September 21, 2023 • 30 mins
Historian Niall Ferguson and Azeem Azhar explore the geopolitics of technological revolutions past and present in an effort to determine whether we are in the midst of a historic societal transformation.
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Speaker 1 (00:07):
We're witnessing a historical transformation in how we organize our societies,
our economies, and our politics. That is a premise for
today's conversation. I'm Asimazar. Welcome to the Exponentially Podcast. One
of the key assumptions behind this question is that the
(00:28):
really big turning points in history have been driven by technology.
We know that agriculture, the technology of food production, gave
birth to civilization. We know that Gutenberg's invention of the
printing press allowed ideas to travel faster and further than
ever before, transforming European societies. And we know that two
(00:49):
hundred and fifty years later, the invention of the first
commercial steam engine marked the beginning of the Industrial Revolution,
a revolution that would ultimately reshape global power. To understand
and if today's technologies are doing the same, I've come
to Stanford University to meet a historian. He's a world
expert on that intersection of economics, politics and technology, Professor
(01:10):
Neil Ferguson. This show is called Exponentially, and what we're
trying to investigate is the extent to which this series
of interconnected changes, particularly rapid technological change, but also the
climate crisis and things like pandemics that are all different
(01:32):
but somehow related, whether they are buzzing around in a
sort of febrile fever that might reflect some kind of
change in the way that we live our lives. Do
you see, as I do, complicated domains that are changing very,
very quickly, or are we overreading what we're seeing.
Speaker 2 (01:51):
Well, if you went into the typical windowless room full
of professional chatter merchants from the various eats of the world,
the financial elite, the academic elite, the political elite, and
you ask that kind of question, I think the answers
would include, well, there are some huge paradigm shift happening
(02:13):
in the global climate that will have terrible consequences. There
are technological changes, particularly in the area of artificial intelligence,
that are exponential, with the rapid growth of large language models,
and it's all very scary. And somebody will say because
we're in a poly crisis and everything is happening all
at once, and this is unprecedented, which just means they
(02:35):
don't know any history. So let's just run a thought
experiment supposing you and I were having this conversation with
somewhat different technology in nineteen twenty three, rather right twenty
twenty three. I'm sure that there would be somebody in
the windowless room who would say, well, we've just had
a tremendous pandemic in nineteen eighteen nineteen and a huge conflict.
(02:56):
The world is being driven crazy by inflation, and and
there are these alarming breakthroughs in technology that are producing
moving pictures at cinema, and it feels like they would
have had some sense of impending disaster. And I think
we have to therefore guard against saying things that were
(03:17):
also being said one hundred years ago, and indeed might
have been said fifty years ago. And if you'd had
a conversation like this in nineteen seventy three, you would
have all kinds of reasons to think that the world
was going to hell in a hand cast. So I
think the first thing to do is beware of assuming
that the year you happen to be in is hugely
historically significant.
Speaker 3 (03:36):
Well it might not be.
Speaker 1 (03:38):
Well, every year in a sense is unprecedented. Unprecedented things
are actually quite quite common in life.
Speaker 2 (03:42):
And most of the things that are happening in this
particular year aren't drastically different from the things that struck
people as worrying fifty years ago or one hundred years ago.
Speaker 3 (03:53):
So I'll dissent a bit from.
Speaker 2 (03:56):
Conventional wisdom by trying to highlight the things that I
think really are in autance about now, because most of
the things we attach significance to terminal not to be important.
In the early seventies, people thought a huge population crisis was.
Speaker 3 (04:08):
Coming, and this was the dominant view.
Speaker 1 (04:11):
If I can jump in though, if we look back
over the long arc of history, we can see moments
where there were these paradigm shifts. You can see England.
The economy of England looks very, very different in seventeen
fifty to how it looked one hundred and fifty years
earlier before the discovery and exploitation of coal. If we
(04:33):
look at the structure of power and economies in Europe
in the two hundred years after the printing press, they
look quite different to how they looked just one hundred
years before the printing press. There are perhaps not annual moments,
but there are a dozen where we can start to
say these look like turning points, so we know they
exist in history.
Speaker 2 (04:52):
You've mentioned two, and you'll struggle to come up with five.
Because the Industrial Revolution is one of the very rare
moments where human history resembles the hockey stick. There is
a really exponential change in economic life. It starts, of
all places, in the British Isles in the eighteenth century,
and it spreads gradually to the rest of the world,
(05:12):
and it involves a massive enhancement of human productivity through technology.
The printing press is the thing that transforms communication in
the sixteenth and seventeenth century. Again, it happens in Western
Europe and then gradually spreads to the rest of the world.
So let's ask ourselves, is it plausible that something like
that has happened in our time? And the answer is
(05:33):
it has because the Internet has had about the same
impact in our lifetimes as the printing press had over
a more prolonged period.
