An „exponential gap“ is opening up between our understanding of our world, which updates slowly, and new technologies, which change faster than we can cope with, argues Azeem Azhar.
For the last couple of years the coronavirus has been teaching a master class on exponential growth: from January 2020, when 100 cases in China led the WHO to call a public health emergency, to today, when there have been over 239 million cases worldwide. Before that, as people have begun to forget, exponential growth was perhaps best known as the secret behind the rise of computers. Moore’s Law — the observation made by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore that the number of transistors on an integrated chip doubles roughly every two years — is the reason the smartphone in your pocket is more than a thousand times more powerful than the biggest computers 50 years ago, which only governments and large organisations could afford. The exponential growth of computer power led the inventor Ray Kurzweil to propose the Law of Accelerating Returns and predict that by 2045 machine intelligence will pass that of humans — a.k.a. the Singularity. In Exponential: How Accelerating Technology is Leaving Us Behind and What to Do About It, Azeem Azhar begins with the perception that Kurzweil’s take was too narrow and that exponential growth is taking place in no less than four converging sectors: computing, energy, biology, and manufacturing.
