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Oct. 22, 2021 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
55:02
Edition 584 - Azeem Azhar

Azeem Azhar is an acclaimed UK-based expert on tech , startups and innovation - His book "Exponential" asks if accelerating technology is leaving us behind - and what can we do about it....

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Across the UK, across continental North America, and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes and this is The Unexplained.
I hope everything is good with you.
Thank you for all of the emails that you've continued to send in through the website theunexplained.tv.
Some very heartening and supportive emails and emails that tell me again that I have somehow been helping you get through this very difficult period.
And as I've said before, so won't labor the point, you've helped me because by having the regularity of continuing to do this, it's been able to take my mind off the million problems and issues that I have.
And if it's doing something similar for you, then I'm really, really grateful.
And wonderful emails from people like Phil and Wendy in Ontario who loved the Chris Hadfield interview.
A lot of good response to that.
And what a great guy Chris Hadfield is.
I hope that sometime in the future I get the chance to speak with him again.
Thank you to Adam, my webmaster, for his ongoing hard work.
Thank you to you for the emails and the ongoing guest suggestions.
Very, very important.
I'm now booking the podcasts again by myself.
So if you have a guest suggestion, contact details for a guest, then, you know, very, very grateful to receive those.
Just go to the website, theunexplained.tv, and you can follow the link and send an email from there.
And remember, the official Facebook site of The Unexplained with Howard Hughes, it's the one with the logo, no other one.
If you see any other Facebook pages, it's not that one.
The official one is the one with my logo on it, you know, the one that you see on the website.
So that's the one.
And please check in on the Facebook page.
Any news about the show or the radio show and its future will be there, I promise you.
By the way, some people have emailed that they haven't been able to listen again to the radio show.
I have mentioned it to people at the radio station, and I know that you've been emailing.
That's about as much as I can do.
I'm, you know, basically custodian of the website and, of course, devised The Unexplained.
It's my show.
But the radio show is put out by them.
The radio station, all of the podcasts are looked after by me.
So that's the difference.
So if there is an issue, it's not something that I can get Adam to deal with here because it's down to the radio station.
And I hope you understand.
So emails that have come in, lovely ones from people like Louisa in California, massively supportive.
And one or two, and one or two that aren't.
One that made me laugh, Trevor, regular listener to the show and critic at times of the show, accused me of being, quotes, a globalist shill for an interview that I did about MH370.
I don't know how I can possibly be a globalist shill when I went to a Liverpool comprehensive school, trained as a journalist, first in my family to get to a university.
You know, I don't do anybody's bidding.
They certainly don't do my bidding.
So why would I be doing the bidding of anybody?
They don't bother much with me.
It's a joke.
So, you know, I can clear that one up right now if you're sitting there thinking that I'm a globalist shill somehow.
I just don't get how that can be.
And, you know, as my grandmother used to say, if you didn't laugh, you'd cry.
Thank you.
Thank you for all of your emails.
Okay, the guest on this edition is Azeem Azhar.
He is an expert on technology, award-winning entrepreneur, analyst, strategist, investor.
He produces Exponential View, the leading newsletter and podcast on the impact of technology and our future generally.
He's got a great new book out about this.
And because of all of the things that are happening in technology, like, for example, you know, Mark Zuckerberg wanting to build a metaverse and all the rest of it that's happening at the moment, I just thought it might be a good time to speak with him.
So Azimazar, the guest on this edition of The Unexplained.
Thank you very much for all of your emails and communications, the nice things you say.
Please keep supporting The Unexplained.
And I thank you from the bottom of my heart for being there for me through what was another difficult year.
All right, let's get to Azim Azhar.
And we're going to talk about exponential.
Azim, thank you very much for coming on my show.
What an enormous pleasure.
So, Azim, I think we have an awful lot to talk about.
And I think these issues, and I know that you would agree because that's your whole raison d'être, are absolutely crucial now to the core of where this society of ours seems to be moving in 2021 and beyond.
You know, these are big issues.
They're very large issues.
Yes, they are issues that I argue are ones we haven't faced for more than a century.
And how we face them today is quite different to how our forefathers and ancestors dealt with them over 100 years ago.
Talk to me about you, what you do and your interest in all of this.
Well, I've been working in and around technology, perhaps accidentally, since I was a university student more than 25 years ago.
And after a career being on the edge of technologies that were just about useful, usable as an entrepreneur and as a journalist and as an investor, I just have a bit of perspective.
And I've been studying these rapid changes pretty much full time for the last five or six years through a newsletter and a podcast that I have.
And I've summed up my learnings and my sense of where things are going in a new book that's called Exponential.
Indeed.
And we'll talk extensively around that.
