Accelerated tech innovations and its future shocks

We are in the Exponential Age between the faster computers, better software and bigger data, amid accelerating climate change, a deadly pandemic and unravelling global supply chains are critical. Ours is the first era in human history in which technology is constantly accelerating without breaks empowered by our compulsion to innovate. Azeem Azhar, writer, a technology analyst, entrepreneur who created Exponential View newsletter and podcast, explains diligently and comprehensively definition of a new phase in human affairs and argues that Technology is developing at an increasing exponential rate. But human society, from our businesses tour political institutions can only ever adapt at a slower, incremental pace, making exponential gap between the power of new technology and our ability to keep up.

Exponential looks at how recent innovations in computing and other emerging technologies have radically transformed human existence, with consequences that we can hardly fathom.

Azhar, thanks mutually reinforcing advances in technologies such as AI, renewable energy and 3D printing, this dizzying acceleration of social, economic, and political change has just begun.

Azhar writes, humanity’s ride only gets faster and bumpier from here, thanks to how new technologies converge and inevitably compound one another’s increase in socially disruptive power driving an upward “hockey stick” growth trajectory that promises unimaginable benefits but also threatens to tear apart the comparatively staid institutions and social norms we rely upon for our well being.

The twin focus on technology’s risks and benefits typically aims to persuade the reader of an author’s balanced, and objectively sensible outlook, while obscuring the fact that unlike the average reader, the author’s personal investments and privileged position in tech culture assures them of a wildly disproportionate share of its promise and minimal exposure to its perils. We are ones who decide what we want from the tools we build.

The author’s conversations with Silicon Valley Chief executive and founders clearly establish him as an accomplished insider

 Exponential reveals the internal conflicts that arises when one can plainly see the widening stress fractures in the pillars of the current techno-social order. We must fight to guarantee that all those who inherit that world get a just and rightful stake in deciding.

Exponential: How Accelerating Technology is Leaving Us Behind and What to Do About It by Azeem Azhar, Random House Business £20, 352 pages.