Nesta Talks to... Azeem Azhar

Nesta Talks to... Azeem Azhar

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[Music] welcome and good afternoon thank you for joining us at the fifth nesta talks to event this autumn these events are put on by nesta and designed to be a conversation with today's most interesting thinkers focus on the big topics that define our future we're really pleased to be welcoming azeem azar today to discuss whether our societies can stand the pace of technological change before i introduce azim i should introduce nesta and myself nesta is a uk-based innovation agency for social good in a new strategy published this year we have three missions giving every child a fairer start helping people to live healthier lives and building a more sustainable economy i'm laurie smith from nestor's discovery hub and i lead lots of our foresight research nestor's discovery hub systematically scans for emerging trends technologies and interventions embedding strategic foresight at the heart of the organization and helping us to anticipate new challenges and opportunities nadrazim is on a mission to explain how our societies and ways of life will change under the force of exponential technologies he does this from a vantage point of over 20 of over a 25-year career as an entrepreneur investor and analyst in the tech industry today he runs a highly cited newsletter exponential view that has 187 000 subscribers and you also host the exponential review pod podcast in his new book exponential which we'll discuss today he outlines the four areas of technology that are accelerating exponential rates ar and computing biology renewable energy and manufacturing a few housekeeping notices initially azim's going to spend five or maybe 10 minutes providing a short overview of the book then i'll speak with him for about 20 minutes or so we'll then move on to questions from the audience there's a handful of questions that been submitted in advance and please join in the conversation in the comments box on the right hand side of your screen and ask any questions throughout the event also if you'd like to view closed captions and make them accessible or via a link in the description so over to you azim [Music] well thanks so much lori thanks nesta and thanks to everybody who is giving up lunch time to join this discussion i hope you managed to get a sandwich or something at your your desk or couch or bed wherever you happen to be sitting in these days of hybrid working uh it's really exciting to be here and to talk about my book because all authors do i have to hold up a copy uh of it uh please do go and find a copy if you do read it read books on uh the kindle ebook reader it is available for 99p at the moment which is considering i've put many many years of work into it uh feels like a real bargain so just in my opening uh remarks uh just a few minutes i'll try not to go to 10 minutes i i having spoken to laurie i'm pretty certain the discussion will be more interesting uh once he and i are having a conversation but let me frame what uh the the book and the thesis of the argument is and much of this i think will be familiar uh to you because you you live in this world i want to draw attention to how uh technologies shape us and the societies in which we live but also make the point that not only does technology shape society society can shape uh technology and that second aspect is a part of the debate that is often lost uh when we live in these moments of frenetic change and the occasional hagiography of the technologist and the technology entrepreneur and it's important to understand that framing because i think that we find ourselves today at uh or just past a really really important turning point and that turning point is a shift a phase transition in the way that will order society because of the capabilities and impacts of a range of technologies that are improving at exponential rates the relationship between technologies and uh social political economic affordances is a really important one to understand so i'm speaking to you today uh from gray uh cricklewood it's i'm in the borders actually between cricklewood and golda's green in north london and where my house stands today uh was only 120 years ago fields so i'm somewhere between zone 2 and zone 3 of the tube network and yet my house was you know almost within living memory uh on farmland uh by 1930 or so the house stood as it stands uh today with pretty much the same floor plan uh the roads were laid out as they are today uh there was uh electricity coming into the home in fact it's the same mains connection that was laid and nearly a hundred years ago uh there was a telephone system and of course there were cars flying the streets in that short 30-year period this farmland turned into something that's distinctly recognizable today and the catalytic technologies of the time the car and the internal combustion engine the telephone and electricity were responsible for shaping uh that that world that looks so recognizable now and those three general purpose technologies were so powerful that even 100 years after they had emerged into the world the world's largest companies were all connected some sense to being phone companies electricity companies or using producing oil or building vehicles that use the internal combustion engine so it's a remarkable uh x period of time based on these gpt's general purpose technologies so the argument that i make today is that we're undergoing a transition that is at least as significant i think it's more significant and it's also driven and catalyzed by general purpose technologies a general purpose technology is one which can be applied very very widely in our economies in many different industries and in many different parts of those industries and the the thing about general purpose technologies is that because they are so generalized and so available they do create many many potentials hither and vither and left and right what's distinct about today's setup is that the general purpose technologies that i investigated uh computing and ai the ones that we're probably most familiar with but also the new realms of of biology uh