its core ideas for my Masters students in Entrepreneurship and Innovation.
When Azhar talks about exponential growth, he implies that technologies comparable to computer chips, renewable energy, artificial intelligence (AI) and gene editing have gotten cheaper and more powerful and are being adopted at an ever faster rate. This, he says, has modified society, the economy and politics, although not all the time for the higher.
Part of the issue is that technology is seen as someway independent of humanity, each by its creators and the remaining of us. This explains, for instance, how the politicians behind the 2020 Brexit trade deal joyful about it Netscape Communicator is described as a “modern email software package,” though the service was discontinued in 1997.
One consequence of this cultural divide is that it’s difficult for either side to interact in dialogue about easy methods to profit from recent technologies while minimizing their disadvantages.
Azeem Azhar
This creates what Azhar calls the “exponential gap,” which he illustrates in this easy diagram by comparing the speed of technological development (black hockey stick line) with the speed at which institutions comparable to governments and corporations adapt (dashed straight line).
From a business perspective, this gap creates challenges because corporations that construct on a lot of these technologies are likely to grow much larger than traditional corporations, and once they’re established, it becomes extremely difficult to topple them.
This happens on account of Network effectsthe concept that corporations that construct a network of users develop into exponentially more useful to all and sundry on the network. A classic example is a telecommunications network, which becomes an increasing number of useful to customers the more they enroll, because each of them can call a bigger number of individuals.
Something similar happened with Google's search engine, which became the preferred of its kind. This made it increasingly useful for advertisers to succeed in large numbers of consumers. Google then used its huge search data to drive back home They can make the most of this by providing users with higher search results and advertisers with more sophisticated customer targeting.
Thangspol Sangsee
Network effects are critical to many modern tech giants, including LinkedIn for business, Instagram for images, and Apple's AppStore/Google Play for smartphone apps. Regulators are suddenly faced with huge monopolies and sometimes find that their antitrust rules are inadequate to cope with them.
As I teach my master's students, the speed of those changes may leave many entrepreneurs behind. I stress that network effects create a winner-takes-all culture, where it is usually significantly better to lean on the winners than to support a challenger.
Azhar also points to necessary geopolitical implications of exponential technologies. For example, they may speed up the transition from globalization to relocalization, comparable to through 3D printing, which is able to make it significantly cheaper to supply goods locally.
Likewise, wars will change as recent technologies develop into cheaper. Since Azhar's book got here out, we have now already seen that drones and in addition online disinformation play a very important role within the Ukraine war.
Finally, exponential technologies even have societal impacts. This is most evident in data, where the boundaries of privacy and personal data tackle recent meaning as our personal information is bought and sold online. Likewise, we’re seeing national conversations going down on huge platforms like X (formerly Twitter), that are privately owned.
Navigating these effects
Azhar makes 4 suggestions to handle the challenges these technologies pose. The first, which relates specifically to online platforms, calls for greater transparency about how the tech giants make decisions in order that the impact may be higher assessed. Platforms comparable to Facebook and X have already had to reply many questions from regulators and politicians about their decision-making processes lately, but their processes are still removed from transparent.
Azhar also desires to put more emphasis on interoperability. example of that is the rise of e-commerce in India. Open network for digital commerce (ONDC) has developed a system that enables shoppers to browse and buy from different online stores without having to be on a single platform. The aim is to create a level playing field between vendors and reduce the sales commissions they need to pay to the platforms. Since its launch in 2021, the ONDC has processed hundreds of thousands of sales transactions.
Azhar calls for a digital bill of rights to supply individuals with legal protection from the arbitrary actions of corporations and governments. In fact, some countries like South Korea are already pioneers here.
Finally, Azhar advocates for “digital commons” through which data may be pooled in a single public place and managed by volunteers who work in an analogous capability to editors at Wikipedia. For example, Great Britain a biobank This network collects hundreds of thousands of genetic data annually to assist researchers higher understand and stop diseases.
Since Azhar's book got here out, the Exponential Gap has only widened due to advances in technologies like artificial intelligence. As Exponential makes clear, governments urgently have to take concerted motion to alter the direction we’re heading in. In doing so, we will develop into co-creators, together with technologists, of a more inclusive, high-tech society.
