This is Cognitive Revolution, my show about the personal side of the intellectual journey. Each week, I interview an eminent scientist, writer, or academic about the experiences that shaped their ideas. The show is available wherever you listen to podcasts.
Azeem Azhar is a technologist and investor with a background in technology journalism. His newsletter, Exponential View, is enjoyed by ~200,000 readers per week. The occasion for our discussion was Azeem's new book: The Exponential Age; or in the UK: Exponential. It is about the discrepancy between the rate of technology's change—which is exponential—and the rate of change in the rest of society, in our cultural practices, and in the way we think (which is slower). This is the exponential gap, and it is where many of our society's most pressing problems lay. In this episode, Azeem and I talk about some of the key arguments in his book and their extrapolations to other topics of interest. We also talk about his background: starting when he was a boy living in Zambia, encountering computers for the first time. You can dig further into Azeem's work in his book or through his newsletter, both available here:
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#64: Azeem Azhar on the Exponential Age