where we're able to rewrite what organisms do and we can lean on the beauty and efficiency of nature to do other useful things for us new energies and storage and the most incipient of them all which is what we're going to do in manufacturing through additive additive manufacturing is that these technologies are improving on a price performance basis at exponential rates which i mean at least 10 compounded improvement every year now that's really important because what happens is that you take a technology that is too expensive at one point but because it improves in price by say 40 45 50 every year which is what's happened for 50 or 60 years with computer power at some point it becomes cost effective or better than the other way that we will use we were using to achieve a particular goal so at some point computer power became so cheap that we now use it to create trivial uh filters on our social networks and on our on our cameras and the amount of computing power we leverage to do that is greater than all the computing power that the world had at the time of the choose your moment in history of the manhattan project the apollo moon landings you know whatever it happens to be and so the second characteristic here is that these technologies get much much cheaper and because they get much cheaper we will use them more widely in our economies more rapidly and there are a number of other dynamics which we might jump into that i argue that i describe in the book that explain why this comes about and what the outcomes are for uh innovation and for change uh in in the economy so that's all good and well we understand that technologies shift the way societies get structured we can believe and i argue and i demonstrate in the book that the pace of change today is far faster than in previous times and that this is driven by the fact that technologies are getting cheaper and cheaper and cheaper the challenge is that the technologies will race away a bit like this sort of um kind of curve on the cover but the way in which we live in the world is governed by institutional norms uh they are either very formal institutions like uh things that perhaps uh have physical buildings like you know the un uh or the courts um or there might be formal institutions like legal systems or firms or employment contracts as well as informal norms and customs and habits now all of those things are really really useful in making a society function but they don't necessarily adjust as quickly as the potentials of the technology that we are deal dealing with uh today and that is what i call the exponential gap the gap between the potentials of the technology how they get seized upon by particular groups and used extensively how they demand different ways of management in the same way that we handle gaseous water known as steam very differently to how we handle liquid water both are useful but they both need different regulatory mechanisms to be used safely and the exponential gap is for me that the descriptor the analytic and it's the cause of so much friction and change that we see whether it's in industrial structure or in the labor markets or in geopolitics or in conflict or in the way our democracies function and that the urgency that we need to act on is to find ways of closing that gap so i've spoken for six minutes uh and i'd love to uh bring lori back on and we can have a discussion thank you azim um so perhaps you can sort of start with the overall tenor of the book well not in the book but also suppose somebody said your podcast newsletter so in the round you seem to sort of take quite a strike quite a positive tone about the future of technology i suppose i was wondering what makes you on balance feel a bit optimistic well i'm not sure how optimistic i i feel when i've read the reviews of the book um i've been criticized for being too optimistic i've been criticized for being too pessimistic those on the on the right have argued that i'm this is full of socialist nonsense and those on the left have said i'm far too sympathetic towards uh the market uh so you know i think people have read into the book slightly different things coming from their their own uh perspectives uh my view is that we can be we can observe underlying processes that show that uh these types of core technologies that are that are really interesting and powerful will be getting cheaper and cheaper uh or the corollary of that is they're going to get more and more capable and and that is reason to be optimistic it's reason to be optimistic because if you think about the human condition for a long time it was determined by energy poverty and food poverty and vulnerability towards very very simple diseases and in large parts of the world we've really really tackled that we still have much more work to do but the reason one needs to temper sort of a starry eyed optimism about technology saving everything is that technology is destabilizing and technology changes power relationships and technology is designed by humans to do particular things so it's not like manner from heaven or a bolt of lightning from zeus it is a fashioned directed uh uh force and the governance of that technology and the principles by which we we build it and choose what to build and choose what we designed to build and then choose how we manage it it becomes really really important and that's the realm of politics and so the question is it's not so much whether we have a power it's whether we can wield that power with a sense of of justice and broader good and and those are the reasons why one might feel uh less optimistic because there are signs that alongside all of the sort of headline numbers that have improved the human condition there are many many risks and problems baked into that well maybe um being accused about optimism and pessimism indicates you've got it got it about um right um perhaps i'm moving to the central thesis of yourself thinking around some exponential technologies i mean what what could what could those involved in innovation for social good learn from what are the most important messages for them for organizations like nestor people involved in that sort of space well you know