Seems to me that the phrase they use for alcohol is also partly a phrase that applies to technology.
In other words, it seems to me that in 2021, technology is a good servant and a bad master.
And at the moment, it seems that technology is outstripping our abilities to cope with it and is controlling us.
What do you think?
You know, I think we can unpack that a little bit.
There are certainly dimensions where we should feel that it is now a bad master.
And that's probably our relationships with the very large technology companies that own and operate so much of the average daily typical tools that we need to use as we go about our business.
There's a wider question, which I try to tackle in the book, which is a sense that we're moving into a new period of time where our relationship with technology is going to be quite different, much more obvious and manifest than our relationship with technology has been in previous generations.
And I'm not sure that's necessarily a servant master relationship.
It is really, though, one which requires a good deal of thought to be put to it.
Indeed, it does.
And it seems to me that our politicians, I know they've had other things to deal with in the last 18 months or so.
We know what they are, are failing.
They're failing to deal with this.
They're failing to level with us about what all of this means.
They are failing on every level.
What do you say about that?
Do you agree?
I think politicians face a constant problem, which is that they have to make long-term decisions under the cosh of a short-term electoral cycle.
And what's particularly destabilizing about the technologies that we have today is that they change very rapidly within the period of an electoral cycle.
And politicians are not well tooled to make decisions in that short period of time against something that looks innocuous one year and is enormously significant two or three years later.
And I think we have to combine with that a sense, I think, that is very, very prevalent within British political culture, which is that we've not really respected science or technology or innovation much within our political culture, not even just in the last three or four years, but for many, many years before that, it was acceptable to stand up and say, I'm enumerate, or I don't know how to use a computer, or I don't get science as a politician.
And I think that creates a culture where people don't engage with these issues broadly.
But we have to also recognize that in amongst all of that, Howard, there are politicians who do engage with these issues and do think about them and do have sensible things to say.
But, you know, of course, they are a little bit like the little raisins peppered about a scon, right?
There are a few raisins and there's a lot of scones.
No, that's true.
And, you know, just while we're talking about this general issue, then we'll do a deep dive into all of it.
You know, I don't really want to talk about politics or politicians.
It's just not what we do here.
However, it does seem to me, and maybe particularly in the United Kingdom, that politicians at the moment are addressing the issue that poor people may be about to get even poorer.
And yet, while they're saying that we're going to do something about that, we have situations where global multinationals like Microsoft, for example, having said they were not going to bring out another operating system, they were going to do things in another way, are introducing Windows 11, many computers, and not even just computers used by poorer people.
You know, computers used by other people are not going to be compatible.
There will be issues with this.
It will be more expense.
Politicians are not having that kind of dialogue.
So on the one hand, we've got a huge company saying, okay, we've made a decision.
We want to go Windows 11 now.
And forget what we told you before.
That's fair enough.
That's a business decision for them.
But our politicians are not having a dialogue, it seems to me, about what that means.
If you're sitting in Africa and you've got, you're in a school there with donated computers, what are you going to do about that?
I know that's a side issue, but I think it's very important.
It is important.
I am not sure, though, that that is necessarily where we should be concerned.
I think there are other places for us to be concerned about what is happening with the way in which technologies are emerging in our economies and in our societies more broadly.
I mean, the headline story is these things have got so much more cheaper over the last 50 years and have had many, many positive impacts and will continue to get cheaper.
The downside, that drunken master that we touched on earlier, is really more about power and access and equity in quite fundamental ways.
Whether you use Windows 11 or Windows 10 or Windows 95 or an old version of the Macintosh operating system.
Or you go to Linux, for example.
Or you go to Linux, I think is a marginal choice compared to the rather tougher issues I talk about in the book, which I hope we explore.
And I'm not sure that politicians should leave technology companies to do whatever they want to do.
And I don't think they should at all, but they need to figure out where are the right interventions and what are the right types of interventions for them to make.
And that comes back to your point about, are they asleep?
Have they caught up with this?
Do they really understand what is symptom and what is cause?
Because we would rather they spend their time on tackling causes rather than sort of firefighting after the sort of next story du jour.
And we don't want to stifle innovation.
We certainly don't want to do that because we depend on that.
You look at Britain's history, and this is another side issue, but a lot of people in this country have come up with fantastic ideas, but we've gone and sold them off, or those people have gone to other countries.
So we need to be dealing with that.
One very quick thing before we dive into the issues in the book.
Facebook announced 24 hours ago as I record this that they want to recruit 10,000 people in Europe to create a metaverse.
Now, I think an awful lot of these people, a lot of people listening to this podcast and a lot of us in general are going to be baffled about what a metaverse might be.
We might think we have a notion of it, but we really don't.
What is a metaverse and why do we need it?
