Exponential: Order and Chaos in an Age of Accelerating Technology

by Azeem Azhar

These wide-ranging inventions are known as ‘general purpose technologies’. They may displace other technologies and create the opportunity for a wide variety of complementary products – products and services that can only exist because of this one invention. Throughout history, general purpose technologies (GPTs) have transformed society beyond recognition. Electricity drastically altered the way factories work, and revolutionised our domestic lives. The printing press, which played a key role in the European Reformation and the scientific revolution, was much more than a set of pressure plates and cast metal type. GPTs upturn our economies, and our societies too – spawning changes far beyond the sectors in which they began.18 As the economists Richard Lipsey, Kenneth Carlaw and Clifford Bekar put it, GPTs ‘change almost everything in a society … by creating an agenda for the creation of new products, new processes, and new organizational forms.’19