i think one of the the key ones is uh an understanding of uh what will happen with that the price and then the availability uh of these of these technologies uh and what that what is maybe difficult and expensive today will be much much cheaper in the future and actually much easier and you can see that in um uh just in in the field of ai i tell a story in the book about a school student called um laura o'sullivan and i met her at a science competition in dublin that i've been asked to go and sort of attend and look at and at the time she was 17 and she had built a simple model machine vision system that could look at scans of of cervical smears and with very very high accuracy predict whether they would be anomalous or not and the tools and techniques she used for this which was her first ever programming project i should say were uh techniques that had been developed only two or three years earlier in a postgraduate research lab in california and in the olden days lori when i 20 years ago when i was in my uh late 20s it didn't take three years for things to go from the lab to a high school project it took decades and so this idea that actually these high-end techniques become available very quickly they also become not only cheaper but easier is a really important one to to grasp and i think the second thing that is perhaps less theoretical and more more practical and tangible is this question of power in one of the chapters of the book i i make a point that the companies that make use of these technologies well um they tend to have this increasing return to scale which means an increasing returns of power and there is a temptation when you look at questions of social good to say who best uses these technologies and what one can often do then is look at the very largest technology companies in the world and say well we should partner with them and my argument would be that you have to be very very careful about that because what we've observed is a tremendous shift of power of legitimacy and accountability towards those companies sometimes for the good sometimes for ill and if your default response is i must work with one of the big five i think what you do is you ignore some of the real benefits of these technologies which is that they're democratized and they can be built with the tools that are available from the ground up that's really really interesting um just thinking about against of going back to the sort of thesis around um exponential technologies there are sort of a number of experts people like robert gordon and tyler cohen who've made the case that um innovation's faltering and how does this sort of thinking square with your own around technologies growing exponentially well i'm a bit um simple-minded about this and i just i look at the price um and i i familiar with um a lot of the research around the uh the sort of sense that that progress is getting more expensive in some ways and if you look at some of that research it's asking a slightly different question which is you know what is the gross total number of dollars required to make a scientific breakthrough and is that number growing and in many cases it is growing the question that i pose instead is um what's actually happening to the price of uh dn uh genome sequencing or cell programming uh or lithium-ion battery storage and is that really declining by you know 15 20 30 50 sometimes higher percent uh per annum and that's what the historical data has said and what and when you look at what the the underlying process of that price decline is um it can often be it's not necessarily related to scale and i'm not really interested in scale effects that result in in price decline at that point being that if you buy a million of widgets from a supplier they'll give them to you at a lower per unit cost than if you buy 10. i'm not thinking about that question i'm really thinking about this question that as we develop these technologies we get better at making them and we go through what's known as a learning curve and it's that learning curve effect which was described by theodore wright in 1936 that is a better predictor of how the price of these technologies will will decline and i think the the thing that that's fascinating is that that's what we we what predicts them very well and that's what we see across all of these different domains that are very very different 3d printing to lithium-ion batteries to wind turbines to cell programming to silicon chips they are not the same thing and yet right stores a strong predictor of what goes on and so i think we can coexist with the argument that it gets more expensive to make certain scientific breakthroughs we can even coexist with the idea that we're kind of running out of new ideas in physics and we need a new paradigm because we're sort of hitting on the door but for the intents and purposes of looking at how societies might shift and what those underlying technologies will do we've got a good data set and i think quite a reasonable predictive model to argue that this can continue for a little while longer so when looking see in that sort of data driven approach you presume you looked at a number of different technologies to select your form were there any when you looked at them that surprised you that you thought oh that will def should definitely be on the list of the four and actually it turned out not to be or something that's in your list that really surprised you when you actually sort of dug into it when i started doing um my research which was really quite informal because i was writing uh the the newsletter one of the things that had kept cropping up was the death of moore's law so moore's law is a relationship that has described how silicon chips get get smaller or the components on silicon chips get smaller every every year or so and as they get smaller that means the chips themselves get faster for a fixed cost and it's why you know your iphone is hundreds of thousand times more powerful than uh you know the first um computer that i that i had in 1981. um and people were talking about the death of moore's law and the reason they were saying this is that um the process of miniaturization was