Exponential, book review: Technology acceleration and its impact on society

For the last couple of yrs, coronavirus has been teaching a master class on exponential growth: from January 2020, when 100 cases in China led the WHO to contact a general public health and fitness emergency, to today, when there have been over 239 million cases globally. 

In advance of that, as people today have begun to fail to remember, exponential growth was most likely finest acknowledged as the magic formula behind the rise of computer systems. Moore’s Law — the observation built by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore that the number of transistors on an integrated chip doubles approximately each individual two yrs — is the purpose the smartphone in your pocket is extra than a thousand instances extra powerful than the most important computer systems 50 yrs ago, which only governments and significant organisations could manage.  

The exponential growth of computer power led the inventor Ray Kurzweil to propose the Law of Accelerating Returns and forecast that by 2045 equipment intelligence will move that of human beings — a.k.a. the Singularity. 

In Exponential: How Accelerating Know-how is Leaving Us Driving and What to Do About It, Azeem Azhar begins with the notion that Kurzweil’s take was also slim and that exponential growth is taking put in no much less than four converging sectors: computing, energy, biology, and production.  

In energy, the value of renewables is plummeting. In biology, the value of genome sequencing is undertaking the similar. The to start with human genome took thirteen yrs and $3 billion today anybody can get theirs done for $two hundred in a couple of times and rapidly sequencing was element of why we got COVID vaccines so soon. In production, 3D printing is rapidly bettering, and gives solely new options for making every little thing from properties to organs. 

Taken jointly, the earth we’re hurtling into will look pretty diverse. Azhar credits Kurzweil for recognising that the most important contributor to our notion that it truly is ‘accelerating’ is the parallel growth and conversation of diverse technologies. The result, Azhar writes, is an “exponential gap” that’s opening up among our being familiar with of our earth, which updates little by little, and the arriving technologies, which improve more quickly than we can cope with. 

In this ebook, and in the Exponential View podcast and e-newsletter that preceded it, Azhar, who has been a journalist, a several organization founder, and a enterprise capitalist, states he wishes to straddle CP Snow’s Two Cultures — art and science — in purchase to comprehend the effect of all these new technologies on modern society.  

To fulfil this ambition, he to start with explores the four accelerating sectors, and then discusses their impact on the conversation among politics and the financial state. Azhar then considers the effect on the partnership among the citizen and modern society – and concludes by generating strategies for wide principles that can guide us as a result of the phase changeover, and environment four prescriptions for the road ahead: transparency, openness, interoperability, and electronic legal rights. 

SEE: Report finds startling disinterest in ethical, responsible use of AI between business leaders

The principles Azhar proposes are wide: we want to construct resilience and versatility we want to rethink our conceptions of the mother nature of monopoly, and the partnership among personnel and businesses and we want to comprehend the modifying power interactions among cities, regions, and nations. Above all, we want to don’t forget that technologies is a force we can direct. 

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