Well, it is a baffling idea.
The idea of the metaverse is to construct a digital world that is more immersive, that is richer in its interactions and its expressions than our current digital experiences.
And so if we think about where digital experiences have evolved back in the turn of the millennium, you or I, if we were having a shared digital experience, it was probably through an SMS message.
I would be messaging you saying, you know, I'm running late for lunch.
And you would get that text message and say, reply back.
And that was a little black and white bit of text that appeared on our Nokia or Ericsson mobile phones.
And over the last 20 years, we've made those experiences richer through the shared digital worlds we have, whether it's leaving hearts on someone's Instagram post or having a video conference with our friends and relatives around the world over Zoom.
And the metaverse is taking advantage of the new capabilities within displays and devices and broadband to create more of an immersive, richer digital experience.
I mean, that's what it is.
And you could call it virtual reality that many people can step inside of.
And these things are additive and complementary to the things that went before.
We still send text messages 20 years on, even though we could have a video conference call.
We still read newspapers less than we did, even though we can get on news on Twitter or we can watch videos on TikTok.
So I would say that this is sort of an additional platform space for expression and opportunity.
I think the thing that is sort of quite curious about it is that if you look at the successful platforms that we have developed over the last 25 years, they've rarely been developed with a hullabaloo and a fanfare.
They've emerged rather scrappily from the sort of itch of some founders, whether that was Facebook or Twitter or TikTok.
The announcement up front with this sort of grand 10,000 hiring spree they will go on is not the way that most historically that most platforms have emerged that we use have ended up emerging.
So one needs to read a lot into it.
You also asked me how, do we want it?
Henry Ford was always sort of quite clever about this.
People wanted horseless carriages.
They didn't want cars.
And I don't know necessarily whether we can articulate exactly how people will end up using these things.
But if I had said to you, you know, if I had said to you 40 years ago, do you want me to be able to look inside your brain by assessing the magnetic spin on the nuclei in your blood that's in your brain?
You would have probably said, no, I don't want that.
Yet you'd happily hop into an fMRI scanner if your doctor said, we need to do an MRI scan of your brain.
So we always need to sort of ask questions about novel technologies and how they emerge and how they get accepted, because it's never clear upfront what will necessarily take off.
So we need to lead people better.
We need to explain to them impartially, and that's going to be a problem, what new technologies would mean.
You're quite right in that example of the MRI scanner.
If somebody had said that to me years ago, I can't honestly see that that's going to help.
But remember on MRI, right?
I mean, a lot of the breakthrough work was done in Britain.
And it was originally called NMR, nuclear magnetic resonance, nuclear meaning of the nucleus.
And they dropped the N because people started getting scared of the word nuclear.
And that's when it became MRI, magnetic resonance imaging.
Because culturally, post-Three Mile Island and the sort of the sort of nuclear scares of the 80s, people didn't want to have this thing going on with them.
And we needed to redress the turkey.
Right.
60%, according to a survey, of people asked in this particular survey said, and I'm not surprised by this at all, that the pace of technology is too fast.
You say in the book, in chapter one, that computers were the first exponential technology, the first thing to grow and develop at that kind of pace.
So that's the gap, isn't it?
How do we bridge it?
Well, bridging it is a complicated subject about which I write 100,000 words.
So I will maybe try to summarize where some of the issues emerge, right?
So what is the gap?
And the gap is that we have technologies that are improving with a very, very generous rate of compound interest.
The bank account that we all wish we had, 10, 20, 30, 50, 60% per year interest being paid on these technologies.
In other words, they're getting much, much more capable or much more affordable every year.
And that keeps compounding.
And what does that mean?
It means that where there was something that you might want to do in business or in your daily life that required one of these technologies, if it was too expensive today, within two or three years' time, that technology will be cheap enough to apply to that particular problem.
And so what we see happening is we see these technologies becoming very, very ubiquitous.
And a simple example is look at what's happened with silicon chips.
So the core component of a silicon chip is something called a transistor.
And transistors used to sell for $1,000 or £700 just in the late 1950s, 1958, per transistor.
Yesterday, Apple, the day before we recorded this, Apple released a new chip that had 58 billion transistors in it.
Now, each transistor does not cost $1,000 because that chip would then cost like $50 quadrillion.
It was that each transistor now costs billionths of a cent or billionths of a penny to produce.
And so we use many more of them.
And that means we have computation everywhere.
And having that everywhere with a general technology like this can do so Much.
It can do our accounting.
It can help us control our light bulbs.
It can help us diagnose diseases.
It can help us waste time and relax watching movies and playing video games.
Changes the fabric and the relations of our everyday lives and our societies.