going to hit up hit against the limits of physics right the the electrons were going to get quantum drunk and wando places they shouldn't do on these in these uh transistors on on silicon chips and and as i dug deeper into this idea of the death of death of moore's law uh you know the theory was really well held but it wasn't evidenced by what was happening in the availability and price of computing for developers and for machine learning engineers and they were actually continually being able to access more and more cheap uh computational power and so that was that was in a sense was a a surprise because it was an inversion of the um the general uh sort of received wisdom and and and it's not that those things in the received wisdom weren't directionally important and it wasn't that it wasn't getting harder and harder for chip companies to make these that that measure of progress it was but the gains were significant enough that they were still able to and then back in 2011 when deep learning emerged as a as a sort of viable technology it created an entirely new use case for uh computing cycles and actually we were able to jump an energy level and use a different architecture for silicon chips moving from a cpu architecture to a gpu architecture but the gpu architecture and many of the gpus were built on much larger circuits that were technologies that were actually a few years older but the difference in the design delivered the exponentiality so that was quite a surprising result i think because it flies in the face of you know all the headlines and stories of new scientists and mit tech review in nature saying the death of moore's law is um is upon us and in some sense it might be but the exponentiality in computing uh hasn't come to an end and in your in your introduction you sort of um you highlight the exponential gap between us a rapid growth of technologies and the much slower pace of institutional change i suppose as somebody works for sort of an innovation agency with a public purpose i suppose i'd be really interested to learn um what social innovation could help do to try to bridge that gap that's a really great question and i think one of the major reasons we have we have a gap is because of agency and participation and you know one of the things that didn't make it into the book because it had to be a certain length but it was a beautiful chapter uh it was a a long um history of the idea of technology and how its meaning shifted uh over the the you know the past thousands of years and how at some point in the last 150 years or so technology started to not be a process and a sort of a craft that we could all participate in but uh become an autonomous force of its own um that was that had to be you know ridden uh by those who could ride it for the rest of our benefit and that that message became progressively reinforced through the through the 20th century and reinforced uh increasingly um uh through advertising and media representation and when you get to the the 70s uh computing was very much a hobbyist activity that anyone could really participate in um and but as soon as the uh the sort of money started to show systems started to get locked down and actually the experience that my kids have using computers today much more powerful than the ones computers i had when i started is a much less powerful experience than the one i had because i got to program the computers and i got to wonder about them and uh and that um uh change i think has been a real issue so from a social innovation perspective i think one of the things i try to argue in the book is about reclaiming the art of technology and active technology and encouraging participation and trying to become a maker rather than a taker that's really interesting another interesting sort of idea you mentioned the book it's this idea of sort of social facts like moore's law you mentioned so things that are true because we almost make them true i mean could this idea be used to ensure exponential technologies benefit citizens if so how uh absolutely i mean it's uh moore's law was this amazing social fact uh it coordinated uh so many different participants in the semiconductor industry and it became their clock speed uh and the you know the process is so complicated um to make chips and it involves so much specialist process and technology it really requires a lot of different people to come together and believe it i think we're starting to see the emergence of of some new social facts um around uh you know predominantly around things like sustainability most broadly but just to give you one example the idea of the circular economy um is something that if we start to all believe in it is something that we can then believe and then then make happen and over the last four years uh you know i've observed in occasional snapshots when i've been looking at the circular economy the increasing breadth with which many different companies and groups are are talking about it and talking about it as something that needs to come about and needs to happen so there's not really a sort of underlying theory that's you know that is a sort of homo economical style theory that says how oh this is how it will be it's really more a social fact that's coming about and in fact i had a discussion with a um a goldman sachs banker about two weeks ago who was talking about the importance of the circular economy so i think there are just as an example ways in which circular uh social facts can emerge and they can shift our priorities that's really interesting that's something i haven't thought of at all um i mean one thing i thought was great to see um in your book was you so as well as offering sort of diagnosis you also offer solutions i suppose what um what role do you think citizens have in developing these solutions well i should say something about the solution so jeff molgan who i think used to run nestor until a couple of years ago uh sent me a sent a tweet yesterday going i loved his book but he doesn't give enough solutions so let's say i prefer the new nester that says you give solutions over the old nester that says you know you don't give solutions but hi jeff thank you for