YouSaid · the spoken record

Azeem Azhar

lines on the record: 38
first: 2021-09-27
most recent: 2021-09-27
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“and through more locally grown produce. A lot of things will still look the same, but many things will be different. And I think it will start to feel distinctly different because there won't be so many petrol cars on the roads and there'll be lots of weird looking electric, smart electric buggies that we don't really have words for today. But I think we will really have started to get there. I mean, the other thing I think that we would see in the UK is We will see ourselves as consumers engaging with many more British companies and European companies than we currently do because today our technological surface is mostly mediated by American giants and I think within a decade that will have changed as well.”
2021-09-27 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: Exponential, with Azeem Azhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think the first thing is that we will have really started to live with climate change. And that means that the extreme weather will be worse. There will have been many more floods and fires and migrations. But we will have also started to see really, really meaningful steps towards tackling that in terms of electric vehicles and smart virtual power grids and the removal of carbon from the atmosphere and the use of computing to make all of these predictions. So it'll start to feel different against the context of our greatest challenge. Our day-to-day lives, I think, will also have really started to shift because we will be living much more within our cities and within the 400 meters of our homes through delivery services, through remote medical consultation.”
2021-09-27 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: Exponential, with Azeem Azhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Programming project. I mean, she hadn't really programmed before. She said, oh, I think I went to a coding camp when I was 14. And here she is, age 17, writing her first bit of software, and this is what it can do. And it really is a story of one of the drivers of exponentiality in our economy because the many of the techniques that Laura used hadn't existed even five years earlier. One of them critically was only three or four years old. It was called GANS, a generative adversarial networks. And it was amazing that from a Californian lab and some guy writing a blog post that a teenager in Ireland who's never coded before can discover that this is the solution to a very, very intricate technical problem she had. She can read about it, find work in code, write the code up into her own piece of software. Get it to run and”
2021-09-27 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: Exponential, with Azeem Azhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, Laura's story is just brilliant and it's so, it always brings a smile to my face. You know, I was, I had to go to Dublin in January and to go to the young scientist competition that they host in Ireland every year. And it's absolutely the most uplifting afternoon you can spend. And it happened across one of these booths and I chatted to this young woman, a girl called Laura. She was from a college in Cork and her project was to devise an AI system that could look at cervical smears and predict whether they were abnormal or not. And it did so more accurately than a trained human doctor. And the thing that's really just sort of baffling and remarkable about that is that this was Laura's first”
2021-09-27 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: Exponential, with Azeem Azhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Weeks, that is to develop a vaccine to a new threat. We do have technologies that are getting cheaper and cheaper and cheaper. And so actually it's much cheaper to produce electricity from solar power than from fossil fuels now. So why wouldn't you do that? And so I can be optimistic about us having technologies that with a great deal of hard work and a great deal of organization could help us tackle that challenge. But again, as I write, having the technologies is a necessary condition, but it's not sufficient because there are questions about values and governance that will determine whether we do this well or don't do this well. And I think that's also been the story of the growth of these very large digital technology companies, right? They're very powerful, but we kind of got the values wrong and we got the governance wrong.”
2021-09-27 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: Exponential, with Azeem Azhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“not just between countries, but across stakeholders of many different types. And those might include future pandemics. And when the next pandemic comes, we will get the vaccine even faster. It would also include cyber risks and cyber threats and observing those. And it should also include things to watch climate risks and climate threats. So we can do some sort of observation. But of course, the big challenge of our age is climate change. I mean, that is the sort of most enormous thing that we have to contend with. And I think that I argue that we need more technology, not less, in order to tackle climate change. And I think we can take some succour from what we saw with the pandemic response, which is that we can look at a wickedly hard problem that had taken 45 years previously, and we can now address it within a matter of”
2021-09-27 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: Exponential, with Azeem Azhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of exponential technologies is that it was scientists and entrepreneurs who did that. And it wasn't, governments were not sort of clunking around getting in the way in any way, shape or form. So one of the things that we know is that we can respond to these things very, very quickly if we want. And what do we learn from these exponential capabilities that got us these vaccines very quickly? The first was that we had this knowledge commons, these open gene databases for virus sequences. Imagine if the virus sequence had not been treated like that, but had been treated the way that, you know, a company treats a patent or a trademark or a trade secret. I mean, that would have been hoarded and no one would have had access to it. So I think we can learn that there are certain things that we want to put in the commons and that we want to collaborate with.”
