In Praise of Azeem Azhar, "Þe Exponential Age: How Accelerating Technology is Transforming Business, Politics & Society "; & BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2021-12-12 Su
Things that went whizzing by that I want to remember:
First:
My take on the world—at least the global north—since 2010 or so is a downer one:
Is there anybody in any previous century who would not be amazed and incredulous at seeing humanity’s technological and organizational powers as of 2010? Yet they would then go on to the next question: Why, with such godlike powers to command nature and organize ourselves, have we done so little to build a truly human world, to approach within sight of any of our utopias?
As of 2010, distrust in America’s hegemonic role had been cemented by Middle Eastern misadventures, and confidence that America was in some ways a plausible model was being replaced by a fear that in most ways it was a horrible warning. Discontent had grown with exploding income and wealth inequality that few even of its advocates associated with any boost to economic growth. The Great Recession of 2008-10 had revealed the emptiness of claims that the neoliberal technocrats had finally gotten the problems of economic management right. The political institutions of the global north continued to fail to even begin to grapple with the problem of global warming. Standard measurements told us that the underlying engine of productivity growth had begun to stall.
And in 2010 the great and good of the global north were about to fail to prioritize a rapid restoration of full employment. They would fail to understand and manage the discontents that would bring neofascist and fascist-adjacent politicians to prominence worldwide in the 2010s. Thus the long twentieth century’s story was over.
Perhaps it did not have to end then, in 2010. Perhaps the bright future that many had envisioned—the idea that rapid equitable growth could be restored as the information-technology boom roared ahead—was always illusory. Or perhaps the opportunity could have been grasped, had chance and contingency turned out otherwise.
Perhaps if in 2008 the United States had elected an FDR, he (or she) could have worked a miracle—as the original FDR had, unexpectedly, done in 1933 and after. Perhaps even in 2016 the dry bones of the long twentieth-century pattern of rapid productivity growth, governments that could manage the creative-destruction transformations such growth brought to the world, and American exceptionalism could have been made to live again. But it turned out that post-2010 America would instead elect Donald Trump, and western Europe would do little better, ending possibilities of revivification.
That my take is this gloomy makes it much more urgent that I engage with and absorb Azeem Azhar: The Exponential Age: How Accelerating Technology is Transforming Business, Politics & Society <https://www.amazon.com/Exponential-Age-Accelerating-Technology-Transforming/dp/1635769094>. For his take is close to the very opposite of mine:
IN 2020, AMAZON turned 26 years old. Over the previous quarter of a century, the company had transformed shopping…. At the heart of its success is a staggering $36 billion research and development budget in 2019, used to develop everything from robots to smart home assistants. This sum… is not far off the UK government's annual budget for research and development…. Ten years earlier, Amazon’s research budget had been $1.2 billion. Over the course of the next decade, the firm increased its annual R&D budget by about 44 per cent every year…. In the process, Amazon created a chasm between the old world and the new. The approach of traditional business was to rely on models that had succeeded yesterday. They were based on a strategy that tomorrow might be a little different now, but not markedly so. This kind of linear thinking, rooted in the assumption that change would take decades, not months, may have worked in the past—but not anymore. Amazon understood the nature of the Exponential Age…. Those that couldn't keep up would be undone at remarkable speed. This divergence between the old and the new is one example of what I call the exponential gap….
In the Exponential Age, one primary input for a company is its ability to process information. One of the main costs to process that data is computation. And the cost of computation didn’t rise each year, it declined rapidly…. If an organisation 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…. Organisations that understood this deflation, and planned for it, became well-positioned to take advantage of the Exponential Age…. Companies that didn't adapt to exponential technology shifts, like much of the newspaper publishing industry, didn't stand a chance…. Consider for a moment what it actually feels like to live in the Exponential Age—the answer, as many readers will know, is bewildering. Someone like me, born in the early 1970s, has experienced wave after wave of innovations. From the landline to the mobile, dialup internet to mobile internet, vinyl records to CDs to MP3s to streaming. I’ve owned the Bee Gees’ Saturday Night Fever on at least five different formats…
The problem is not just that we underestimate exponential growth. Experts who are mindful of the power of exponentiality can also be prone to overestimate its power…. A slight error in your basic assumptions can throw your whole prediction off…. And these problems of underestimation and overestimation are confounded by a third difficulty… “mis-estimation”…. The primary cause of the exponential gap is our failure to predict the cadence of exponential change, the secondary cause is our consequent failure to adapt to it. As the speed of change increases, our society remoulds itself at a much slower pace….
