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Personal view: the idea and importance of 'The Exponential age' is being oversold here. Sure Moore's Law has - with some adjustments - applied for a long time,
by klelatti 5y ago
Personal view: the idea and importance of 'The Exponential age' is being oversold here. Sure Moore's Law has - with some adjustments - applied for a long time, but lots of things that are really important don't follow this pattern. Is the author really saying electricity isn't as important as Moore's Law because it wasn't 'exponential'?
The key issue is at what point does the technology progress to a point where important things that previously weren't viable suddenly become so. The way in which the technology progresses to that point is key, but being exponential or not is not really relevant.
- azeemazhar3 5y agoIt is a great point and one which I expound in some detail in the first two chapters of the book. Things don't have to be 'exponential' to be important. Printing press, wheel being two other good examples. Square-rigged sails as well! However, a number of aspects of our economies are not sufficiently configured to enable a kind of phase change in interactions between entities in our economies. And one of those is enabling the rapid development of a whole suite of technologies (outside traditional tech), and those technologies good well be candidates for general purpose technologies, which in turn maginifies the impacts they might have.
- klelatti 5y agoLook forward to reading the book - sounds like it will be a very interesting read (although publishing on the same day as Adam Tooze's Shutdown presents a dilemma!) Completely applaud any effort to step back and examine these effects. We do need better ways of thinking about how technology interacts with economics and, I think now especially, geopolitics given current challenges.