Speaker 1 (05:42):
How do you measure the impact of the internet.
Speaker 2 (05:44):
If you simply compare the cost of communication. It was
reduced as much by the Internet as it was by
the printing press. It's as big a transformation in the
ease of communication. So that has happened, and in a way,
it's sort of waching some natural frontier points and diminishing returns.
Speaker 1 (06:04):
Will run out of people connect We almost.
Speaker 3 (06:08):
Shift happened. We're really looking back on it now.
Speaker 1 (06:11):
There's something else that I think is quite interesting about
the spread of the Internet, because when it started to spread,
the idea was that it would energize local democracy, it
would energize the individual, it would give us all a voice,
and up until the point of the Arab Spring, you
could make that case. And a decade on we've seen
those that democracy didn't take root, and we've also seen
(06:34):
that these new non state actors, in the form of
the platforms, have found ways of sequestering the democratic capability
of the Internet into something that doesn't look too dissimilar
to mass media with a little hint of all.
Speaker 2 (06:50):
Well, I think the same kind of disappointment arose with
the rise of the printing press. I mean, there certainly
was a moment when it seemed as if the advent
of very cheap printed books would allow Christian doctrine to
spread everywhere very rapidly, and this was very exciting. But
what in fact happened was that one Martin Luther started
(07:12):
to argue for improvements in Western Christendom.
Speaker 3 (07:14):
You had about one hundred plus.
Speaker 2 (07:16):
Years of very violent religious warfare, and in the same way,
we thought everything would be awesome if everybody was connected
on network platforms Google, Amazon, and the rest. It took
us a few years to realize that there might be
downsides to much enhanced into connectivity, that if we'd only
studied the history of the printing press more thoroughly, we
(07:37):
wouldn't have been surprised to find the polarization and other
pathologies that have arisen from the rise of the internet.
So I think that kind of thing illustrates why you
need to study history if you're not to misunderstand the
paradigm shifts of your time. The thing that I would
add that might turn out to be comparable is the
(07:59):
rise of artificial intelligence right exactly, And that does feel
like something that's really transa well.
Speaker 1 (08:04):
It looks like it's a technology that could dramatically improve productivity.
So when we go back to England in the seventeenth
and eighteenth nineteenth century, you saw the start and then
the deployment of machines that looked at human work and
magnified it, multiplied it. And when we start to look
at these very very early large language models, they've only
(08:25):
been publicly available for a matter of months, and we're
already seeing how knowledge workers who make up a very
large portion, certainly of Western countries employment bases, are able
to use them to magnify their work. So I do
wonder about whether artificial intelligence has some of the characteristics
(08:46):
of the kind of technology that can be a pivotal
point in our development.
Speaker 3 (08:51):
Well, let's hope.
Speaker 2 (08:53):
So, I mean, that's certainly plausible when we look at
something like alpha fold, which has allowed a far far
more rapid analysis of proteins than was possible before. And
I think in medical science the case is already clearly
proven that there are huge benefits.
Speaker 1 (09:18):
It could be that given that we have this productivity
enhancing technology that is AI, that has come off the
back of this transformative communications network that's the Internet, we
also have radical improvements in certain biotechnologies, and we have
a fundamental shift and the way the energy system is
working as we move from extractive sources through to renewable sources.
(09:42):
And these renewable mean.
Speaker 3 (09:44):
Other extractive resources, because renewables involve.
Speaker 1 (09:46):
Extraction, but the ratio of extraction to useful energy is
much much more in favor of renewables than it is
with oil and gas. And that feels like the energy
system could also change. So there could be the ingredients
of a pivot point of a kind that we've only
seen a couple of times previously in history.
Speaker 2 (10:03):
Let's ask what the driving forces will be. The world
has propelled forward and has been for thousands of years
by great power.
Speaker 3 (10:11):
Competition's right, and that is the.
Speaker 2 (10:13):
Thing that drives innovation right now across the board, whether
it's in solar panels or in artificial intelligence, it is
a competition which is intensifying between two superparers, the United
States and a communist led superpar Now is this standard
sound familiar to does?
Speaker 3 (10:32):
So?
Speaker 2 (10:32):
What is really significant about this historical moment is that
we are in the first inning, the early phase of
Cold War II. That is going to drive all the
things that we've talked about, and it will not necessarily
drive these changes in directions that are benign. That the
big technological advance of Cold War one was of course,
nuclear weapons, and I don't believe for a minute that
(10:55):
we can have a Cold War two without a similar risk.
And in fact, you can already see how cold War
two is repeating cold War one in a number of
key respects, one of which is it has its hot aspects.
