Exponential: Order and Chaos in an Age of Accelerating Technology

by Azeem Azhar

In 2016, the German sneaker maker, Adidas, opened its first small-scale factory in its home country. At 50,000 square feet, the Speedfactory in Ansbach, Bavaria, could produce half a million pairs of shoes a year – relying not on cheap labour but on robots, automation and 3D printing.

Such a factory could produce more complex, personalised shoes for its customers.

The main 3D printing technologies are already improving at around 30 per cent per annum.

This trend is in its infancy. The global market for 3D printing is tiny, only just nudging $10 billion per annum in 2019. Yet it is growing fast.

And so here we can make out a new system of global trade. Gone will be the world of poor countries manufacturing goods for rich countries, and shipping these products across the world. Instead, each rich country will begin to make its own goods at home, for a domestic market.

3D printing will put downward pressure on the value of world trade. Analysts at the Dutch bank ING reckon it might eliminate up to 40 per cent of world imports by 2040.

Between them, the trends of localised manufacturing and local production of food and energy could erode the authority of the states and multilateral institutions that maintain the global order of trade.

The effects of exponential technology will be even more transformative. The institutions of a globalised world require nations to keep talking to each other, trading and cooperating. When the better-off world disengages from the economic wellbeing of the poor, it makes the path of economic development less clear. And it’s a familiar pattern in the Exponential Age: high-tech, rich economies thrive; others get left behind.

Most of the high-tech urban areas in the Exponential Age are living proof of the way talented people from across sectors flock to cities – a process known as ‘agglomeration’. Every year, thousands of tech workers migrate from around the world to San Francisco. As a result, technology companies are willing to shell out for the eye-watering cost of doing business in San Francisco (or London, or Paris) because they are getting the benefit of an incredibly skilled labour pool. Otherwise, they would move to smaller towns or the countryside and enjoy a lower cost of living.

Of course, it would be foolhardy to extrapolate too much from these early clashes between urban and national. But we can begin to make out the contours of an Exponential Age society in which there are constant conflicts between cities and nations. Exponential technologies allow cities more autonomy and self-sufficiency in electricity, trade and food. The exponential economy favours the complex, high-skill activities that are best supported by large, diverse urban populations. If the industrial age of nineteenth and twentieth centuries cemented the importance of the nation state, the Exponential Age is shifting much of that significance to great cities. The result is a tension over where decisions about many aspects of the daily lives of more than half of humanity should occur: at the level of the nation state, or closer to home, in the city.

No one today would think of using a castle to defend from a modern assault. This, in short, is what the technologies of the Exponential Age are doing to the modern state, not to mention modern businesses. Our security systems look increasingly feeble, our attack surface ever more vulnerable, when set against new military technologies.

A UN report estimated that North Korean cyber experts have illegally ‘raised’ up to $2 billion for the country’s weapons programs. This is a much cheaper form of extraterritorial activity than the traditional modes of warfare – which involve sending troops to the other side of the world. All the North Koreans need to wreak havoc is a computer and a talented hacker.

In short, an unhealthy combination of exponential forces – new information networks, viral network effects and AI – combine to help lies spread.

Taiwan’s digital minister, Audrey Tang, told me that they ‘teach media competence, meaning that instead of being just readers and viewers of data and journalism, everybody is essentially a producer of data and narratives’.69 It’s a lesson that many in the West would do well to heed.

In the words of one of its co-founders, Zuckerberg’s Harvard roommate Chris Hughes, ‘Mark’s influence is staggering, far beyond that of anyone else in the private sector or in government.’

Not only does Zuckerberg profit massively from the company, he also has near-absolute control over it. ‘Facebook’s board works more like an advisory committee than an overseer, because Mark controls around 60 percent of voting shares,’

However, in the Exponential Age, private companies increasingly encroach on these areas – ones that we once thought of as beyond the market’s reach. This is the result, once again, of increasing returns to scale. Exponential companies get bigger and bigger, sometimes verging on monopoly. They expand horizontally, at an accelerating rate, into ever-wider sectors of our society. And our democratic norms, embedded in slow-to-adapt institutions, seem unable to keep them in check.

Apple and Google helped enable tools to support contact tracing, but did so on their terms – prioritising user privacy over government surveillance. This may have been a good call, but should decisions like this be taking place in the private realm? Usually, laws are made by elected officials. Now, we have a system of arbitrary power without any clear process of accountability. In the words of the internet activist Rebecca MacKinnon, the ‘consent of the networked’ – that is, every one of us – is being weakened.

Take 23andMe. I developed a fascination with the company soon after it was founded in 2006. Named after the 23 pairs of chromosomes in a human cell, it offers low-cost gene sequencing – giving you the chance to view the source code that makes you into you. It tells you things about yourself that you know, and things you don’t. I learnt that my genome suggests that I have wet earwax (I do) and that I’m likely to wake at 7.51 a.m. (actually, I wake up much earlier). It turns out it’s possible one of my ancestors was a Viking. I also learnt about my risk of developing diseases like Alzheimer’s and macular degeneration.

A large-scale study of YouTube analysed more than 330,000 videos and 72 million comments across 349 channels, and found that users consistently migrate from milder to more extreme content.30 Users who consume extreme content used to consume milder videos – but eventually found themselves following ‘radicalisation pathways’ that took them to ever more hardcore sections of the internet.

Befriending one ISIS supporter leads Facebook to recommend a dozen other pro-ISIS accounts. ‘Facebook, in their desire to connect as many people as possible, have inadvertently created a system which helps connect extremists and terrorists,’ concluded the researchers,

As network effects took hold, clear winners emerged. LinkedIn for business users, Facebook for friends, Twitter for news addicts, Instagram for pictures. Openness played second fiddle to competitiveness. And so the dominant players suffocated interoperability, making their systems deliberately incompatible.

Moderna developed its vaccine with a ‘modified messenger RNA’, or mRNA, a method that involves teaching our cells how to create proteins that resist a virus. And it was able to design such a vaccine thanks to the power of machine learning – Moderna’s platforms crunched millions of numbers to identify what concoction would spark the right response from human cells.

When the researchers calculated the R0 of Covid misinformation on different social networks, they discovered that it ranged from 1.46 (for Reddit) to 2.24 (for Instagram). All driven by exponential technology – with a single click we could share our unsubstantiated thoughts with hundreds or thousands of people.

Building on the advances presaged by services like Ping An Good Doctor, you might have access to hospital-grade diagnostics from your neighbourhood pharmacy.

Cheap wearable devices and regular testing of your blood and microbiota might allow doctors to catch many conditions before they become serious.

Rural and small-town areas are at risk of getting left behind. Issues that we have thought of as national are becoming regional or even local – how will the structure of power within and between nations need to change to reflect that? On such matters, government needs to be closer to the people it serves. But we also need new organisations to maintain international cooperation, to prevent much of the world being shut out of the benefits of exponential technology.