the wonderful comments uh and there are um i mean i mean there are some uh directions i put put out there i wanted to be a bit careful about this because i really think that the solutions are driven by the experience and the context and the position location and resources of particular groups and so i don't think that there are necessarily single top down um solutions that i should strongly merit and what i tried to do was find that balance between values and principles and tools and specific examples which have worked in particular contexts and i think that's a really important way of thinking about how we address this um uh this age because it is really that a common theme i think is this idea of agency and subsidiarity right so agency for the individual and subsidiarity for decisions to be made more proximately to where they can best be made and what and so i've realized you've talked about some and those solutions being uh more localized what what one of those most excites you what do you think's the sort of most radical yet credible uh well the one i like the most i don't know if it's the most radical uh is the the idea of um you know shifting how we think about resource allocation and resource management so for the bulk of the last certainly 60 years we have divided the tools for resource management in society between the market and the state and the dominant uh [Music] monetarist neoliberal consensus has been the market's really good at resource allocation for efficiency and for things the market doesn't do well chuck it over to the state which will just kind of deal with it and we've sort of relegated um the the the the role of the state now there's obviously much more we can do with the state and i think that thinkers like um carlotta perez and mariano mata carto and bill jainaway and many others have uh argued that the the importance of those types of interventions oh and indeed the goldman sachs bank who i spoke to two weeks ago was saying well we need much better work from from from the state to kind of clear some some paths for for decarbonization but there's another area um mechanism for resource management which has been overlooked uh which is the commons and and the idea of having a a self-governing uh group that can manage resources for its own benefit and you know commons thinking is an analysis uh sprung up in its sort of formal way most famously through eleanor ostrom who was a nobel laureate who started to do this work about the same time that the um the sort of monetarist consensus was taking hold in policy circles in the early 70s in the u.s and then in the uk and in her work she identifies it quite well that outside of the market and outside of the state we can find ways of governing our resources and i think the exponential age provides many many tools where we could govern our resources that way that's what open source software governance looks like that's what we could start to imagine happening on chain in in this sort of decentralized blockchains as well and and the idea of having common pools and common resources whether it's data commons and data trusts i think is something that that sets the ground for many many more public or semi-public goods upon which other things can be built and that leads us really nicely into some of the questions from um the audience some of which were sent in advance we've got a question here from talking sort of um citizens um and sort of the commons and governance we've got a question here from andy uh matthias from vincent who asks about sort of digital democracy tool of the 21st century which you talk about a little bit i mean are there any tools you think are particularly fruitful or have value or perhaps appear to have value but don't actually have to have so much value i mean it's a really really a great question and you know posed at the point where the where the role of the social media platforms in uh skewing and democratic debate is becoming uh pretty pretty clear now and i think that there is a growing concordance that that that that upsets the way in which citizens have been um have been informed or misinformed but the question i think is really about how do we um what kind of arenas now lend themselves to some form of democratic accountability and governance and what kind of tools can we can we use um i think one interesting area just on the former is that many of these technologies are are increasingly local uh so decentralized solar power and localized battery storage provides some measure of energy self-sufficiency to a particular community you're starting to see that happen in places like south australia there's an experiment in cornwall as well and then you start to ask the question well if these are entirely local resources now do we need to have ways of managing those and and creating the policies for those that are local rather than national and that friction is starting to emerge there's a there's a battle at the moment between the city of cape town uh and escom which is the national power system in in south africa because escom is sort of dealing with all sorts of brownouts on power but cape town actually has enough renewable power to keep itself running and you know the the rules are not designed to make that happen so that's one area which is where the new loci of uh of democracy and then when we think about um what are the tools that we we can use and there are experiments that are going on in in taiwan uh around getting people to sort of engage regularly through digital tools and discussions around key issues but the thing that i'm i find most interesting is not specifically a kind of a technology technologically driven approach it's the idea of deliberative democracy through either citizens juries or permanent standing citizens councils which can actually debate and discuss what the question is and that question can then be put as it was in ireland around the abortion issue a couple of years ago to a referendum and it was pretty exciting that actually since the book came out i think the city of paris in the last month or so has announced a standing citizen's jury to evaluate issues and figure out what the questions should be so i don't