2021-09-27 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: Exponential, with Azeem Azhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I am optimistic that there's quite a lot of that out there. I mean, that story is just really remarkable because it touches on a whole number of the foundations that I lay in the book. The genome sequence of this strange virus wasn't called COVID-19 or SARS-CoV-2 at the time was made available on the 6th of January 2020 and within a few weeks the first vaccines had been created on the mRNA platform. And thousands of scientists were looking at that gene sequence. And that used ideas of open source and knowledge commons and machine learning that Moderna used to accelerate how they found the candidate vaccines. And it was really, really remarkable. The thing to note about all of that, which was, yes, sitting on a bunch of”
2021-09-27 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: Exponential, with Azeem Azhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Everything that we buy and eat and consume. And so that, I think, forces us to think slightly differently about, you know, about taxation, about global taxation, and about what we ask of companies as they sort of operate in this new kind of metaglobal, but also highly regional and localized economy.”
2021-09-27 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: Exponential, with Azeem Azhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, that's a really complicated and problematic issue because what we've already started to see in the last, since I put the book to bed has been companies who've traditionally manufactured in one place and like the semiconductor industry saying we're going to manufacture locally and build factories in Germany, in the UK and the US, which they hadn't done for 25 or 30 years. And so what that tends to do is it tends to leave the profits and the power with the owners of the intellectual property. And the nature of how value and profits flow through the supply chain changes. So you can imagine a scenario where these large global companies who own the know-how will simply hire local production to do the most mundane stamping out of a finished manufacturer. and offer them a 5%.”
2021-09-27 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: Exponential, with Azeem Azhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Years. And I think certainly on the right, and we've got a conservative government, they haven't really found a way of updating the sort of Thatcherist enterprise cry in a way that they need to. Because my recommendations for the exponential age are not anti-enterprise. I mean, I'm a startup investor, right? In my day job and I work with venture capitalists and founders all the time. It's to say that we need enterprise, but there's also certain types of business activities that we absolutely need the state to step in and start to constrain. And I think that sort of thatchrite protocol needs an update and that in a sense with the conservative government in power, I think is one of the barriers. It's one of the blockers to getting really, really sensible about these issues.”
2021-09-27 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: Exponential, with Azeem Azhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I won't share their names because I'll offend the other 647. And I think the other thing that we're starting to see is more and more people like me who've been in the industry for 25 or 30 years starting to say, look, we want to move into some form of public service in some way where we can bring our expertise along. I think it's not really sufficient, to be honest, because there's only so much that you can do as an advisor. There's only so much the civil service can do. And I've worked with a number of civil servants over the past two or three years and have been incredibly impressed with their understanding of the dynamics and their open-mindedness. I think the issue is that it's not necessarily even Ro's individual politicians. I think it's where political rhetoric lies that people didn't really care about these issues in the UK for the last four or five.”
2021-09-27 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: Exponential, with Azeem Azhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'll be optimistic with my response to this. I mean, I think if you had put bets on a 78-year-old, 70-something year old U.S. president being able to make, say, sensible things towards technology regulation, you might have said, look, it's not really going to happen. But what Joe Biden has demonstrated is his ability to get smart people around him, at least when it comes to monopoly power around Amazon and Apple, you know, perhaps not in other areas right now. So one can be optimistic and say, look, countries can level up. When I look around, there are a number of places, Estonia, Taiwan, Finland, where there are really smart politicians who understand technology within the UK. There are a number of MPs who I really think start to have started to demonstrate a really deep understanding.”
2021-09-27 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: Exponential, with Azeem Azhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That, oh, well, interoperability is, of course, a desirable thing, but it's technically hard to do. But these companies make hundreds of billions of dollars in profits every year. It's not that hard. So my third prescription is where there are networks, there needs to be interoperability. And that interoperability would mean that even if I'm not on Facebook, I could still reach my friends on Facebook. If you're on Facebook and I wasn't, you could still get hold on me. And that would start to weaken some of their inherent network-based power.”