This is an urgent need. In the Exponential Age the institutions that govern our economies will cease to be fit for purpose. New technologies will clash with our existing expectations, rules and systems. We need radical thinking to prevent the exponential gap eroding the fabric of our society…
[…]
Acknowledging that the direction of technology is not preordained doesn’t amount to saying that technology isn’t transformative. Elsewhere, Kranzberg writes that technology “is neither good, nor bad, nor is it neutral.” Like it or not, technology brings change. And so the second stage in our shift in mindset involves acceptance…. Chaotic, unpredictable developments can be for the good—it’s our responsibility to direct them where we can and manage their surprises when we can’t. As the Exponential Age accelerates, general purpose technologies will affect all of our most cherished institutions…. Technology is unpredictable. It is hard to say how new innovations will transform our society, as they constantly interact with our approaches to business, work, place, conflict and politics.
LINK: <https://www.wired.co.uk/article/exponential-age-azeem-azhar>
Certainly from here in Berkeley on the outskirts of Silicon Valley it feels as if Azeem Azhar is right—that humanity’s technical competence to manipulate nature and organize and communicate with ourselves is increasing faster than it ever has before, faster than the 35 years or so it took for each of the four doublings of human technological competence from 1870 to 2010, and then we have to look back from 1870 to 1600 for the previous doubling (and then back from 1600 to 200 for the doubling before that). But the real-wage numbers we have suggest that for the working and middle class real wages and salaries have for 15 years been increasing at an average rate of only 0.5%/year, compared to 2.0%/year or so in the neoliberal age from 1975-2005, and 3.0%/year or more in the 1945-1975 Thirty Glorious Years of the preceding social-democratic age. Yes, working- and middle-class people today have access to awesome electronic gadgets and mind-blowing frontier medical therapies, but these have been counterbalanced by the standard indicia of middle-class making-it—a house in a good neighborhood with an easy commute, assurance that if your children study hard and turn out to be smart they can graduate from a good college without a huge debt load, and the ability to look the overclass in the face without feeling that they are beings of a different order—harder to grasp.
A bet that the wage-growth slowdown and the status-anxiety creation that our standard statistics and measurements tell us is in fact masking a much more hopeful, exponential-growth reality is certainly one that can be made. Whether it is true or not depends on how fast our leading-sector technologies grow exponentially, and how many doublings they have before demand for their services becomes inelastic and they cease to be important, or they simply run into the upper end of their S-curve logistic and converge to their respective anecdotes. So far, however, I am not convinced. At times I see Silicon Valley as engaged in brain-hacking to glue people’s eyeballs to screens so that they can be sold ads, and if that is what we use our technologies for it would better if they did not develop so fast.
Forthcoming September 6, 2022, from Basic Books:
Slouching Towards Utopia: A History of the Long Twentieth Century: Paragraph 6: As the genius Dr. Jekyll-like Austro-English-Chicagoan moral philosopher Friedrich August von Hayek observed, the market economy crowdsources—incentivizes and coordinates at the grassroots—solutions to the problems it sets. Back before 1870 humanity did not have the technologies or the organizations to allow a market economy to pose the problem of how to make the economy rich. So even though humanity had had market economies, or at least market sectors within its economies, for thousands of years before 1870, all that markets could do was to find customers for producers of luxuries and conveniences, and make the lives of the rich luxurious and of the middle class convenient and comfortable.
