The Exponential Age Quotes

“Where workers do lose their jobs due to automation, it’s not because they themselves are replaced by some piece of software. It’s often because the firms they work for fail. And the firms they work for fail because their management or shareholders are unwilling or unable to keep up with the new possibilities of technology. That failure often extends to failing to invest in the training that their employees need to implement the latest technologies.”
― Azeem Azhar, The Exponential Age: How Accelerating Technology is Transforming Business, Politics and Society

“In general, if an organization needs to do something that uses computation, and that task is too expensive today, it probably won’t be too expensive in a couple of years.”
― Azeem Azhar, The Exponential Age: How Accelerating Technology is Transforming Business, Politics and Society

“A 10 per cent compounding improvement in the price and performance of a technology would result in it becoming more than 2.5 times more powerful for the same price every 10 years.”
― Azeem Azhar, Exponential: Order and Chaos in an Age of Accelerating Technology

“State-sized companies are on the rise – and they are challenging our most basic assumptions about the role of private corporations.”
― Azeem Azhar, Exponential: Order and Chaos in an Age of Accelerating Technology

“When rapid technological change arrives, it first brings turmoil, then people adapt, and then eventually, we learn to thrive.”
― Azeem Azhar, Exponential: Order and Chaos in an Age of Accelerating Technology

“A quick survey of New York Times articles from a century ago reveals that Americans were apprehensive about elevators, the telephone, the television and more.3”
― Azeem Azhar, Exponential: Order and Chaos in an Age of Accelerating Technology

“By the 1960s, the price had fallen to $8 or so per transistor. By 1972, the year of my birth, the average cost of a transistor had fallen to 15 cents,6 and the semiconductor industry was churning out between 100 billion and 1 trillion transistors a year. By 2014, humanity produced 250 billion billion transistors annually: 25 times the number of stars in the Milky Way. Each second, the world’s ‘fabs’ – the specialised factories that turn out transistors – spewed out 8 trillion transistors.7 The cost of a transistor had dropped to a few billionths of a dollar.”
― Azeem Azhar, Exponential: Order and Chaos in an Age of Accelerating Technology

“much like a child’s stencil. This imprints a circuit onto a silicon wafer, and the process can be repeated several times on a single wafer – until you have several transistors on top of one another.”
― Azeem Azhar, Exponential: Order and Chaos in an Age of Accelerating Technology

“This is the Janus face of work in the Exponential Age. Those who are well-educated and lucky can thrive. Those who aren’t might find themselves trapped in an unprecedentedly punitive workplace.”
― Azeem Azhar, The Exponential Age: How Accelerating Technology is Transforming Business, Politics and Society

“more distant – and in some cases they might”
― Azeem Azhar, Exponential: Order and Chaos in an Age of Accelerating Technology

“When you’re talking to a bunch of corporate guys about eighteen to twenty years in the future, when none of those guys will still be in the company, they don’t get too excited about it,” Sasson later recalled.116”
― Azeem Azhar, The Exponential Age: How Accelerating Technology is Transforming Business, Politics and Society