And so that is the sort of the disruptive, febrile part of technology change, where it sort of upsets the old order.
Now, normally when you have upsets coming into the old order, we have time to adapt to them.
It took decades for people to move from countryside to town.
It took hundreds of years for towns to become cities and thousands of years for half of humanity to live in cities and to become an urban species.
But the speed with which these technologies come in and replace what happened before is occurring not over the hundreds of years or thousands of years or generations where we can adapt to them and we can make adaptations in the way we live, but in less than a decade, sometimes in less than just a few years.
And that is really unsettling.
And it's that speed that I think drives the sort of the sense that we are slightly out of control.
What do we do about it?
Well, I think the question is, why does the speed make us feel that we're out of control?
And there's a number of different issues there.
One is that we don't adapt well to this pace of change.
And there are reasons for it.
We don't see this pace of change in nature.
So evolution hasn't encouraged us to be really good at dealing with exponential processes.
The ways in which we live our lives in the everyday are, whether we like it or not, they're governed by institutions, whether it's our family relationships or our employer or the laws or a church that we're members of.
And these institutions in themselves are meant to have a set of regularity, solidity, static qualities.
I mean, the word institution has the Latin root for the word stand in it.
And so we rely on institutions and conventions to guide everyday life.
Rapid change often means that those institutions and the guidelines they provide are not suitable or they run into this rapid change.
So that is the heart of the slowness of the response.
So then we've got these two issues.
One is you've got the speed of change and the second is you've got the slowness of response.
And I think we have to do things on both sides of that.
We have to look at the speed of change and the nature of that and say, what can we do to make this more acceptable?
Can we slow it down or can we direct it in a more constructive way?
But how do you, sorry to jump in, how do you tell, you know, I can see ways that we might be able to get our institutions to speed up a little.
Some of them have had to, like our royal family here have had to get on board with new technology.
They were steeped in traditions organization, but they've had to move with the times.
You know, we all have to do that.
How do you tell a multi-billion billion billionaire that he or she has got to slow down the pace of what they do?
You know, as a government, as a society, as individuals, we seem to be powerless on that.
Well, I think the starting point there is to look at why we think it's the multi-billion billionaires who are doing this and whether that really is the case.
And of course, 15 years ago, Mark Zuckerberg wasn't a multi-multi-billionaire.
He was a little kid running a small website.
So a large part of, I think, how we have ended up here is over the last 50 or 60 years, we started to treat technology as some kind of magical force that appeared out of the sky.
And you either trusted the high priests of technology to fashion that into something that might be useful for humans, or you got steamrolled by it.
And so we constructed this sense of exceptionalism.
And in fact, for many, many years in the 70s and 80s, technologists were looked at as weirdos somewhere out there, and they weren't really brought into the mainstream of culture or decision making.
And so for me, the issue and the argument that I make in the book is that technology is a sort of intimate human activity.
It is the process of trying to figure out how to make life more engaging or easier or more efficient or just more fun.
And we all engage in acts of technology.
But for reasons that are largely historical, they're connected to the way in which people are going to make money, we've created this sort of mythology and hagiography around special individuals, and no doubt they're sort of exceptionally good at what they do, who create all of this.
So I would start by challenging this idea that technology is owned by certain groups of people who have these powers and therefore we have to work out how to restrain them.
I would start by saying technology is a much, much broader human capacity that we need to participate in and start to own more broadly.
And that's quite a long journey.
But if we choose not to, then perhaps we shouldn't be surprised if we are takers of the technology rather than makers of the technology.
That sounds like an excellent point.
I've never really thought of that, that we need to, instead of worshiping these people who develop technology and bring it to us as some kind of graven image, some kind of godlike figure, what we have to do is to bring these people into the decision-making process so they see how life is for us on this side of the divide.
And if we don't do that, we can't blame them or ourselves for the situation.
Well, we can blame ourselves.
We can't blame society in general for the fact that we're getting left behind and there's a great gulf between those who are making and creating the technology and us who are trying to deploy it.
Yeah, you know, I think that's right.
And bear in mind that if you think about what the job of a company is and what society has asked companies to do, we've asked companies to increase profits, make returns for shareholders and try not to break any laws.
And so if you're a founder or a boss of a company, that is what you are obliged to do.
That is your fiduciary duty.
And we haven't said anything about who you should include and who you should not include in doing all of that.
I mean, there are laws about employment and discrimination and so on.
But largely speaking, the pursuit of growth and capabilities by these companies and the people who lead them has been done within the framework that we sort of agreed from the 1970s when we kind of started to unpick trade unions and we started to say enterprise, enterprise, enterprise.
And we started to say government needs to just get out of the way.
And lots of that was important.
Some of it was not done well.
Some of it shouldn't have been done.