think all of this gets done through technology and maybe the interface is a sort of you know a smartphone interface uh but we do need we do need some new tools and we're seeing some experiments around it and once i've i thought those interesting sort of raised citizens um uh jury so one challenge around those is their sort of legitimacy because you only have a subset of the citizens what what what are your thoughts on that sort of legitimacy question for them that's in the that's in the jury design um and it's also in the um in what you ask the jury to to do so what i've seen um work uh at a at a distance um i'm a trustee at the ada lovelace institute and one of our one of the researchers there uh rima patel runs a lot of citizen juries on key issues that are complicated and difficult like biometrics and citizen biometrics and and the the way that process works is to bring a some kind of representative sample of the citizenry oh through a deliberative process that might take a little bit of time it might take many many hours or a few days to identify what the key issues might be and then you can take those key issues away to to decision makers and i think that the case study of in in ireland is a is a very good one um around the the abortion debate and and if you imagine i mean we had a referendum some of you may remember a few years ago um around the eu i mean it was an absurd question to put to a big population having a referendum about eu membership was not is not an absurd issue but one of the questions what is a question that you put and how do you frame that and where what might a citizen jury have done i mean a citizen jury might have ahead of that worked out what the issues ought to be and how the question ought to be framed in a way that is also a little bit descriptive about the direction of what happens given a yes or a no vote given that question so so i think that that's in the design of the system i don't think they're inherently problematic right that's helpful and we've got another question um that was submitted in advance which sort of um relates about education this is from peter findlay jisc who's interested in strategic approaches to use technology and education and foresight um do you have any thoughts about those approaches are they something that um feature in your thinking well i think it depends where you where you are in the world um so again on the cutting room floor is the section on online education in china and uh what we one of the things that the chinese have obviously had to struggle with is the vast inequality of experience between the children who live in the tier 1 cities and those who live in tier 4 or in rural areas and for the last 15 years they've actually had a very large scale online learning program and it's incredibly heartwarming when you read i mean i'm reading the translated uh interviews with some of the students and they'd say things like well i come from a small village and i felt that i was sitting in one of the best schools in shanghai because of this and they also had so they have personal stories that are very powerful and they also had um strong case studies of how it had improved um economic outcomes and and professional and life outcomes because of this now that's china and that's a chinese um context if we look at um what's going on in um uh in in the uk we i think the thing that i'm concerned with is that a lot of the it skills that my kids have been taught have literally been things like um they've been taught things like powerpoint and microsoft word and font selection which as well as programming and computational principles and the latter is really brilliant um and that idea that you can understand um you know the the kind of core elements of computational thinking then i think also of data based thinking so how do you think with data these are kind of fundamental skills that enable you to move forward now i'm not close enough to the sort of broader spectrum of what every child gets taught and how they get taught but but i i think that the understanding those core skills becomes much much more important than a familiarity with an interface or a particular application and this speaks to us a question from rohit tauwat from fast future research who so i talked i suppose this can relate to education so about what additional steps um we could take to accelerate social understanding and adaptation and how does that sort of fit in in relation to education uh it's a really um it's a really really good question uh and you know i think about what happened with um i think about storytelling here and one of the really powerful things that emerged when in the early 1970s when we moved to sort of this very technocratic version of market capitalism was that milton friedman um was a great storyteller and he told stories well and he he his stories launched a thousand ships of course of policy makers and funders and public affairs people behind that pushing things and making this um uh happen but the stories become really really important if you think about margaret thatcher and her ability in ten words to frame an issue uh it was very very powerful and then if you look up what happened in that period 2016 to 2019 around the climate crisis it wasn't that the science changed it was that greta tunberg was able to tell a story in a way that that resonated with people and and so i think one of the things that we are slightly in need of is is a storytelling around this and a storytelling that is not the hagiography of the single technology founder i'm not sure aaron sorkin would make the social network uh today the way he did uh 10 years or so ago it's not that type of storytelling nor is it the type of storytelling saying you know we've got 50 android tablets or chromebooks or something that have been delivered we need to figure out a a way of capturing this this opportunity um in in very very simplistic and appealing and emotive ways now i'm probably too nerdy to be able to do that i mean i hope my book is accessible enough to give people some of the tools and maybe it can inspire someone who can uh tell that story and capture that moment well and this is that's really