The Exponential Age: How Accelerating Technology is Transforming Business, Politics and Society

Like it or not, technology brings change. And so the second stage in our shift in mindset involves acceptance: recognizing that while we can shape it, technology will nonetheless bring rapid, often unexpected dislocations.

The meningitis vaccine took ninety years to develop, polio forty-five years, measles a decade. Scientists created an effective vaccine for mumps in just four years: that was a proud achievement at the time. Given the virulence of SARS-CoV-2 and the effects it was having, no one could afford to wait that long. And so they didn’t.

In short, we are entering an age of abundance. The first period in human history in which energy, food, computation, and many resources will be trivially cheap to produce.

Our phones are designed to fit in men’s hands rather than women’s. Many medicines are less effective on Black and Asian people, because the pharmaceutical industry often develops its treatments for white customers. When we build technology, we might make these systems of power more durable—by encoding them into infrastructure that is more inscrutab... See more

The result is what I call the “exponential gap”: the chasm between new forms of technology—along with the fresh approaches to business, work, politics, and civil society they bring about—and the corporations, employees, politics, and wider social norms that get left behind.

When rapid technological change arrives, it first brings turmoil, then people adapt, and then eventually, we learn to thrive.

Complexity scientists refer to moments of radical change within a system as a “phase transition.”5 When liquid water turns into steam, it is the same chemical, yet its behavior is radically different. Societies, too, can undergo phase changes. Some moments feel abrupt, discontinuous, world-changing. Think of the arrival of Columbus in the Americas,... See more