There's a Hot War going on right now in Ukraine,
which you can think of as analogist to the Hot
War and career the career fifty. The Cuban missile crisis
(11:16):
in this Cold War will be a Taiwan semiconductor crisis,
And in that sense, I think if you try to
imagine yourself as a future historian, you'll be writing about
how the US China rivalry, both ideological and technological, produced
moments of great risk before the superpowers found out a
way of managing it better.
Speaker 1 (11:38):
I think it's always the case, though, that breakthroughs in
technology will lead to great power competition. I mean the
square rigged sales resulted in those expeditions from the Iberian
Peninsula that started that wave of colonization. Steel and larger
bore guns turned into competition in Europe when we got
to World War one way around.
Speaker 2 (12:00):
Actually assume it's actually the competition that leads to the
technological development. The reason that there's so much more technological
innovation in Europe than in China from around fifteen hundred
is that there are relatively.
Speaker 3 (12:14):
Evenly matched states.
Speaker 2 (12:17):
Engaged in a competition, whereas it's not like that in China,
where there is one very large empire, and it doesn't
really have to wage war with peers. Peer to peer
conflict incentivize European states to innovate with shipbuilding and particularly
to innovate with artillery. And in the same way, it's
clearly the rivalry between the United States and the Soviet
(12:40):
Union that propels innovation with nuclear weapons. And in the
same way today, I think the United States and China
are in a race with respect to artificial intelligence, quantum computing,
and a whole range of other technologies, because once you're
in that great part competition, you cannot afford to lose
technological leadership.
Speaker 1 (12:58):
But the current petition between China and the US started
with civil applications of these technologies, so it's been a
case of plowshares into swords. We were not developing AI
or genome sequencing first and foremost for military advantage. We
were developing them for their innovation capacities, which would lead
(13:20):
to economic advantage.
Speaker 2 (13:22):
And Chinese as scientists and American scientists were cooperating in
all kinds of domains in a relatively short space of
time up until I guess She's in pin came to
power in China and Donald Trump came to parer in
the United States. People in the United States really underestimated
the extent to which almost all the technologies were potentially
(13:44):
dual use that as I say, they had civilian but
also military usages. They underestimated the extent of which their
own military hardware US military hardware had Chinese components.
Speaker 1 (13:54):
Something else happened between two thousand and seven and about
twenty fifteen, which was in technology, things that we now
called AI went from being slightly mundane and not usable
to suddenly quite useful.
Speaker 2 (14:08):
I think historically, technological innovation sometimes seems like its own
story that's somewhat separate from everything else. In the nineteen thirties,
the world was in the grip of the worst depression
in modern economic history, but if you look closely, quite
a lot of innovation was happening in the US economy
that would turn out to be enormously consequential. Right There
(14:30):
was actually growth again in.
Speaker 3 (14:32):
The nineteen seventies.
Speaker 2 (14:34):
Most people thought that the world was in stagflation, but
that was actually the decade when Microsoft and Absolutely were founded.
Speaker 1 (14:41):
And Intel was building chips for the very first time
and so on.
Speaker 2 (14:44):
And that turned out to really matter in cold War
one because the Soviets were able to steal and copy
the technology of nuclear weapons, also space flight, but when
it came to copying microprocessors, they utterly failed. Even though
they could steal them, they couldn't work out how really
to replicate Moor's law. And I think in that sense
what happened in the nineteen seventies in Silicon Valley turned.
Speaker 3 (15:06):
Out to be strategically hugely.
Speaker 2 (15:08):
Important once the Soviets realized that the next generation of
weapons would depend on microprocessors and computers. That's why from
a technological point of view, they couldn't possibly win Cold
War one.
Speaker 3 (15:21):
That Cold War two, I think has similar characteristics.
Speaker 2 (15:24):
It's going to be decided by at the technological frontier
at the moment. There are two respects in which I
think this is much closer than Cold War one. Number one, Obviously,
the Chinese economy is bigger than the Soviet economy. Ever
was I mean, it was forty four percent of USGDB
at peak and falling away from the mid nineteen seventies.
(15:44):
China overtook the US in twenty fourteen on a purchasing
power parity basis, It's not that far behind on a
current dollar basis. So that's point one point two. Just
the way that the Chinese economy works, because it has
a very large and dynamic private sector, is more likely
to use competitive innovation than the soviets of a could.
Speaker 1 (16:03):
But there are a couple of things that we could
pick up, and one is that the dynamics of Moore's law,
which was this relationship that saw silicon chips getting cheaper
and cheaper and cheaper every year, or you were getting
more processing banged for your dollar spent, was a highly
socialized process. It required a lot of competitive firms fundamentally
(16:24):
collaborating across an ecosystem, not just in California, but in
many other parts of the world. And that is a
characteristic of a free operating market, which it doesn't feel
exists in China, and that within China they don't have
the full stack of market participants when it comes to
the semiconductor industry that you need. I think the second
(16:48):
challenge I would raise is really about the spirit of research,
which ultimately these things are built off really really basic science.