But that was the framework that we gave people.
And then at the same time, there was also this sense that these technologies were somehow magical and the people who could manage them were also in themselves magical.
And then I think that's partly what gets us to where we have got to.
Facebook is the incredibly powerful advertising technology that is more effective for advertising than almost anything that's gone before.
That was almost what we were asking, we more broadly, as sort of members of a democratic economy, when we chase after GDP numbers and we look at the profits that companies are reporting, we think about where our pensions and our ICEs are being invested.
So in a sense, we're party to this because we're not necessarily asking the right questions.
But one of the points that I make in the book is that on this particular issue of companies, there was an embedded assumption throughout the 20th century that companies would not get as big and dynamic as the companies that we see today, these very large technology companies.
There was an assumption that big companies would get bureaucratic and sluggish and uncreative and stop innovating.
And that would create room for competitors to come in and keep them honest.
And indeed, if that didn't happen organically, like, for example, with the banks in America and the telecom companies, they would legislate to break them into more manageable units.
That is not happening at the moment.
That's exactly the case.
But, you know, they were broken into more manageable units because they broke very, very particular monopoly laws.
And it's not clear that the way that since the 1970s, in the American tradition in particular, which has driven a lot of this, that the very large technology companies do obviously break traditional monopoly laws.
So it's a little bit like there was a US jurist who was looking at some question of pornography, Potter Stewart was his name.
And he said, you know, I can't describe it, but I know it when I can see it, when I see it.
And I think we have this issue when we look at the technology companies, which is that they look and they seem like they're monopolistic and they're super dominant.
But actually trying to pin them down on where that is actually happening is a much, much harder question.
And my argument is that the reason that's a harder question is because you need to, when technologies come and they are sufficiently general and differentiated, you need new language and new ways of thinking to ask questions about it.
In the same way that cars don't need horseshoes, right?
They need tires.
And you wouldn't put a horseshoe on a car.
Would you use the same method of analysis of diagnosis of the market power of an Apple or a Facebook as you would to look at the market power of a standard oil in the 1900s?
And I argue that you shouldn't use the same framing and that there are reasons why we see these companies getting really, really big, but also still find it a bit hard to take our old tools of monopoly and look at them and say, this is a problem.
So do you believe that we should just leave them as they are?
You know, they no, I mean, we shouldn't leave them as they are, but it's complicated.
And it's complicated because they do so many different things.
And in large part, they are running major parts of our, what I would call public infrastructure.
So when I was growing up in the 70s and 80s, if you wanted to really get things done, most of what you did occurred across public infrastructure.
You know, you walked down a high street, you walked into a shop, you paid with pound sterling, you walked back.
Apart from your interaction with the greengrocer, there was no private entity in the space.
Whereas today, when you try to do that, that selfsame thing, you pick up a phone that is made by Apple, you type in a search query that is run by Google, you find the delivery service that sits between you and the greengrocer.
And each one of those are privately run companies that are making specific decisions about what does and doesn't appear on those platforms.
And you could theoretically say, well, you assume you could walk out to the greengrocer if you wanted to, but yes, and I could, but that's not really how we have now started to live our lives.
And it's past the point of consumer choice when you say, oh, I booked this on my iPhone rather than walking to the GP surgery or whatever it is.
I think everybody's happy with that.
I think what people are not happy with, and I know that's not the main thrust of this discussion, but I think what people are not happy with is the thought that their data, their thoughts, maybe elements of emails that they've sent are being mined so that these companies, free of charge, we have to say, and that's part of the trade-off that this involves, you know, can make money off us.
You know, that's one issue.
And then the other issue is that it's all developed to the stage where some people who maybe need to have their speech curbed somewhat because it is dangerous to society and it's wrong, they get an absolutely clean, clean sheet because nobody's controlling them because nobody's controlling the big tech companies.
And that's not really part of this discussion, but it's a fact, isn't it?
Well, but I think that we lose sight of the real issues when we worry about those issues.
Now, they are issues and they're important ones and the ones I talk about in the book, but they're the present ones that the companies are willing to talk about because they're not really the most important ones.
The most important issues are that in order to participate in a modern society now, you need access through digital interfaces.
And those digital interfaces are governed not by our democratic politics, but by private companies who make their decisions in particular ways.
So you recently saw that as a request from the Russian government, Apple removed to and Google removed apps relating to Alexander Navalny, who's an opponent of Putin, from the app store.
And in response to requests from the Chinese government, companies removed Bible and Quran apps from app stores in China.
Now, that is demonstrating the power of those companies to determine what goes on in what we think of as a public realm.
