Exponential by Azeem Azhar
BOOK REVIEWS BY BINOD
BINOD’S RATING: 7.5/10
The top 20 points:
1. Technology is NOT neutral and value-free, and it is not for consumers who decide whether it is used for good or evil. This is simply a cop-out for technologists who refuse to take responsibility for their work.
2. Technology is developing at an exponential rate. Humans evolved for a slower, linear world- the annual harvest, the human lifespan, the changing of the seasons. Humans are terrible at understanding exponential change. Numerous studies show that we underestimate what happens when growth compounds over time.
3. Where workers do lose their jobs due to automation, it’s not because they themselves are replaced by some piece of software. It’s often because the firms they work for fail.
4. Those who are well-educated and lucky can thrive. Those who aren’t might find themselves trapped in an unprecedentedly punitive workplace. This is the Janus face of work in the Exponential Age.
5. Automation could over time create more jobs than it destroys. Our concern should not be with the QUANTITY of workaround for humans to do. It should be with the QUALITY of options that are available.
6. Automation is a distraction from the REAL issues facing workers in the exponential age: from pernicious systems of algorithmic management to a relative decline in workers’ wages.
7. Historically, there were limits to the market economy – you could sell food and gadgets; but you couldn’t sell people’s private lives or a nation’s laws. The boundaries are now increasingly blurred.
8. Exponential advances will increase local economic activity and reinforce the importance of cities. Cities will become even more important because knowledge workers tend to cluster around universities, and the economy is centering around ever-more complex products that require their skills.
9. Today’s ‘exponential technologies’ point towards deglobalization. New forms of energy production, like wind and solar, can take place anywhere – reducing the need for a global trade in oil. And manufacturing is increasingly local: 3-D printing means we can create almost anything at home.
10. If an organization needs to do something that uses computation, and that task is too expensive today, it probably won’t be too expensive in a couple of years.
11. We assume that once businesses reach a certain size, they stop growing. That is outdated. Today’s exponential businesses show little signs of reaching their limits thanks to network effects etc.
12. As countries become more insular, global politics becomes more unstable. Nations have less in common and are more likely to go to war thanks to exponential technologies. E.g., Increasingly cheap & sophisticated armed drones means you can attack the enemy sitting safely far away at a very low cost without the risk of being identified.
13. While technological change is accelerating rapidly, our society is evolving at a more gradual, incremental pace. As a result, a divide is opening between technology and society that is the “exponential gap”.
14. One gap- Superstar tech companies have amassed huge market power in shockingly little time, and industrial-age antitrust enforcers have been slow to address it.
15. A second gap-the traditional norms and regulations around employment are inadequate in the face of gig work directed by computer algorithms, as with car and delivery services like Uber & Deliveroo.
16. A third gap-our established protections for individual privacy and speech fall short of what’s needed when private companies have such extensive visibility into and control over what we see and do.
17. A fourth gap- in the knowledge and perception between technology developers and broader society. Developers are failing to grasp wider issues from the world of humanities & social sciences, and non-technologists are being left behind in their understanding of new innovations.
18. We are entering an age of abundance. The first period in human history in which energy, food, computation and much else will be trivially cheap to produce.
19.‘Exponential’ has 3 suggestions- people should be protected from unreasonable surveillance, should not be manipulated using data, and should not be unfairly discriminated against using technology.
20. If this is the kind of world we wish for in the future, we will have to fight hard for it, as the technology giants and the world’s governments will not willingly surrender such power to us.
The book does a brilliant job of explaining why technology is impacting our work and society so dramatically, and why our customs and institutions are struggling to adjust. It’s a timely reminder of the power of exponential changes, where we are headed and what we should do.