The US still has a lead in pure research, and
there are academic freedoms that exist in the US that
don't exist in China because the lines of research are
(17:10):
not clearly drawn. For scientists, there are lines they cannot cross,
but they're not told, ay priori what they might be.
Speaker 3 (17:16):
Well, let me come back at you.
Speaker 2 (17:19):
In both points, the most high end semiconductors are not
manufactured in the United States, as you well know.
Speaker 3 (17:25):
They're manufactured in Taiwan, which is an.
Speaker 2 (17:28):
Island that, according to the People's Republic of China, is
part of China, and its contested status in that sense
is going to be even more explosive than the contested
status of Cuba was in the early nineteen sixties. The
second point is that scientific talent is quite widely distributed globally,
and it's produced in greater volumes.
Speaker 3 (17:50):
In China at this point than it is in the
United States.
Speaker 2 (17:53):
Now, that really didn't matter when the United States was
able to attract the.
Speaker 3 (17:58):
Talent from all over the world.
Speaker 2 (18:00):
But one of the consequences of the rise of Cold
War two is that process has really broken down. Legal
immigration into the United States for talented people has come
to a near standstill. So the US is throwing away
its opportunity to win Cold War two, and the way
to win it is just keep importing the talent, including
the talent from China, and then the Chinese can't possibly compete.
(18:24):
The Chinese don't have the chance to import talent. Pose
nobody wants to emigrate to the People's Republic of China. Surprisingly,
so this is a really critical point which brings us
to something we haven't talked about yet, which is super
important demographics and migration.
Speaker 1 (18:38):
And your point about demographics is that many countries are
in retrogaatee, not just Japan, not just Italy, but also
China and large parts of Eastern Europe are well below
the replacement.
Speaker 2 (18:48):
The population of China could fall by as much as
half between now and the end of this century.
Speaker 3 (18:54):
That is a.
Speaker 2 (18:55):
Plausible projection from the United Nations, if you assume that
the fertility rate doesn't go back up. Even the median
projection from the UN Population Prospects says that the population
of China will fall by about a third. How can
the Chinese economy possibly have sustained growth at even five
percent with a shrinking population, a shrinking workforce.
Speaker 3 (19:16):
A twenty nine percent of the economy is building terwer blocks.
Speaker 2 (19:19):
But these are terr blocks for nobody, and I don't
think we're thinking enough about what that means.
Speaker 1 (19:23):
But we can perhaps bring in one of the technologies
we talked about earlier, which was these AI technologies, because
of course they are productivity magnifying technologies, at least that's
a theory. So let's assume for the discussion that they
allow one person to do the work of three or four.
That might suggest that countries like China or Italy should
invest more heavily in these AI technologies because they are
(19:46):
running out of human workers. So could a country like China,
with its investments in robotics and AI, use those technologies
to in some way defray the downward pressure of this
demographics that they're having to deal with.
Speaker 2 (20:00):
They are clearly in China investing with that in mind.
But I'm not sure that that solves the problem, because
I think the problem is somewhat more complex than we
don't have enough people to assemble the electric vehicles. There
are a couple of other aspects to this which I
think are interesting. One is that if you have a
population which is aging, you have to be supported by
(20:24):
a relatively smaller working population.
Speaker 3 (20:26):
There are just distributional problems.
Speaker 2 (20:29):
Right twenty years ago, and I said the politics of
the twenty fourth century will be about generational conflict, not
class conflict, and we're still at an early stage of
the generational conflicts that are going to play out. As
younger people say to themselves, wait a second, I seem
to be having a pretty hard time in order to
support the older generation in very prolonged retirement.
Speaker 1 (20:51):
There are strong echoes of that in the US with
college debt burden, in the UK with the cost of housing,
and in France and in Italy as well. And China
has got a huge one coming.
Speaker 2 (21:05):
It's going to age as rapidly as Japan has, but
at a lower level of per capita GDP. I think
there are all kinds of really quite unforeseeable problems. So
I think that that doesn't get solved by robots. And
I think there's another problem for aging societies. I mean,
it's the young people who have the cool ideas. And
if you have an aging population, it seems to me
(21:28):
that by definition, you will be less innovative in relative terms.
Speaker 1 (21:32):
So historically, are there examples that you can think of
where nations or states of some sort have really bet
hard on technology to get them out out of one
of these quite existential threats.
Speaker 2 (21:44):
No, this is new territory because the problem in the
past was altogether different. Human life expectancy, we forget, this
was pretty short for most of history, and so you know,
people didn't feel young at fifty nine. I still kid
myself that I'm relatively youthful, at least physically.
Speaker 1 (22:03):
You're about to take up a new sport in golf,
I understand.