And so I think it's very important for us to recognize that they now control things that you or I, when we were growing up, would have thought were, in a sense, uncontrollable, and we just sort of decide on a community basis, or they were things that we would expect our politicians and our lawmakers to make decisions about.
And before we get into this issue of, oh, it's really interesting that Google is making money off my booking for an osteopath appointment in my email, I think that's just much, much less important than the idea that our ability to have agency in the decisions that affect our lives on a quotidian daily,
hourly basis have been subtly swept into these large companies over the course of 20 or 25 years without us being able to have a conversation about whether that's right or not and whether we want those decisions to happen in some place that's more democratic and more accountable.
But the genie's out of the bottle, isn't it?
Well, you know, genies, I don't think we've had the discussion.
I mean, I'll give you an example here, Howard.
During the COVID pandemic, there was this question about contact tracing, right?
We all carry mobile phones.
Why can't we use our mobile phones to help us contact trace and see who we've, you know, if we've been in touch with someone who's had COVID and we can then be told to isolate?
And the mobile phone, at the time, it seemed like a really solid way of doing this.
And there were two approaches to doing contact tracing.
One is a highly centralized mechanism where our names and addresses are held and you could query that database and you could then find out where everyone has been at every given point.
And of course, that achieves a public health requirement, which is tracing where the virus is spreading.
But it's also really tempting for the security services and the police because they can figure out, you know, who was around at the time of that FRACA.
I mean, it's an absolute sort of panopticon.
The other approach, which is what many privacy advocates wanted and human rights advocates wanted, was to have a decentralized contact tracing, which doesn't have a central database, but would achieve the same public health outcome, which is if you had been exposed to COVID, we could have told you and then sent notifications out to everyone who you had been near without anyone knowing who those people were.
And that's great because it means that you achieve the public health outcome without starting to infringe on this idea of privacy and sort of civil liberties.
And when contact tracing was being sort of thought about on the mobile phones, the two big protect platforms who run the mobile systems, Apple and Google, said, we are going to enable the decentralized privacy-safe civil liberties version of contact tracing on our phones, like billions of devices.
And governments can go off and build their own sort of invasive, sort of home office-friendly version of this if they want to, but they won't be able to act.
But if they want a quicker route to market, they can use a decentralized mechanism.
And that, I think, highlights the really complexity of this issue, which is that should that decision have really, which is now kind of public health decision, have really rested with the technology companies, or should it have rested with our Democratic representatives, number one.
Number two, but what if you get into this situation where actually our Democratic representatives were hugely overstepping the remit that we had asked them to engage in, specifically around COVID, which was they wanted to turn this into a tool of surveillance, not just a tool of public health.
And so that's the complexity, because in my view, the technology companies were right to protect our privacy.
I would have asked our government to protect our privacy and our liberties, but they didn't want to at that time.
So the decision ended up falling to the technology companies.
Now, that may be a better outcome, but it's bad governance and it's bad democracy.
Do you think that, I mean, giving the politicians just for once a break, they might have just done what politicians do, and that is ask the civil servants, what do we do about this issue?
We need test, track and trace.
How do we make that happen?
And of course, they're going to get a civil service answer, which is not necessarily the best answer.
So, you know, through simply not understanding the situation and having to move quickly, that's what we ended up with.
No, so that might have been the case, but I was party to a number of the discussions.
And so, you know, and I had made my points clear to the civil service and elsewhere about this.
And my experience of the civil service is that they are, from a kind of technocratic standpoint, they understand the issues very, very deeply.
It tends to fall at the realm of the kind of political capability.
So I think in that instance, because it was a very public debate and I was tangentially, I really on the outside had a couple of conversations with people at the time had made it clear.
And you could see from the blog posts and the technical papers that came out of the NHSX group that they understood the trade-offs between centralization and decentralization.
So it wasn't, I think, a lack of subject knowledge or awareness or speed that was forcing that.
I mean, I think it really is, but it's hard to know exactly why you would have done that.
And I suspect there's generally a kind of an adage about government, which is at moments of crisis, government looks to expand its capabilities almost to its maximum extent.
And sometimes we're very, very grateful for that expansion.
And sometimes it oversteps the mark.
And I think you can look at what happened in the US after 9-11 and the Patriot Act that was thousands of pages and passed in a matter of hours, which hugely expanded US government powers without the right kind of oversight, because that is the opportunity that government has to broaden its capabilities.
And I think that's an easier way of explaining what went on than to simply push it back down to expedience.
And I think this is where we have an interesting challenge because these new digital capabilities are really powerful.
They can be beneficial for us.
They can also be deeply, deeply invasive.
So they have to be well governed.
And right now, the private companies will govern largely for their own benefit, which in some cases might line up well with our benefit.
In many cases, it doesn't.