Very Briefly Noted:
John Authers Roll Over Non-Farm Payrolls (and Tell Tchaikovsky the News): ’This month, CPI Friday really should be a much bigger deal than NFP Friday…
Doug Jones: The Veil <https://logarithmichistory.wordpress.com/2021/12/09/the-veil-7/>
Election Fraud, Foreign Interference & Options for 6 JAN <https://otb.cachefly.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Trump-Autogolpe-PowerPoint.pdf>
Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala: How an Incan Nobleman Contested Spanish History: ‘[He] left behind a one-of-a-kind object that undermines the crónicas de Indias… <https://daily.jstor.org/how-an-incan-nobleman-contested-spanish-history/>
Ben Zimmer: “Phoning It In”: ‘The luxury afforded by the telephone of transmitting a message from a distance…. Asarcastic comment about Thornton Wilder’s Our Town,…“ ”Now that a Broadway drama has attained hit proportions with no scenery,“ wrote Senator Soaper, ”the next step is to have the actors phone it in"… <https://www.vocabulary.com/articles/wordroutes/mailbag-friday-phoning-it-in/>
Cliff Schecter: HOW IS THE FACT THERE WAS A POWERPOINT CREATED BY TRUMP/TOP REPUBLICANS FOR A COUP THAT INCLUDED CALLING A FAKE NATIONAL EMERGENCY NOT A FP ABOVE THE FOLD STORY IN EVERY NEWSPAPER??<
Matthew C. Klein: U.S. Inflation Isn’t Getting Worse (or Better). Keep Watching Motor Vehicles.: ‘The latest monthly figures are telling the same story as the past few months. So I did a deep dive into what’s been affecting cars and trucks… <
Paragraphs:
Joe Wiesenthal & Tracy Alloway: Odd Lots: ’What if the pandemic has irrevocably broken the employer/employee relationship, such as it was?… He walked Joe and I through the recent shortage of school bus drivers and describes one of the big changes in the industry…. We also have an episode coming out next week with Doreen Cleyre, one of the moderators of the anti-work subreddit that’s shot to internet fame in recent months thanks to all those screenshots of people quitting…. "In Japan and the euro area, there is no evidence of any deterioration of the jobs-skills match. Preserving the employment relationship appears to have kept the economy on a path where the recovery is closer to bringing the economy to its pre-pandemic state, at least in terms of the Beveridge curve relationship”…
Diane Coyle: Best Economics Books of 2021: ‘Amartya Sen… his memoir, Home in the World…. Shut Down: How Covid Shook the World’s Economy by Adam Tooze…. Good Data by Sam Gilbert… a very healthy counterbalance to the ‘surveillance capitalism’ trope…. Vaxxers by Sarah Gilbert and Catherine Green… two of the principals involved in the development of the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine…. Radical Potter by Tristram Hunt…
LINK: <https://fivebooks.com/best-books/best-economics-books-of-2021-diane-coyle/>
Yastreblyansky: The Great Awokening: Can They Be Trusted?: ‘What Brooks learned in 1984 and never gave up, is that the correct political response to a situation in which poor people can’t find adequate housing is not to build it for them but to lecture them for leading such idle and immoral lives. In a very compassionate voice, if you’re Brooks. The one thing conservatism never does is to consult the opinions of the residents themselves. This is a thought that can only arise from a failure to practice the opposite of conservatism, which is democracy. Traditional Burkean conservatives would never ask the residents either; they saw their responsibility as consulting with the squire and his lady, and the vicar. The mistake of the engineers planning Cabrini-Green wasn’t that they were too left-wing, it was that they were too conservative themselves, assuming that they knew better than the members of the community they were supposed to be serving…. What we need in such a case is to become more committed to democracy, and less “of the right”. If that’s what Brooks wants to do, he’s welcome, but he can leave his “Burkean modesty” at the door…
LINK: <https://nomoremister.blogspot.com/2021/12/the-great-awokening-can-they-be-trusted.html>