Speaker 2 (22:06):
Well, I don't regard golf as a sport, to be honest,
but yeah, it's the kind of thing you do when
you hit sixties. But the interesting thing is that all
the times of technological innovation that we look back on
as we have in this conversation happened when societies were
extraordinarly youthful by our standards, and the elderly were a
really small share of the population.
Speaker 1 (22:34):
So where have we got to. There are some new technologies,
the internet and artificial intelligence. They feel like a paradigm shift.
There are some more linear trends, demographics being a key
untold story, and these together are driving a real Cold
War two between between China and America. Some scholars argue
(22:57):
that in many cases where great powers, especially if they're
ideological differences that are hard to reconcile, find themselves competing,
they will fall into a war.
Speaker 2 (23:09):
I think if we're going to rerun this and have
Cold War two, we should not assume that we're guaranteed
to avoid a hot war. Both societies in their different
ways of wrestling with problems of aging that were not
familiar to Cold War one participants. The technologies include the
old ones nuclear weapons, but there are a bunch of
new ones.
Speaker 1 (23:29):
Too, hypersonics, AIS size.
Speaker 2 (23:32):
AI, satellite warfare is going to happen on a larger scale.
So I have to say that I agree with Henry
Kissinger who said to me in an interview, not unlike
this last year, cold War II will be more dangerous
than Cold War One. That is a very sobering fault
to me.
Speaker 1 (23:49):
So after the end of World War Two, we developed
a whole set of new institutions from the United Nations
through two things like the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty. If
you look at the environment that we move into now,
is it a case of having to invent new institutions
or is it a case of transforming the ones that
(24:09):
we have.
Speaker 2 (24:10):
The United Nations, when you look closely at its record,
had a structural problem from the outset, namely the veto.
Speaker 3 (24:18):
Power of the permanent members permanent the permanent.
Speaker 2 (24:22):
Members included the United States and the Soviet Union, and
so they took turrents to exercise that veto, which meant
that the UN didn't actually do terribly much that was
consequential when it came to avoiding conflict, which is why
there were a lot of small and not so small
wars during Cold War one. That's right, So I think
we need to recognize that the UN never really was
a terrifically powerful force for preserving peace, that it has
(24:45):
been exposed very badly by the war in Ukraine.
Speaker 3 (24:49):
And let's go down the list. How about the IMF?
Speaker 2 (24:52):
How is the International Monetary Fund doing when it comes
to financial stability?
Speaker 3 (24:57):
Can I give an F grade?
Speaker 2 (24:59):
It has, I think, not perform brilliantly other than perhaps
at data collection, not at projection over the last twenty years.
And I'll keep going. The World Trade Organization's basically broken.
It's not clear that it can be revived. And so
you asked yourself, well, hang on a second. If these
institutions are kind of dysfunctional, what was it that generated
at least some piece and prosperity after nineteen forty five,
(25:23):
and I think the answer is in fact line systems
that deterred the Soviets from the more.
Speaker 3 (25:31):
Crazy of the plan.
Speaker 2 (25:32):
So fundamentally, NATO NATO mattered much more than the UN
and much more than the European institutions when it came
to preserving peace.
Speaker 3 (25:41):
Therefore, if we want to ask.
Speaker 2 (25:43):
The question how can we avoid World War three, it
is going to be very important that the United States
builds a version of NATO for Transpacific relations.
Speaker 1 (25:53):
Interests are eternal.
Speaker 2 (25:54):
I think, well, this sounds like Henry Kistener's talking right
back at me, but I think in practice this this
is where the action is. Can the United States create
a sufficiently strong network of relationships that China can be
deterred from taking the kind of action that could escalate
towards War three.
Speaker 1 (26:12):
But there were other dimensions of risk that you talked about,
and one was artificial intelligence. And even in their non
weaponized state, because they're dual use, they can still be
quite dangerous.
Speaker 3 (26:25):
Just in the same way that the Peace of West failure.
Speaker 2 (26:28):
Devised the set of rules to stop religious warfare tearing
Europe apart interminably. Why should we not now devise a
convention to limit the use of these new and powerful tools,
especially now when the United States appears to have a
pretty clear lead when it comes to large language models.
Just as it was in the interests of the United
(26:51):
States to have a non proliferation treaty before the Soviets
overtook the US.
Speaker 1 (26:56):
Back then, of course, even the Swedes had a nuclear
weapons program.
Speaker 3 (27:00):
Imagine a world without the non proliferation treaty. It would
have blown up by.
Speaker 1 (27:03):
There right absolutely, and the Swedes would have reconquered Finland.
Speaker 3 (27:06):
In their dreams, in their dream The.
Speaker 1 (27:09):
Premise of today's conversation was that if we look back
on these few years, we'll realize that we were living
through a paradigm shift that was a new age. How
do you assess that premise? Is that something that is
now going to become reality.