2021-09-27 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: Exponential, with Azeem Azhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then the final idea that I think is really critical for the companies in social media where there are large networks of us connected, what they have traditionally done, those firms, is they've not allowed us to go from one network to the other. So when you've got a mobile phone, and I don't know, you're with the network three, you can call me and I'm on Vodafone. That's fine. One network talks the other. And if you want to move to Vodafone, you can a three has to let you do that and you get to keep your number and you can call all your friends on three. Now that doesn't happen between Instagram and TikTok or Facebook and LinkedIn. The social networks maintain this lack of interoperability and they argue that it's technically difficult to do. They've started to say it's desirable. I mean, Nick Clegg, who's the head of PR at Facebook, told me a few weeks ago.”
2021-09-27 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: Exponential, with Azeem Azhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For those parts of their business that look like those utilities, we should insist on them behaving the same way that we insist on my local water company, Thameswater, or BT OpenReach behaving, much higher transparency, much higher disclosure, much lower profit rates, much higher obligations and clarity of what they obligations are. Now, every one of these big technology companies is quite different. But there is an idea that I talk about that these companies are now looking like infrastructure and where their businesses look like infrastructure, we should treat them as we have treated utilities in the past with those rules perhaps updated for the 21st century.”
2021-09-27 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: Exponential, with Azeem Azhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“and expectations around what monopoly actually is and what monopoly harms are. And again, I would say the new chair of the FTC is this brilliant woman called Lena Khan has some interesting ideas in that line along those lines. But the third is just this question of, you know, when you establish yourself as essential to society, even if it's through your own hard labor and your own efforts,”
2021-09-27 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: Exponential, with Azeem Azhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Horizontally, that is into other sectors. So Apple makes watches and is getting into healthcare and is getting into cars, but also vertically. So Apple also now makes its own silicon chips. And it will offer its own financial services. And they don't seem to have the limits that traditional management scholars would have argued industry had and they would have made that argument only 30 years ago. The question is how do we tackle this? I think the approach, again, is slightly multifaceted. The first is that where there are infringements of the existing rules, we should now really go after them. And the US has been particularly bad. The FTC at sort of doing that over the past 10 or 15 years and they will now be better at doing that. The second is that we need to reframe some of our rules.”
2021-09-27 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: Exponential, with Azeem Azhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, they're really, really enormous. When I started my newsletter exponential view in 2015, Apple's value on the stock market had just exceeded $500 billion. And I remember giving speeches and saying to people, hey, Apple's going up and it'll be the first trillion dollar corporation. the audiences would say, no, that's just crazy. It's nuts. And, you know, as we record today, Apple's market cap is 2.45 trillion dollars. It's nearly five times higher. And it doesn't seem to stop because the forces of gravity that made these companies smaller, which were partially government intervention, but they were largely to do with how the industrial technologies work no longer hold them back. And these companies have got really good. They've created a new management doctrine that allows them to expand horizontally.”
2021-09-27 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: Exponential, with Azeem Azhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Especially in the gig economy, need to be able to form some form of collective bargaining entity where they can go in and essentially fight for their rights and figure out what those rights are. Now, I don't think they necessarily look like the rights that workers enjoyed in the 20th century. I mean, they have to be reconceived. But that's the way in which we take that step.”
2021-09-27 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: Exponential, with Azeem Azhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“rights and those rights might include things like the right to inspect the algorithms and the data that are used to rate workers and hand jobs out to them the question is how do you get there and throughout history the way that labour has got a better bargain higher earnings more rights has not been through the generosity of the employers it's been through labour being able to act collectively workers being able to act collectively and present their case and bargain collectively increasingly the issues are very technical and they're very very arcane because it's about you know what data are you collecting what algorithm did you use who are you sharing with it with are you blending it with third party data I mean this isn't something that the average person whoever they are can deal with so you need some resource and so I think workers”
2021-09-27 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: Exponential, with Azeem Azhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The simple questions around the nature of this work and how we can find ways of getting the best of both worlds. Now, if gig work is going to stay, then what we need to do is we need to ensure that it is fair and it is decent and there is a fair trade-off between the worker and the gig platform in terms of their rights and all the other things they can do. And right now, it's pretty tough if you're a gig worker in even simple things like you want to get a loan or a mortgage, you won't be treated. Your income won't be treated the same way that a salaried worker will be. So your credit score will be worse and you'll pay a higher interest rate and you'll be able to borrow less. So it really hurts. So I think fundamentally we need to identify that there is a new category of labor, that it requires new and additional.”