interesting because all it's supposed to speak you um you mentioned sort of jeff morgan previously and he he talked in a paper a little while back about social imagination and how we have sort of a great technological imagination and companies fantastic technologies but our ability to imagine how society could fundamentally change um is much more limited we assume things are going to be quite similar in the future do you do you think that deficit do you think that that that deficit exists or do you think that's a misreading no i think he's well he's absolutely i mean he's right about everything about apart from what you said about my policies in my book um jeff is a brilliant brilliant uh a mind and we're lucky to have him uh you know we're the think imagine the goldfish um in in the bowl and and i'm a goldfish and you come to me and you say would you like me to um in a um would you like me to change the water in your in your bowl and i would i would not have any concept of what the water is nor would i have a concept of changing changing that water so then the question is well how can we how can we uh think about this and there are a couple of approaches one is the approach of using um fiction and imaginations as a way of identifying potential futures and i think that has to be a collaborative and engaged exercise because a lot of science fiction is misunderstands the intersection between uh the technologies and how they change our values and what we want to think about you know the jetsons bubble car is a really um a kind of a poor example compared to some of the science fiction that comes out of other arenas where um you're starting to understand the social and economic impacts of this and how that changes the way people behave so i think there is something to be done around this lens of of fiction something that i've read recently and i spoke with the author kim stanley robinson for his book ministry for the future um has has a style of fiction that's only looking out 20 or 25 years that describes and frames what potential avenues or futures could look like and and i think that that that is one tool that we might be able to use and that that that's really interesting because it speaks to some work with nestor about um involving citizens in those conversations um and those conversations and stories about the future which brings us back nicely to a question that um nico mcdonald's um put in the chat um and he says you you advocate democracy um and he sort of was interesting sort of views on um i suppose the eu referendum and should we have a similar sort of because you mentioned the referendum um she had a similar sorts of referendum around net zero what's your thinking on that well um i'm i'm i'm not sure i'm not sure what the the question is much more about what the question would be um you know my my take on the eu referendum is that the the question you can put things to referendum but you have to referendum you have to be very very careful about the question that you you put and you have to frame it in a way that has gone through some sort of process that allows us to understand what the real the real issue is um really really complicated questions should um should should be with very very uh great care be put to a very very broad populace and a yes no answer and one could imagine a net zero question being posed as you know should we head to net zero um rapidly or should we allow ourselves to be incinerated on an uninhabitable planet could be one way of putting it or the other way of putting it could be should we worsen our living standards and not be allowed to go on holiday um uh or or should we just go out go as we are and rely on getting wealthier to tackle the adaptation to climate change i mean it's the same issue with framed very very differently um so i'm not sure that there's a there's necessarily a good way of asking that particular question as a a referee as a referendum and i also think i'm not sure that policymakers have what what question they would ask because we're already there is a complex system here um and and if you want to build a fossil fuel plant today the capital markets will charge you 15 to 16 percent higher interest rates and if you want to build a win wind farm and if you want to hire people great engineers and brilliant graduates you're going to find it easier if your company is somehow working on the net zero transition on decarbonization than if you're looking to start up defunct coal coal seams in norfolk or off the coast of cumbria and so that there's a sense with with the work in which so many parts of the system have shifted i'm not sure what the question would necessarily be maybe an opportunity to use some of those more participatory deliberative approaches yeah possible so we've got another question here from matt sedan who um says what do you say he says for institutions to evolve sufficiently quickly it seems the principles underpinning them require more explicit arctic articulation so they can be more nimbly manifested in a new form put another way it seems the philosophical consensus ish behind our institutions needs to be broadened if those institutions are to take a new form especially if we assume different people involved and he's curious if you've thought about this at all i i it's a great question uh matt and i'm going to commend you to go and pick up the copy of the book uh i do i do you know i mean i do try and and tackle that and i think one of the things that's most important is to start with the fundamental principles um and to to return to them because if you can be principles driven you can ultimately be a little bit more um agile in your application of those judgments i think the challenge of being principles driven is that it requires a lot of trust uh in those institutions right because the they're going to make judgments against a um against those principles rather than against a checklist so so i i do agree with you principals need to draw to drive that and then when we look at the question of um what the institutions need to be is it going to be that we can adapt existing institutions you know can we adapt the bank of england or the fed or the sec to deal