But it's not clear whether politicians have the desire or the capability to try to govern these technologies for our benefits.
So this brings us to the crux of the whole thing, then, doesn't it?
You say exponential technology could bring a new age of prosperity.
I think you're probably right on that.
Computers could solve humanity's incurable problems.
Renewable energy could stave off an environmental crisis.
Bioengineering could make us all healthier and happier.
But we will only build this future, you say, if we manage to close the exponential gap.
So those are the things that are possible, but we're going to have to go some in order to be able to achieve them.
And we don't have a lot of time to do it.
No, we don't have a lot of time, especially with the context of the climate crisis, which is a decade away from needing to really have us make really significant progress.
And I think my main observation is that the technologies are enablers and they may even be necessary enablers.
There is no way of tracking and identifying the BRCA gene that is associated with so much breast cancer without exponential technologies.
And therefore, without that, those technologies, you can't identify the gene, you can't therefore identify who's at risk, and you can't take early action against that risk of breast cancer.
So we can see that that connection, the necessary input of the technologies to improving human well-being.
But it's only necessary and it's really not sufficient because how we then choose to use them.
Do we choose to use them for human well-being and human flourishing?
Do we choose to use them in ways that increase equity?
Or do we choose to use them in ways that just increase personal profit and inequalities?
Those are all questions of politics.
But for the politics most broadly to ask the right questions, it needs to understand how the underlying technologies work and how they operate.
So when I look out at this idea of an age of abundance, I'm not being starry-eyed and fanciful.
Rather, I'm saying that we have an opportunity now to tackle things that have for the last 50 or 100 years looked really, really difficult to tackle.
But we need to have a wider understanding of what it is to solve them properly.
And that wider understanding might include things like equity.
I mean, we have, going into the pandemic, we had the lowest levels of unemployment in many, many years and the highest levels of employment for years.
And yet we also knew that the world of work was very, very unfair and very divided.
And so the technologies have enabled both the high levels of employment, the low levels of unemployment and the divisions.
And to harness them positively requires a better governance, that is a better control of them.
And that control comes from the right kind of politics and the right kind of discussion about them.
And that's difficult, isn't it?
Because if you talk to people on the street, sometimes they will tell you they don't feel their views are listened to.
So it's all very well saying, you know, we need to have this great debate.
We need to give people more input and we need to involve technologists and scientists and engineers in government, which we do, to help them understand.
So, you know, we're all singing from the same hymn sheet.
We're all heading in the same direction.
But for example, we have a railway project in this country that I know you'll know all about called HS2.
And for my listeners overseas, it's a high-speed rail network.
It's going to have, like all of these things do, an extended time scale to build.
they never happen on time and this one isn't, and a massively increased budget.
Arguably, by the time it's finished, it's going to be out of date.
If you ask people on the street whether they want it, they will tell you no.
But the politicians don't actually enable that.
We press on with something that the people, and this is not me expressing a point about it, although if you want a point from me about it, I'm not the world's biggest fan of HS2 because I think it'll be out of date when we get it.
But let's leave that aside.
People feel that they're not heard.
People feel that they're not heard.
And that is a question that is well above my pay grade.
I mean, it really, you know, it goes back for hundreds of years when we replace the idea of political struggle with a simple idea of economic well-being.
And we then maximize this idea of economic well-being and we essentially buy people off.
I think the Roman Emperor Nero called it Parnem and Cirkenses, bread and circuses.
And in our case, it may be Deliveroo and Love Island that it buys us off or Deliveroo and TikTok.
But there are moves to get people much, much more engaged.
A lot of them are happening at the city level.
So for example, this idea of participatory democracy or citizens' juries, where what you end up doing is you look at a particular issue that's quite divisive and you get perhaps groups of 20, 30 people and a few of them to sit and discuss them, not as a focus group, in a structured way over a course of two or three days.
And they identify what the key issues are.
And that process then gives you the question that is the question that should be put to the democratic polity.
And in Ireland, they used citizen juries, this kind of deliberative democracy, to frame the question about legalizing abortion under certain circumstances.
And that is obviously a divisive political issue and has been for decades in Ireland.
And that referendum went ahead a year or two ago, you know, with the result that it had.
And there are new democratic mechanisms that are very, very different to, you know, well-educated people shouting across the dispatch box in the House of Parliament.
And you are starting to see these deliberative mechanisms emerge in cities.
They are enabled by some of these technologies.
They are often tackling questions that touch on these technologies.
And there is a pathway, I think, to bringing a closer debate and one that touches more closely people's real concerns.
We don't get that in the traditional media space because I've sat in some citizen juries where I've watched them.
They don't rile you the way watching one of our mainstream TV discussion programmes will rile us.