2021-09-27 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: Exponential, with Azeem Azhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The gig economy is really here to stay. It's too powerful, it's too useful for companies and for enough workers. It's also really, really helpful. It's helpful to be able to have a bit more flexibility, to be able to check in and do things. But I think what we got wrong historically with the gig economy as we see it through the lens of the technology companies. So not so much zero hours contracts which have been going on in the UK for a while, but when things like Uber started to show up in the UK in about 2012, 2011, we were really, really excited and we sort of suspended our disbelief because we were desperate to look like a technologically advanced country, which looks absurd sort of in hindsight. And so we didn't ask the...”
2021-09-27 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: Exponential, with Azeem Azhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Top line is you can ask questions about the purpose of those technologies. You can ask questions about the design of the technologies. You can ask questions about who they serve. And I think if you start to do that, you can take the benefit of the acceleration and the faster progress, but have channeled the direction of the technologies and ways that are likely to be somewhat more socially beneficial and slightly less harmful. So that would be the first track, which is let's point this rocket in a slightly more helpful place. And then the second track is what can we do to”
2021-09-27 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: Exponential, with Azeem Azhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is a big question. There are two approaches because we've got two different things happening. We've got the technologies racing away and we've got society sort of plodding along like me on a Sunday afternoon. First question, can we do something about the speed with which the technologies develop? And I argue in the book that it's pretty unlikely that we can because the processes by which these technologies get faster are really baked into a society that is free, that allows free exchange of ideas, that allows people to collaborate. And so when you combine that with humans' natural desire to find shortcuts about anything, you're going to construct this sort of set of accelerating technologies. But what you can do on that”
2021-09-27 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: Exponential, with Azeem Azhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This year about how you tax these exponential age firms. And if you don't tax them, you don't get tax revenue. They get to keep that and they get more powerful. And the people who benefit from the tax revenue through the provision of social services and welfare services have fewer services to benefit from. And that's a great example of the exponential gap and why it needs to ultimately be closed.”
2021-09-27 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: Exponential, with Azeem Azhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, you know, in societal terms, the primary point is that it doesn't keep power under control and it doesn't allow us to look after the people who are most impacted by the changes. The purpose of the regulatory institutions of our societies, whether it's habits and norms and customs or tax law or the welfare system or competition law is essentially to say for a society to be free and to work, we need to keep power in check and we need to make sure that the worst off are protected in some way, have some mechanism out from their condition. And the exponential gap is essentially means that the institutions that we rely on are not keeping pace with the job that they have been asked to do. And that might be something as simple as we've seen being discussed.”
2021-09-27 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: Exponential, with Azeem Azhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Wrap someone on the knuckles. In the exponential age, the technologies themselves work differently and they sort of run around the rules that were developed during the 19th and 20th century. And these companies get bigger and bigger and they acquire more power, yet they don't appear to be prima facie breaking our old rules. So that's an example where the technologies allow firms to slip outside of society's expectations for what it is to be in service of the greater good.”
2021-09-27 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: Exponential, with Azeem Azhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I mean, it's a wonderful question. The main reason is that the technologies that we have today are produced by a small number of companies. New companies are arriving all the time. And those companies have a tremendous amount of power and we don't have ways of necessarily checking that power. And in the book I go through a number of different ways in which that manifests itself. One easy example is when we look at how companies operate in an economy, we've always had rules about that. We've had rules about what is good corporate behavior and what's bad corporate behavior. And those rules largely used to keep industrial age companies in check. They didn't get too big. They didn't get too powerful. And then once in a while the monopolies and mergers commission or the competition and markets authorities would come in.”
2021-09-27 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: Exponential, with Azeem Azhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Neutral. The first is it gives technology bosses who have a lot of power a pass and we need to keep power in check. The second is it's just manifestly not correct. Perhaps the second reason is more important than the first.”
