At this point, it’s trite to observe that technology moves fast. Few people had a smartphone 15 years ago, and now nearly 80% of the world does. TikTok hit 1 billion monthly users after just five years of operations. Technologies that once seemed mythical—AI, electric vehicles, gene editing—are improving on a near-daily basis.

But in his recent book, The Exponential Age: How Accelerating Technology Is Transforming Business, Politics and Society, tech analyst, investor, and entrepreneur Azeem Azhar puts a finer point on this tried-and-true observation.

Not only are technologies advancing at breakneck speed, but they’re doing so at an exponential rate. Azhar pinpoints four general-purpose technologies—computing, renewables, additive manufacturing, and biotech—that he argues will define the decades to come.

The problem? Azhar argues this rate of technological change is leaving the institutions of yore—regulators and lawmakers, mostly—in the dust, and leaving society dizzy.

• He calls the gulf between the rate of technological change and regulatory capacity an “exponential gap,” and argues we need to close these gaps in order for these tech advancements to benefit all of society.

We caught up with Azhar to learn more about his thinking—read on for an excerpt, or click here to read the full interview.

On Wright’s Law

Most people are familiar with the idea of Moore’s Law. And Moore’s Law is best described...as a “social fact.” Moore’s Law says that every couple of years, we can miniaturize things enough to make chips more dense, and therefore faster for the same price.

And the thing that struck me when I was in my late teens, early 20s, was, Wait a second, what if everybody went on strike for two years? Would the chips get faster? And of course they wouldn’t.

As I did my research, I came across this idea of Wright’s Law, which essentially says that we learn by doing, and we get better and better with every nth iteration. You double the amount of production, and the per-unit cost declines because you get smarter at making them. And that’s completely independent of scale effect, of economies of scale.

It turns out that Wright’s Law can be applied as a predictor of technological progress across many, many different technologies.

On the consequences of leaving exponential gaps open

The tension emerges because of the exponential gap, right? This is not about saying that the technology is necessarily, and in all cases, bad. It’s really about closing the gap.

I think if you don’t close the gap, what you do is you create significant power imbalances in society, which will result in friction and volatility, whether that is friction and volatility because cyberattacks just increase, and we live in a world that we feel is unsafe, whether it’s friction and volatility because too much power accrues to large companies, and they have power in the market to determine employment standards, and what the shape of industries look like. And then that will often get expressed in the nature of the politics.

I used to call it the pitchfork risk...the idea that people will potentially rebel against that. And that just doesn’t feel like a very nice way to run a society, which is, “How much can we extract before there’s a rebellion.” That seems much less thoughtful and considerate than saying, “How do we run this in a progressive and fair and expansive, but also sustainable, manner?”

Click here to read the full interview.—DM

In our last reader poll, we finally stopped telling all of you about the metaverse and instead let you tell us about persistent, immersive worlds.

The results are in: The majority (59%) of respondents feel that the metaverse—whatever that may ultimately mean—is here to stay. The remainder of you are evenly split between thinking it’s a fad or admitting that this is how you feel about the matter: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

• Respondents have the most confidence in Meta’s odds at success with metaverse endeavors, with 27% saying it’s best-positioned to thrive.
• Nvidia was runner-up with 23% of respondents saying the same, and Microsoft (14%), Apple (14%), and Roblox (12%) followed behind.

This week’s survey...Is on virtual fitting room tech. Click here to take it.—DM

It’s the last issue of November, so we’re rounding up all of the coverage from our monthly theme, which was climate tech.

We covered a lot of ground—from wildfire-fighting tech to bidirectional charging—check out the pieces below:

• As wildfires grow more common and severe, tech startups say they can help
• Soon, your car might be able to power your house—here’s why that matters
• Ford’s future is electric. But how fast can it get there?
• The US government’s carbon removal push has begun

If you’d like to save these stories for later, you can bookmark our hub on the topic.

BTW, just because the month is ending doesn’t mean our climate-tech coverage is—it’s a key pillar of our work going forward.—DM

Stat: Passenger electric vehicles are now 10% of total car sales.

Quote: “While we remain confident that 5G poses no risk to air safety, we are also sensitive to the Federal Aviation Administration’s desire for additional analysis of this issue.”—AT&T and Verizon, in a joint letter offering to decrease the strength of their 5G towers for six months

Read: Structural biologists’ favorite new algorithms.

All week: AWS re: Invent—Amazon’s yearly cloud computing conference—kicks off on Monday and ends Friday.

Tuesday: AI ethics expert Timnit Gebru will present on AI bias to the European Parliament.

Wednesday: Snowflake reports its Q3 earnings. In September of last year, the data analytics company made history as the biggest software IPO ever. Its shares jumped 111% on day one of trading. We’re watching to see how the company is performing one year later.

Catch up on the top Emerging Tech Brew stories from the past few editions:

• Anatomy of an online shopping AI system
• Ford’s future is electric. But how fast can it get there?
• Space junk removal could become a hot new startup category