The Exponential Age

"A revelatory take on where technology is taking us, from one of the worlds most-followed tech writers. We are entering the Exponential Age. Between faster computers, better software and bigger data, ours is the first era in human history in which technology is constantly accelerating. Azeem Azhar - writer, technologist, and creator of the acclaimed Exponential View newsletter - understands this shift better than anyone. Technology, he argues, is developing at an increasing, exponential rate. But human society - from our businesses to our political institutions - can only ever adapt at a slower, incremental pace. The result is an 'exponential gap', between the power of new technology and our ability to keep up. In Exponential, Azhar shows how this exponential gap can explain our society's most pressing problems - from established businesses' difficulty keeping up with digital platforms, to the sclerotic response of liberal democracies to fast-moving social problems. And he draws on cutting-edge social science to explain how to stop the exponential gap eroding our economies, our politics and our lives. Exponential technology is upending our society. This book explains how"--Publisher's description.

The Times and Financial Times Book of the Year 'Enticing' Sunday Times | 'Engaging' Financial Times | 'Essential' Reid Hoffman | 'Excellent' Amol Rajan, BBC News ___ As technology accelerates, the human mind struggles to keep up - and our companies, workplaces and democracies get left behind. This is the exponential gap. Now, a leading technologist explores how this exponential gap is rewiring our world - and reveals how we should respond. ___ 'Azhar has a knack for interrogating and inverting conventional thinking . . . A convincing case that something extraordinary is taking place in business and society' Economist 'Deft and clear-eyed . . . Perhaps Azhar's most valuable insight is that conservatively managing the individual risks posed by new technologies will not suffice' Financial Times 'Valuable and timely . . . A diligent and comprehensive definition of a new phase in human affairs' Sunday Times

Frost & Sullivan's 2014 Growth, Innovation, and Leadership Book of the Year "EXPONENTIAL ORGANIZATIONS should be required reading for anyone interested in the ways exponential technologies are reinventing best practices in business." —Ray Kurzweil, Director of Engineering at Google In business, performance is key. In performance, how you organize can be the key to growth. In the past five years, the business world has seen the birth of a new breed of company—the Exponential Organization—that has revolutionized how a company can accelerate its growth by using technology. An ExO can eliminate the incremental, linear way traditional companies get bigger, leveraging assets like community, big data, algorithms, and new technology into achieving performance benchmarks ten times better than its peers. Three luminaries of the business world—Salim Ismail, Yuri van Geest, and Mike Malone—have researched this phenomenon and documented ten characteristics of Exponential Organizations. Here, in EXPONENTIAL ORGANIZATIONS, they walk the reader through how any company, from a startup to a multi-national, can become an ExO, streamline its performance, and grow to the next level. "EXPONENTIAL ORGANIZATIONS is the most pivotal book in its class. Salim examines the future of organizations and offers readers his insights on the concept of Exponential Organizations, because he himself embodies the strategy, structure, culture, processes, and systems of this new breed of company." —John Hagel, The Center for the Edge Chosen by Benjamin Netanyahu, Prime Minister of Israel, to be one of Bloomberg's Best Books of 2015

A pair of technology experts describe how humans will have to keep pace with machines in order to become prosperous in the future and identify strategies and policies for business and individuals to use to combine digital processing power with human ingenuity.

Ray Kurzweil is the inventor of the most innovative and compelling technology of our era, an international authority on artificial intelligence, and one of our greatest living visionaries. Now he offers a framework for envisioning the twenty-first century--an age in which the marriage of human sensitivity and artificial intelligence fundamentally alters and improves the way we live. Kurzweil's prophetic blueprint for the future takes us through the advances that inexorably result in computers exceeding the memory capacity and computational ability of the human brain by the year 2020 (with human-level capabilities not far behind); in relationships with automated personalities who will be our teachers, companions, and lovers; and in information fed straight into our brains along direct neural pathways. Optimistic and challenging, thought-provoking and engaging, The Age of Spiritual Machines is the ultimate guide on our road into the next century.

“Startling in scope and bravado.” —Janet Maslin, The New York Times “Artfully envisions a breathtakingly better world.” —Los Angeles Times “Elaborate, smart and persuasive.” —The Boston Globe “A pleasure to read.” —The Wall Street Journal One of CBS News’s Best Fall Books of 2005 • Among St Louis Post-Dispatch’s Best Nonfiction Books of 2005 • One of Amazon.com’s Best Science Books of 2005 A radical and optimistic view of the future course of human development from the bestselling author of How to Create a Mind and The Singularity is Nearer who Bill Gates calls “the best person I know at predicting the future of artificial intelligence” For over three decades, Ray Kurzweil has been one of the most respected and provocative advocates of the role of technology in our future. In his classic The Age of Spiritual Machines, he argued that computers would soon rival the full range of human intelligence at its best. Now he examines the next step in this inexorable evolutionary process: the union of human and machine, in which the knowledge and skills embedded in our brains will be combined with the vastly greater capacity, speed, and knowledge-sharing ability of our creations.

To survive in the new, competitive digital economy of artificial intelligence and the Internet of Things, companies will have to change their management models. The company of linear, incremental growth is becoming obsolete. Moonshot leaders like Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos aspire to bringing about massive transformations. These visionaries seek radical solutions to big problems through enabling technologies that are easily scalable and yield increasing returns with decreasing marginal costs that in many cases approach zero. In his book Journey of the Future Enterprise, Jorge Calvo explains what the disruptive change of the Fourth Industrial Revolution consists of, what moonshot leadership is and what exponential organizations (ExOs) are, and having set out the conceptual framework, explains how to gear companies toward the new economy. In short, this resource-packed book is written for those who want to be part of this change, for those who are suffering the impact of this radical transformation, for those who feel lost as a result of the complexity and speed of the changes that are taking place, and for those who want to better understand the drivers of the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

The authors document how four forces--exponential technologies, the DIY innovator, the Technophilanthropist, and the Rising Billion--are conspiring to solve our biggest problems. "Abundance" establishes hard targets for change and lays out a strategic roadmap for governments, industry and entrepreneurs, giving us plenty of reason for optimism.