Eλf Sternberg: ‘I’m reading David Brooks’ essay, and… I’m unimpressed. “I read Willmoore Kendall, Peter Viereck, Shirley Robin Letwin. I can only described what happened next as a love affair.” I remembered DeLong’s comment that you cannot find a 20th century conservative who wasn’t awful. Kendall believed that “we do the Negro an injustice when we impose on them an equal responsibility for civilization…. The Negro … suffers from a blighted biological inheritance.” Letwin was famously an architect of Thatcherism which, well… you can see for yourself just how much Britain is on the rise, eh? Viereck’s name is new to me. But they all had one thing in common: the more straight, white, male, Christian you were, the more human you were. You cannot find a conservative writer whose work reads as anything but troglodytic. Every 20th century conservative writer has an essay somewhere explaining why “the blacks,” “the Jews,” “women,” or “homosexuals” were somehow less deserving of civil rights…
LINK:
David States: ’We’re thinking all wrong about the variants. The prevailing narrative is that each new variant comes to dominate because it’s more transmissible than previous variants. A better view may be that it’s immune escape driving viral diversity. If it was just transmissibility, older viruses would continue to spread, even if somewhat more slowly, but that’s not what’s happening. Older variants are declining in absolute case count suggesting that there is competition between variants. How can variants compete with each other? Immune escape. A variant that evades the immunity induced by a different variant can continue to spread while spread of the old variant is limited to only hosts who have not been infected or vaccinated…. Other viruses also evolve to escape prevailing immunity. E.g. we have studied immune escape in influenza viruses extensively Can immune escape be important if we are still far from “herd immunity”?… R0 is an artificial construct, and it’s as much a property of the population as it is of the virus…. It doesn’t make much sense to talk about R0 as a property of the virus alone…
LINK:
Robert Costa: ’Eastman begins drafting his memo in late December, and [the] Trump White House has it by the new year. The White House then gives it to Senator Lee and others on January 2…. By January 3, after Pence meets with the Senate Parliamentarian, it’s clear he’s not coming along. On January 4, Pence is in Georgia for a rally, but once he flies back, Trump calls him to the Oval Office…. “I’m getting guidance that says I can’t,” Pence tells Trump and Eastman, who is there. “Listen. Listen to John,” Trump replies. As Eastman and Trump pressure Pence and Pence’s aides/lawyers, the rest of the Trump White House is in full-steam ahead mode that same day…. Chief of Staff Mark Meadows is working with Trump this whole time, and we show him meeting with Graham and Giuliani on how to push Trump’s efforts along…. We are [now] learning more about both Meadows and that key day, January 4th. Think of it as the set-up day for the eve of the insurrection, Jan. 5, when Bannon and Giuliani work from the Willard and Trump pressures Pence, 1 on 1, in the Oval Office…. Meadows was in possession of a PowerPoint that echoed the Eastman memo. (The origin story of the PP is a key reporting target.) <https://theguardian.com/us-news/2021/dec/10/trump-powerpoint-mark-meadows-capitol-attack>…. The pressure on Pence is Level 10/10, you have not only the principals leaning on the Vice President, but numerous documents circulating to make the case: Eastman memos, PowerPoints, and Jenna Ellis memos <https://cnn.com/2021/12/10/politics/jenna-ellis-trump-lawyer-memos-pence-biden/index.html>. But despite all of these documents and PowerPoints, the most revealing thing of this period isn’t a document. It’s what he says to Pence on January 5. At the end of the day, Trump isn’t looking to these documents to make his case. He looks to the gathering mob in the streets. “If these people say you had the power, wouldn’t you want to?” Trump asked. “I wouldn’t want any one person to have that authority,” Pence said. “But wouldn’t it almost be cool to have that power?” Trump asked. “No,” Pence said…
LINK:
> But the real-wage numbers we have suggest that for the working and middle class real wages and salaries have for 15 years been increasing at an average rate of only 0.5%/year, compared to 2.0%/year or so in the neoliberal age from 1975-2005, and 3.0%/year or more in the 1945-1975 Thirty Glorious Years of the preceding social-democratic age.
You're looking for an economic reason for this, and there isn't one.
There's a policy reason -- labour is a cost, in the post-1980 consensus, and costs are to be minimized -- and that policy has stood for a political reason -- lack of sufficient power in any non-mammonite faction to replace it.