Speaker 3 (27:25):
Not in the way that most people think.
Speaker 2 (27:29):
I think we're at that stage of Cold War two
where most people don't fully realize the implications of there
being only two AI superpars, only two superpars that could
conceivably have quantum computers, and that that's the real architecture
of the rest of our lives. They'll continue to be
high levels of trade between the United States. You can't
(27:49):
decouple theseoities entirely, but it'll just be much more selective
and there will be things that won't be tradeable. There
is a lot of change coming on the back of
this new Cold War, and it will affect everything. So
even the climate issue inevitably will become part of Cold
War two because you can't avoid climate change if you
can't constrain China, So everything ends up being a part
(28:11):
of this great geopolitical struggle. This illustrates something that is
very important. Indeed, something's changed because technology changes. The world
was changed by the printing press, changed by nuclear weapons,
is being changed by the Internet and AI. But certain
things remain constant because the logic of power is unaffected
by technology. So I think for me, the key to
(28:32):
understanding the future is you have to combine historical knowledge.
Speaker 3 (28:36):
With a grasp of what's new, what's technologically different.
Speaker 2 (28:39):
There's a paradigm shift happening in technology, no question, but
the age old relationships between powers, those don't change. You
have to understand both these domains or you will be
catnapping Neil.
Speaker 1 (28:54):
I think it's very appropriate that we're in a windowless
room having this discussion about Cold War II and this
paradigm shift. Thank you so much for making the time.
Speaker 3 (29:01):
Thank you. As a.
Speaker 1 (29:07):
Reflecting on my conversation with Neil, I'm struck by how
many factors, from global competition to demographic shifts, and of
course rapidly evolving technologies are all reinforcing this state of uncertainty.
Is this a sign of fundamental change in the nature
of human affairs? Technological progress is certainly speeding up, but
the collaboration made possible by the Internet is being replaced
(29:30):
by competition between two great powers China and the United States.
So our degree with Neil that we're seeing flickering of
a second Cold War. But I also think something more
fundamental is happening, a shift to a world built on
exponential technologies, with many new powerbrokers, not just the nation state.
(29:50):
Thanks for listening to the exponentially podcast. If you enjoy
the show, please leave a review or rating. It really
does help others find us the Exponentially. The podcast is
presented by me Azeem Azar. The sound designer is Will Horrocks.
The research was led by Chloe Ippah and music composed
by Emily Green and John Zarcone. The show is produced
(30:11):
by Frederick Cassella, Maria Garrilov and me Azeem Azar Special
thanks to Sage Bauman, Jeff Grocott and Magnus Henrikson. The
executive producers are Andrew Barden, Adam Kamiski, and Kyle Kramer.
David Ravella is the managing editor. Exponentially was created by
Frederick Cassella and is an Eat the Pie I plus
one limited production in association with Bloomberg LC
We're witnessing a historical transformation in how we organize our societies,
our economies, and our politics. That is a premise for
today's conversation. I'm Asimazar. Welcome to the Exponentially Podcast. One
of the key assumptions behind this question is that the
(00:28):
really big turning points in history have been driven by technology.
We know that agriculture, the technology of food production, gave
birth to civilization. We know that Gutenberg's invention of the
printing press allowed ideas to travel faster and further than
ever before, transforming European societies. And we know that two
(00:49):
hundred and fifty years later, the invention of the first
commercial steam engine marked the beginning of the Industrial Revolution,
a revolution that would ultimately reshape global power. To understand
and if today's technologies are doing the same, I've come
to Stanford University to meet a historian. He's a world
expert on that intersection of economics, politics and technology, Professor
(01:10):
Neil Ferguson. This show is called Exponentially, and what we're
trying to investigate is the extent to which this series
of interconnected changes, particularly rapid technological change, but also the
climate crisis and things like pandemics that are all different
(01:32):
but somehow related, whether they are buzzing around in a
sort of febrile fever that might reflect some kind of
change in the way that we live our lives. Do
you see, as I do, complicated domains that are changing very,
very quickly, or are we overreading what we're seeing.
Speaker 2 (01:51):
Well, if you went into the typical windowless room full
of professional chatter merchants from the various eats of the world,
the financial elite, the academic elite, the political elite, and
you ask that kind of question, I think the answers
would include, well, there are some huge paradigm shift happening
(02:13):
in the global climate that will have terrible consequences. There
are technological changes, particularly in the area of artificial intelligence,
that are exponential, with the rapid growth of large language models,
and it's all very scary. And somebody will say because
we're in a poly crisis and everything is happening all
at once, and this is unprecedented, which just means they
(02:35):
don't know any history. So let's just run a thought
experiment supposing you and I were having this conversation with
somewhat different technology in nineteen twenty three, rather right twenty
twenty three. I'm sure that there would be somebody in
the windowless room who would say, well, we've just had
a tremendous pandemic in nineteen eighteen nineteen and a huge conflict.