2021-09-27 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: Exponential, with Azeem Azhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“of the sports car than I am if I'm working for a company that makes little buggies that go around golf courses. And so there is an inherent participation by the individual designer in the design of these products. But the other thing I think that's important is that the products themselves tend to influence us and the things that we therefore care about. And so you can't unpick one from another. Really simple example was when selfies were starting to come out in the start of the 2010s, there was this facial expression, I think, called the duck face, right? Which didn't really exist, right? Yes, you know the duck face. So then we constructed the duck face and the technology has started to shape us. So I think that there are two reasons why we need to dispense with this idea of technology being.”
2021-09-27 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: Exponential, with Azeem Azhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, first of all, the reason a boss says a technology is neutral is because it's so easy to do that. That makes your day job really simple. I made it. It's lovely. What you or your neighbor do with it, that's your business. And I can sort of stroll off home and do whatever it is I do. It's a fiction because technologies are artificial constructs that emerge from people or groups of people embedded in society. And so our starting point, the way we look at these problems, the way we choose to look at X data rather than Y data is really, really determined by our experiences and our priorities. And all of that is part of a social construct. If I'm working for a company that makes sports cars, I'm much more interested in thinking about the acceleration.”
2021-09-27 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: Exponential, with Azeem Azhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which we can look at and I look at in the book, which show how the development of these technologies has actually contributed to some of the schisms and inequalities that did help to foster some of the political change.”
2021-09-27 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: Exponential, with Azeem Azhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It gets reflected more widely in society and the notion of the declining sense of trust, the decline in the quality of the civic conversations that we have because people who are fearful and can't control the source of that fear. They don't feel they have agency towards it will often look for other causes. And so while I'm not saying and I don't argue in the book that it's because there are loads of iPhones and they keep doing different things that there was a turn against immigrants or there was a turn towards Donald Trump, I would argue that it contributes to the atmosphere of a sense of lack of control. And there are some really interesting processes which”
2021-09-27 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: Exponential, with Azeem Azhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, we're not made up and constituted to enjoy large amounts of change, especially when it's change that we feel that we can't control. When we feel we're in the driving seat, it's less of an issue. And so you can imagine that there is quite a lot of anxiety that's being expressed at the moment. And I think that anxiety gets expressed in people's attitudes towards technology. Edelman, which is a PR company, runs a global trust barometer. And in the West, certainly, attitudes towards technology and technology companies have really declined significantly since about 2016, 2017. So there is a sense of really, really deep anxiety, and it does get reflected in at least in surveys. But I also think it gets...”
2021-09-27 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: Exponential, with Azeem Azhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Secondly, where this was actually reflected in the structure of our industries, because the world's largest companies in 2008 or 2009 were companies of Henry Ford's era, General Motors, ExxonMobil, the oil companies, AT&T, General Electric, founded by Thomas Edison, and by two thousand fourteen, twenty fifteen, heralded first by Apple, the world's largest companies were all exponential age firms built on these technologies Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Facebook, Amazon, and these Chinese companies. So that for me is marks a really significant phase transition because it tells us that the technology is ubiquitous and it's now been reflected in the structure of industry and the structure of our economies.”
2021-09-27 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: Exponential, with Azeem Azhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Easy. That's easy to see. But the contention that we're at a turning point, I think arises from some simple facts, some things that we could observe happen between about 2011 and 2014. So in 2011, Apple became the biggest company in the world. It replaced ExxonMobil, the oil company. And 2013 became the last time that Exxon actually was ever the biggest company in the world. In 2015, there were about one and a half billion smartphones sold. In 2006, not a single smartphone had been sold. So that turning point, which happens around 2010 and 2015, is a point where we saw, first of all, the ubiquity of this one of these incredible exponential technologies computing.”
2021-09-27 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: Exponential, with Azeem Azhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, no, thank you. And it's always a bold claim to make, right, to say that we're at a special moment in history going back 600 years. So I had to think quite hard about before I made that assertion. I think that we all recognize that we live in a world that is infused with much more technology than when we were teenagers. And however old you are, really. And that technology is showing up in all sorts of strange places, whether it's supercomputer smartphones that we own, whether it's the way we now have our GP consultations, the idea of having a genome sequence to figure out our propensity for a disease or electric cars. So that's...”
2021-09-27 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: Exponential, with Azeem Azhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source