with the emerging uh uh challenges of cryptocurrencies and decentralized finance or will we need a new style regulator uh the uk of course smushed together offtel and the itc about 20 years ago to produce ofcom because they thought that the issues between broadcasting and telecoms were going to converge and so they they took that approach or will we need to find entirely new uh institutions and have those emerge and i think we're seeing a mix of all of that happening so examples of of new institutions would be um things like the uh the three c's um group which is a bunch of countries like estonia running southwards uh that is trying to build a regional block and you're seeing a lot of regional blocks this sort of mini lateralism arguably what's emerging with that that horrible new um acronym uh what is it and zukus or something between australia the uk and the in the us um uh which which is sort of starting to emerge and so i you know my sense is unique one needs to have principles um and then you we're going to be faced with a question of how much trust do we then have and then we have to decide what what can we refashion and what do we have to build a new and if we're going to build a new how ambitious can we be with our first iteration and moving back to uh one of the issues in the circular economy which you raised earlier we've got a question here from jasmine s who asks how do we encourage organizations to build a circular economy it's a conversation that's been around for a few years so how can we encourage uh more rigor in its adoption um you know there's there's a number of things um you know consumers individual consumers can play a role uh because they can they can ask uh the question and they can ask the question more more frequently and and even as small shareholders you can ask that question and i wouldn't understate the uh the power of the the consumer i think it's been one of the uh the myths of the climate change debate that only policy can can make a difference we actually see people choosing to change their behavior and that being reflected in aggregate enough to shift where capital gets allocated and ultimately capital is the is the sort of blood that pumps the change through our economies um so if you think about um the uh the shifts are six 17 percent um uh decline in meat eating in the uk over the past uh several years um is not being driven by policy but by consumer choice and the consequence then is you get the big food companies saying this is a massive trend we've got to invest in it and then they start to make it real or if you look at the switch from petrol and diesel cars to electric vehicles go to norway which is a much bigger country than the uk it's a much colder country so all the arguments about electric vehicles not functioning well in cold long journeys apply in norway much more than they do here and norwegians love their long journeys in 2016 about uh 20 15 to 20 of new car registrations were electric vehicles um by september 2021 that's only five years later that was closer to 90 percent and you know my reckoning would be that some early point in 2022 virtually no non-electric vehicles will be uh bought in in norway now the policy is to ban those from 2025 the sale of them so that's happening faster than the policy and the subsidies have roughly been the same over that time what's actually driven this has been consumer behavior and then a consumer switch turning into a fad and an ephemera more than a fat sorry a fad a craze and a kind of permanent change in behavior so there are things that we can do as consumers as well um alongside uh where our you know and then our policymakers will will read from that um we're almost at time we're gonna use chairs prerogative and slip in one last question and there is a short amount of time for an answer but right at the beginning of the book you mentioned getting a sinclair zede x 81 in your youth i suppose i was wondering what might some child get for christmas this year that might turn out to be a new exponential technology well it better not be my camera which is just frozen uh lauren switching cameras uh so uh uh so much for the external camera um i i mean i think the we want to give people things that they can tinker with kids need to have things that they can tinker with and explore in different directions um and we've seen things like uh you know the raspberry pi uh and uh come out but i i suspect that there are some there's a there's quite an interesting um but set of bio hacking uh things that are emerging in um uh you know in that community out in the u.s and i would love uh kids to be able

to play around and ask questions in that new vista which is you know a better understanding of of biology and this is not to create uh you know strange genetically modified puppies uh but just to give you the the basic fundamentals of of what's possible well thank you so much azim for sparing the time to speak with me and all of us i can genuinely recommend the book which i think provides an excellent overview of how our societies are struggling to keep up with the exponential force of technological change and the audience please do fill in a short survey there's a link that's going to be shared in the chat i think it's also available on the events description um our net next nester talks to event will take place on thursday the 11th of november where our ceo ravi guru murthy will be speaking to christopher snowden and dolly thess on should the government decide what we eat um finally i'd like i'd like to thank everyone in our audience for tuning in and their thoughtful questions both now and those that are posted um in advance um azeem was there anything else you you sort of wanted to add that you think you have no i mean it's been a real pleasure and thank you for the great questions and you can follow me on twitter um and just as a reminder if you do buy the ebook ebooks and you like ebooks you can pick it up for 99p at the big um big ebook store from uh uh from seattle but no it's been lovely thank you laurie thank you very much azim okay everyone else thank you [Music] you

2021-11-22 09:00

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