(02:56):
The world is being driven crazy by inflation, and and
there are these alarming breakthroughs in technology that are producing
moving pictures at cinema, and it feels like they would
have had some sense of impending disaster. And I think
we have to therefore guard against saying things that were
(03:17):
also being said one hundred years ago, and indeed might
have been said fifty years ago. And if you'd had
a conversation like this in nineteen seventy three, you would
have all kinds of reasons to think that the world
was going to hell in a hand cast. So I
think the first thing to do is beware of assuming
that the year you happen to be in is hugely
historically significant.
Speaker 3 (03:36):
Well it might not be.
Speaker 1 (03:38):
Well, every year in a sense is unprecedented. Unprecedented things
are actually quite quite common in life.
Speaker 2 (03:42):
And most of the things that are happening in this
particular year aren't drastically different from the things that struck
people as worrying fifty years ago or one hundred years ago.
Speaker 3 (03:53):
So I'll dissent a bit from.
Speaker 2 (03:56):
Conventional wisdom by trying to highlight the things that I
think really are in autance about now, because most of
the things we attach significance to terminal not to be important.
In the early seventies, people thought a huge population crisis was.
Speaker 3 (04:08):
Coming, and this was the dominant view.
Speaker 1 (04:11):
If I can jump in though, if we look back
over the long arc of history, we can see moments
where there were these paradigm shifts. You can see England.
The economy of England looks very, very different in seventeen
fifty to how it looked one hundred and fifty years
earlier before the discovery and exploitation of coal. If we
(04:33):
look at the structure of power and economies in Europe
in the two hundred years after the printing press, they
look quite different to how they looked just one hundred
years before the printing press. There are perhaps not annual moments,
but there are a dozen where we can start to
say these look like turning points, so we know they
exist in history.
Speaker 2 (04:52):
You've mentioned two, and you'll struggle to come up with five.
Because the Industrial Revolution is one of the very rare
moments where human history resembles the hockey stick. There is
a really exponential change in economic life. It starts, of
all places, in the British Isles in the eighteenth century,
and it spreads gradually to the rest of the world,
(05:12):
and it involves a massive enhancement of human productivity through technology.
The printing press is the thing that transforms communication in
the sixteenth and seventeenth century. Again, it happens in Western
Europe and then gradually spreads to the rest of the world.
So let's ask ourselves, is it plausible that something like
that has happened in our time? And the answer is
(05:33):
it has because the Internet has had about the same
impact in our lifetimes as the printing press had over
a more prolonged period.
Speaker 1 (05:42):
How do you measure the impact of the internet.
Speaker 2 (05:44):
If you simply compare the cost of communication. It was
reduced as much by the Internet as it was by
the printing press. It's as big a transformation in the
ease of communication. So that has happened, and in a way,
it's sort of waching some natural frontier points and diminishing returns.
Speaker 1 (06:04):
Will run out of people connect We almost.
Speaker 3 (06:08):
Shift happened. We're really looking back on it now.
Speaker 1 (06:11):
There's something else that I think is quite interesting about
the spread of the Internet, because when it started to spread,
the idea was that it would energize local democracy, it
would energize the individual, it would give us all a voice,
and up until the point of the Arab Spring, you
could make that case. And a decade on we've seen
those that democracy didn't take root, and we've also seen
(06:34):
that these new non state actors, in the form of
the platforms, have found ways of sequestering the democratic capability
of the Internet into something that doesn't look too dissimilar
to mass media with a little hint of all.
Speaker 2 (06:50):
Well, I think the same kind of disappointment arose with
the rise of the printing press. I mean, there certainly
was a moment when it seemed as if the advent
of very cheap printed books would allow Christian doctrine to
spread everywhere very rapidly, and this was very exciting. But
what in fact happened was that one Martin Luther started
(07:12):
to argue for improvements in Western Christendom.
Speaker 3 (07:14):
You had about one hundred plus.
Speaker 2 (07:16):
Years of very violent religious warfare, and in the same way,
we thought everything would be awesome if everybody was connected
on network platforms Google, Amazon, and the rest. It took
us a few years to realize that there might be
downsides to much enhanced into connectivity, that if we'd only
studied the history of the printing press more thoroughly, we
(07:37):
wouldn't have been surprised to find the polarization and other
pathologies that have arisen from the rise of the internet.
So I think that kind of thing illustrates why you
need to study history if you're not to misunderstand the
paradigm shifts of your time. The thing that I would
add that might turn out to be comparable is the
(07:59):
rise of artificial intelligence right exactly, And that does feel
like something that's really transa well.
