Book talk: "Exponential: how accelerating technology is leaving us behind and what to do about it" with Azeem Azhar

Past Event

Date
 29 November 2021, 5:45pm - 6:45pm

Location
 Oxford Martin School & Online
34 Broad Street (corner of Holywell and Catte Streets), Oxford, OX1 3BD

Event Recording:

As technology accelerates, the human mind struggles to keep up - and our companies, workplaces, and democracies get left behind. This is the exponential gap.

Leading technologist, Azeem Azhar, in conversation with Professor Ian Goldin, will explain how this exponential gap is rewiring business and society. Exploring corporations and the workplace, diplomacy and big tech, Azeem will make sense of a period of dizzyingly fast change - and reveals how we should respond.

Azhar Azeem

Azeem Azhar
Entrepreneur, investor and curator, Exponential View

Azeem Azhar is a serial entrepreneur, investor and Author of Exponential: How Accelerating Technology Is Leaving Us Behind and What to Do About It. He is the creator of the Exponential View, Britain's leading platform for in-depth tech analysis. His weekly newsletter is read by 200,000 people from around the world, and his chart-topping podcast has featured guests including Yuval Noah Harari, Reid Hoffman, and Tony Blair.

Azeem Azhar is a senior advisor to professional services firm, PwC. He also advises breakthrough entrepreneurial firms, including Kindred Capital, Onfido, Ocean Protocol, ReInfer and quantum-computing startup, Beit. He is an investor in early-stage startups in AI, renewable energy, female healthtech, self-driving cars and marketplace.

Azhar is also on the board of the Ada Lovelace Foundation, the leading independent research institute focused on the ethics of AI and is a member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Future’s Council on the Digital Economy and Society.

Previously, he’s been an award-winning entrepreneur, founding the VC-backed, PeerIndex, which was acquired in 2014. He has also invested in more than 30 startups, with exits to Microsoft & Amazon amongst others. The early part of Azhar’s career took him to journalism, where he covered technology at The Guardian and The Economist. Azhar has also had strategy and innovation roles at the BBC and Thomson Reuters, and was on a non-executive board at Ofcom, the UK’s converged communications regulator.

Ian Goldin1

Professor Ian Goldin
Director, Oxford Martin Programme on Technological and Economic Change

Professor Ian Goldin was the founding Director of the Oxford Martin School from September 2006 to September 2016. He is currently Oxford University Professor of Globalisation and Development, Senior Fellow at the Oxford Martin School, Director of the Oxford Martin Programmes on Technological and Economic Change; Future of Work; and Future of Development and a Professorial Fellow at the University’s Balliol College.

From 2003 to 2006 he was Vice President of the World Bank, and prior to that the Bank’s Director of Development Policy (2001-2003). He served on the Bank’s senior management team and led the Bank’s collaboration with the United Nations and other partners as well as with key countries. As Director of Development Policy, he played a pivotal role in the research and strategy agenda of the Bank.

From 1996 to 2001 he was Chief Executive and Managing Director of the Development Bank of Southern Africa and served as an advisor to President Nelson Mandela. He succeeded in transforming the Bank to become the leading agent of development in the 14 countries of Southern Africa. During this period, Goldin served on several Government committees and Boards, and was Finance Director for South Africa’s Olympic Bid.

Previously, Goldin was Principal Economist at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) in London, and Program Director at the OECD Development Centre in Paris, where he directed the Programs on Trade, Environment and Sustainable Development.

He has published over 50 articles and 23 books. He is the presenter of three BBC series After the Crash, Will AI Kill Development? and The Pandemic That Changed the World. His most recent books are Terra Incognita: 100 Maps to Survive the Next 100 Years and Rescue: From Global Crisis to a Better World. More information can be found at iangoldin.org