That reptilian excitement of cut and thrust and ad hominem attack and everything else and shock and awe, which is what happens on TV shows in the UK like question time, don't really happen within citizen juries or these deliberative forums because people are considered.
They feel respected.
They feel heard.
They get to participate.
And so I think that we can, we have got mechanisms that allow people to get closer to these types of questions.
And as I said, many of these are happening within cities rather than at the national level.
The Irish example was a national one, but Paris has, the city of Paris has recently announced it's going to have a permanent citizens' jury that will run looking at key issues and help the city lawmakers frame the kind of discussions they need to have.
And I think that that is sort of a really great example of reform.
So the takeaway point I get from this, and I think it's very valuable, and that's why I wanted to speak with you, and I'm grateful to you for making the time for me, Azim, is that, you know, we don't get a free pass on this.
This is the biggest issue that any of us will have to face in our lifetime.
It will transcend everything, including the likes of COVID.
Everything else will pass us by, but technology and its impacts will always be with us.
And whether we want a better future, that future of abundance and everything else that it could bring us, we've all got to get on board.
And that means that the debate has got to be framed.
And that's going to have to be politicians and people in the public sphere who do that.
We are going to have to take a part in it and understand why that's important.
And I think most people will get it because most people depend on technology these days.
But if we don't do that, then we can't really blame ourselves for being on board a runaway train.
You've said it beautifully.
You've said it beautifully.
I would hope that people will read my book and will come away feeling more able to ask the right questions and more able and eager to get involved in the discussions and at whatever level they feel they want to,
whether it's to writing to their MP, whether it's to setting something up, whether it's just to have the right kind of conversations at the school gates and where right is not what I think is right, right is what you think is right based on what matters to you, but hopefully with the foundation of perhaps understanding where we are at this moment in history.
And maybe the answer to it all is not turning on the TV and thinking those nice people on the commercials or the young, beautiful people on Love Island or politicians who stand up and talk at us.
The answer is not thinking that that is going to determine the way that our lives go and we don't have a say.
The answer is to get a grip on it all and have an input because you've explained the consequences of not.
Yeah, well, I think exactly that.
Having that input, being active in ways that are useful For you.
And again, this is not about becoming Greta Thunberg or becoming Elon Musk.
It is really about just starting to have slightly different conversations and establishing that change in that way.
I'll share with you one lovely little example, which is in China, of course, there's a lot of management of these technology platforms of changing what people can and can't see.
And there is now a sort of a resistance movement of people in their mid-20s who are finding all sorts of subversive ways of getting around the control of these platforms.
You know, we've seen this pattern happen in the past.
That's what it was to be a punk in England in Britain in the 1970s.
The root is always there, provided we do the uncomfortable and take it.
Well, I think we had to have this conversation.
I found it very stimulating.
And thank you for making time for me.
If you want to promote a website where people can check out your work, I'm happy for you to do that, Azim.
Of course, yeah.
They just have to go to Exponential View.
Just type it into your search engine and you'll find my site there.
And the book is called Exponential and it's available in bookstores all over the place.
And I've looked at it.
Well worth reading.
Azim Azhar.
Thank you so much.
Thank you so much, Had.
And as ever, your thoughts.
Welcome on Azim Azhar and his views of our technological future.
I think when it comes to technology, the genie is out of the bottle.
It's going to be very hard for us to rein back on any of it, even if we want to.
And we have to view it, don't we, as a double-edged sword?
It's changed a lot of our lives.
It certainly changed my life because I'm sitting here at home recording this and distributing it to you, which of course I would never have been able to do 20 years ago.
The people who ran radio stations and media companies had complete control over our lives then.
And if they didn't want to put you on, then you didn't go on.
If they wanted to cease your employment, they could do so overnight at the snap of a finger, and that was it.
You simply lost your platform and nobody could then hear you.
And, you know, I can remember situations, thankfully, very, very few of them, where I've gone from radio stations and people have emailed and phoned the radio station and they've said, what's happened to Howard?
Where is he?
And, you know, it's just like you're a disappeared person.
Now, of course, the great thing about this technology is nobody has to be disappeared anymore.
We can all have a voice.
Now, that, as we have discussed, is a good thing and a bad thing at times.
You know, some people get a voice and don't really deserve one, but that's a whole other story.
If you have a guest suggestion, then please get in touch with me through the website, theunexplained.tv.
Tell me who you are, where you are, and how you use this show.
And if you have contact details since I'm booking the podcast myself now, that's going to be a great, big help.
Thank you very much.
More great guests in the pipeline here at The Unexplained.
So until next we meet, my name is Howard Hughes.
This has been The Unexplained Online.
And please, whatever you do, stay safe, stay calm, and above all, please stay in touch.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
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