The Thirty Glorious Years involve a population that knows it can break nations if it has to. It involves an oligarchy terrified of (mostly spectral) communists, who know they can be faced with a revolution and that knows it needs the capacity for industrial mobilization to maintain the credibility of the hegemony. It involves (in the US) the best geopolitical position any hegemon has ever had. (or will ever have; there will only ever be one Oil Empire, and that period is the United States' time in its uncontested apex as the Oil Empire.) It's conceptually tolerable to allow the white general population an increase in living standards.
After that, in the neoliberal age, you've got three unforced errors: the idea that the problems with the economy could be fixed by removing regulation; the idea that the best exit strategy from the uncontested apex period was to force control -- to implement a bring-hither-the-money economy for existing incumbents -- and the idea that monetary abstractions could provide sufficient information about the health of the economy for all policy activities.
The result is a mammonite collapse; extremely rich people successfully prevent the economy from doing anything except bringing them money. Necessary innovation is strangled; core sector shifts (whatever we should be doing in the energy sector, continued fossil carbon extraction was obviously the wrong answer _in 1980_) have been prevented.
It's not so much that the machine is busted (although it could certainly do with some design analysis), as the people driving won't go anywhere else. It's the wrong thing in the wrong place at the wrong time, but it guarantees their wealth so it mustn't change.
Consider that in our present circumstances, housing should both be robust in respect of drainage -- which requires elevation -- and destructive winds -- which requires burial. Nobody is building housing like that in quantity. It's not even clear what it ought to look like. A functioning system would have stopped with the fossil carbon extraction AND changed the housing sector to acknowledge the time of angry weather. That's not what we've got anywhere.
"Certainly from here in Berkeley on the outskirts of Silicon Valley it feels as if Azeem Azhar is right—that humanity’s technical competence to manipulate nature and organize and communicate with ourselves is increasing faster than it ever has before"
Does it feel that way, though? I am still turning over in my mind the underlying premise, that the "Exponential Age" is a recent thing. My grandfather was born in the southern Ukraine in the 1890's and died in southern Ontario in the 1990's. Here is a list of some of the changes he experienced over his lifetime:
1) Mechanized farm machinery (he once told me that when he came to Canada, one guy and a tractor could do as much work as a team of men and horses in the old country. But he worked a longer day.)
2) Automobiles, particularly private motor cars.
3) Aircraft travel.
4) The telephone.
5) The radio.
6) The television (computers also became common during his lifetime, but he never used one.)
7) The birth of Soviet communism.
8) The death of Soviet communism.
9) The first world war. (As a stretcher-bearer, being a pacifist.)
10) The fall of European monarchies with dictatorial powers.
11) Female suffrage.
12) Universal healthcare (he was bankrupted once when two of his children happened to need hospital treatment in the same year.)
13) The transition from an extended family living in a village to nuclear family life, first on a farm and then in a suburb.
14) Indoor plumbing.
15) Electricity.
16) Central heating (water left on the dresser for morning ablutions used to freeze over in winter.)
17) A dramatic revision to the business model of his occupation. After being busted out of winter wheat farming during the 30's (old technology, developed back in Ukraine), he moved east and became a sharecropper. His workforce was his family, and his farm was adapted to this, with a succession of vegetable and fruit harvests individually small enough to be managed with little outside labour. You couldn't make a living like that now; efficiency demands that you optimize for a small number of products and bring in offshore labour to harvest them. He dry farmed until the 50's, when he persuaded his landlord to install irrigation (he got the indoor plumbing out of the deal too.) He sold much of his produce to a cannery, which eventually closed when a combination of fast and cheap long-distance transportation and preservation by freezing reduced demand for tinned vegetables. Even his irrigation is obsolete now; practically all of Essex County is a hydroponic operation under glass nowadays. My uncle made a fortune selling them hydraulic systems.
I am approaching the close of my 6th decade, and yet it feels like I have a long distance to catch up if I am to match him for change.