Portrait of Azeem Azhar, technology analyst and writer
Reading List
Azeem Azhar
Technology Analyst and Writer
Azeem Azhar is a British technology analyst, writer and entrepreneur, and the founder of Exponential View, a newsletter and podcast on how fast-moving technologies reshape economies and societies.
He began as a journalist at The Guardian and The Economist, then founded and sold the machine-learning company PeerIndex, and has held roles across venture investment and corporate innovation. His book Exponential (2021), published in the United States as The Exponential Age, argues that technology now improves faster than institutions can adapt, and that the resulting gap explains much of the disorder in politics, labour markets and competition policy.
He writes and speaks regularly on artificial intelligence, energy transition and the economics of general-purpose technologies.
How Solar Energy Became Cheap
A Model for Low-Carbon Innovation
by Gregory F. Nemet
“I’m not going to pretend it’s not. However, what Gregory Nemet does is explain this really strange phenomenon, which is that solar power has got incredibly cheap. It’s got almost comedically cheap and continues to get cheaper. The question is, why did that happen? The trivial answer people come up with is that it’s all being subsidised by governments, but that’s simply not the full, or the correct, picture.” — via Interview, December 2021
The Ministry for the Future
by Kim Stanley Robinson · 2020
“So there is a rather formal bureaucratic decision to create something called ‘the Ministry for the Future’ that is going to think about the future and think about how to bring people together and get them to act. At the same time, there is the pressure of unilateralism, so certain governments engage in their own solar geoengineering.” — via Interview, December 2021
Learning by Doing
The Real Connection between Innovation, Wages, and Wealth
by James Bessen
“One of his key points is that a lot of this technical knowledge is picked up on the job, not through the classroom, which is why he calls it ‘learning by doing.’ It speaks to the importance of having that kind of apprenticeship model when you’re trying to get these technologies across.” — via Interview, December 2021
The Planet Remade
How Geoengineering Could Change the World
by Oliver Morton
“I worked with him nearly 30 years ago. I’ve been thinking about questions of geoengineering—whether we will need to embark on active geoengineering to deal with the risk of climate change. Oliver is one of the popularisers of those ideas. This book is a classic. It has a literary style. He makes the argument that people are quite seriously thinking about how we might engage in certain types of geo-engineering.” — via Interview, December 2021
Atlas of AI
Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence
by Kate Crawford
“Kate is a wonderful academic, really brilliant, and she has taken a look at the technology of artificial intelligence. In her view, it’s neither artificial nor particularly intelligent. Its use often masks a set of industrial processes and complex supply chains that bury within them deep inequalities and disparities in power.” — via Interview, December 2021