My first introduction to Azeem Azhar was over a decade ago when he was in the early innings of his entrepreneurial journey. His career has evolved, and the technology world now knows him for his excellent newsletter, Exponential View. He recently authored a book with a similar name: “The Exponential Age: How the Next Digital Revolution Will Rewire Life on Earth.”
I am about halfway through the book and admittedly should have finished it sooner, but it has triggered my thoughts, and as a result, I have to pause, think, make notes and restart. It will be a while before I get to review the book, but for now, here is a short interview conducted via email and Google Docs with Azeem.
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Q: From a layman’s perspective, what is Exponential View?
A: Exponential View is a newsletter charting the impact of this major techno-economic-political transition that we are going through. It started life in 2015 as a simple newsletter to help me learn. We were (and still are) witnessing the collision of general-purpose technologies in the fields of computing, energy, biology, and manufacturing. Each of these was improving — on a price/performance basis — very quickly, more than 10% per annum. Silicon chips have improved at around 40-45% per annum for several decades. And startup should destabilize (and then help redefine) our ways of doing things.
EV investigated these trends from a technical, startup, and social perspective. Exponential View is the thesis that emerged from this activity: that technology and societal changes are intertwined and that now more than ever, we need to understand those interrelationships.
Q: What is the link between the newsletter and the book? How are they similar and different?
A: The newsletter helped me learn about some technologies that had emerged while I had been heads down for seven years running a startup. Through reading blogs, academic papers, investment decks, and talking to founders, I started to figure out what I thought was going on. The newsletter is a flow of material framed by my overarching thesis, which developed over time. That thesis is largely presented in the book. The book is a finished product, a thesis, an argument that is a guided tour of what our near future might look like.
Q: In writing the book, what were some of the insights that surprised even you?
A: When I analyzed why technologies got faster, I was surprised that there were few frameworks that connected the idea of learning-by-doing (which is a key pillar) with the impact of standardization and the growth of networks (of all types). In my analysis, all of these play a role in accelerating technical development.
Most interestingly, I expected to address the book more to technologists — to help them better understand the nature of the technologies they develop, to provide some economic, social, and historical context to their work. But as I did more research, I concluded that the book needs to be equally addressed to people outside of the technology domain who need to be much more to “level up” their understanding of the technologies of the Exponential Age.
Q: Switching gears, where I am based (Silicon Valley), we have become too accustomed to product-oriented innovation. Better SaaS, better streaming, or just better note-taking apps — what do you make of this product & feature-focused innovation?
A: It is one way of achieving some form of innovation or breakthrough. And we shouldn’t ignore the power of the OODA loop to help us discover and iterate against a local maxima. I think it’s an essential part of the toolkit. In an ecological or evolutionary sense, building on previous technologies has also been the story of technology.
I suspect that the appeal of these standardized playbooks, applied with a bit more ocher or teal or beige, is that capital understands the risks it is taking. That clarity of the risk-reward tradeoff frees up resources, the businesses grow, and we hear about them.
When I researched 14,000 individual startups funded between 2012 and 2020 for a report on ClimateTech last year, far and away, the most important hub for climate tech investments was the San Francisco Bay Area. So while you may feel that there is a product monomania in Silicon Valley, there does appear to be a diversity, including deeper tech companies.
What may be commonplace in Silicon Valley could be a business and political culture: of growth at all costs, of exporting innovation without regard to local contexts, of particular ways of conceptualizing an opportunity.
Q: Does [this culture] mask or distract us from thinking about the future and opportunities differently, rather, more bravely, for the lack of a better word?
A: Yes, I agree it might well do that. Technologies that emerge from the interaction of humans and humans have embeddedness in their experience and present. And that will get expressed in the things that matter, that shape those products, for all their global use, Facebook and Twitter remain American products, with a particular hue. It’s a hard thought experiment to ask whether a Swedish or Indian, or British version of the same products could have succeeded globally, and if they had, what would they have looked like?
I’m excited that of the 170 cities with one or more tech unicorns, only 42 are in the U.S. The diversity of innovation will be very good for the breadth of innovation that emerges. The post-Covid world of increasing remote work might allow for, in specialist areas, a global talent pool. Such a global talent pool might support hyper-specialist expertise, allowing for even further innovation.
Q: What does the near future look like? What are some of the key trends that will shape that future?
A: I wrote my decade predictions in an essay at the end of 2018. Largely, they hold up. Climate change is the most important trend.
Equally, the technologies of the Exponential Age in computing, biology, energy, and manufacturing will continue to get cheaper and cheaper. This will make many areas of activity currently uneconomical, economical. Cheap solar electricity will create a market for hydrogen and synthetic fuels. Great computation will enable better ML methods to allow us to design sophisticated microorganisms in silico before deploying them in the world to fix nitrogen with a lower energy cost than the Haber-Bosch process.
And yet, these technologies will be destabilizing. They will upset the status quo and shift power away from certain actors and towards others. This destabilization process could increase national and civil conflicts, disadvantaging in some fundamental ways many groups or simply creating political unrest as others feel a lack of agency. This last trend may be the one that punishes us for any technical progress, so figuring out how to put humanity’s hand on the tiller that guides the direction of their technologies needs to be a priority.
October 24, 2021. San Francisco.