Speaker 1 (08:04):
It looks like it's a technology that could dramatically improve productivity.
So when we go back to England in the seventeenth
and eighteenth nineteenth century, you saw the start and then
the deployment of machines that looked at human work and
magnified it, multiplied it. And when we start to look
at these very very early large language models, they've only
(08:25):
been publicly available for a matter of months, and we're
already seeing how knowledge workers who make up a very
large portion, certainly of Western countries employment bases, are able
to use them to magnify their work. So I do
wonder about whether artificial intelligence has some of the characteristics
(08:46):
of the kind of technology that can be a pivotal
point in our development.
Speaker 3 (08:51):
Well, let's hope.
Speaker 2 (08:53):
So, I mean, that's certainly plausible when we look at
something like alpha fold, which has allowed a far far
more rapid analysis of proteins than was possible before. And
I think in medical science the case is already clearly
proven that there are huge benefits.
Speaker 1 (09:18):
It could be that given that we have this productivity
enhancing technology that is AI, that has come off the
back of this transformative communications network that's the Internet, we
also have radical improvements in certain biotechnologies, and we have
a fundamental shift and the way the energy system is
working as we move from extractive sources through to renewable sources.
(09:42):
And these renewable mean.
Speaker 3 (09:44):
Other extractive resources, because renewables involve.
Speaker 1 (09:46):
Extraction, but the ratio of extraction to useful energy is
much much more in favor of renewables than it is
with oil and gas. And that feels like the energy
system could also change. So there could be the ingredients
of a pivot point of a kind that we've only
seen a couple of times previously in history.
Speaker 2 (10:03):
Let's ask what the driving forces will be. The world
has propelled forward and has been for thousands of years
by great power.
Speaker 3 (10:11):
Competition's right, and that is the.
Speaker 2 (10:13):
Thing that drives innovation right now across the board, whether
it's in solar panels or in artificial intelligence, it is
a competition which is intensifying between two superparers, the United
States and a communist led superpar Now is this standard
sound familiar to does?
Speaker 3 (10:32):
So?
Speaker 2 (10:32):
What is really significant about this historical moment is that
we are in the first inning, the early phase of
Cold War II. That is going to drive all the
things that we've talked about, and it will not necessarily
drive these changes in directions that are benign. That the
big technological advance of Cold War one was of course,
nuclear weapons, and I don't believe for a minute that
(10:55):
we can have a Cold War two without a similar risk.
And in fact, you can already see how cold War
two is repeating cold War one in a number of
key respects, one of which is it has its hot aspects.
There's a Hot War going on right now in Ukraine,
which you can think of as analogist to the Hot
War and career the career fifty. The Cuban missile crisis
(11:16):
in this Cold War will be a Taiwan semiconductor crisis,
And in that sense, I think if you try to
imagine yourself as a future historian, you'll be writing about
how the US China rivalry, both ideological and technological, produced
moments of great risk before the superpowers found out a
way of managing it better.
Speaker 1 (11:38):
I think it's always the case, though, that breakthroughs in
technology will lead to great power competition. I mean the
square rigged sales resulted in those expeditions from the Iberian
Peninsula that started that wave of colonization. Steel and larger
bore guns turned into competition in Europe when we got
to World War one way around.
Speaker 2 (12:00):
Actually assume it's actually the competition that leads to the
technological development. The reason that there's so much more technological
innovation in Europe than in China from around fifteen hundred
is that there are relatively.
Speaker 3 (12:14):
Evenly matched states.
Speaker 2 (12:17):
Engaged in a competition, whereas it's not like that in China,
where there is one very large empire, and it doesn't
really have to wage war with peers. Peer to peer
conflict incentivize European states to innovate with shipbuilding and particularly
to innovate with artillery. And in the same way, it's
clearly the rivalry between the United States and the Soviet
(12:40):
Union that propels innovation with nuclear weapons. And in the
same way today, I think the United States and China
are in a race with respect to artificial intelligence, quantum computing,
and a whole range of other technologies, because once you're
in that great part competition, you cannot afford to lose
technological leadership.
Speaker 1 (12:58):
But the current petition between China and the US started
with civil applications of these technologies, so it's been a
case of plowshares into swords. We were not developing AI
or genome sequencing first and foremost for military advantage. We
were developing them for their innovation capacities, which would lead
(13:20):
to economic advantage.
Speaker 2 (13:22):
And Chinese as scientists and American scientists were cooperating in
all kinds of domains in a relatively short space of
time up until I guess She's in pin came to
power in China and Donald Trump came to parer in
the United States. People in the United States really underestimated
the extent to which almost all the technologies were potentially
(13:44):
dual use that as I say, they had civilian but
also military usages. They underestimated the extent of which their
own military hardware US military hardware had Chinese components.
Speaker 1 (13:54):
Something else happened between two thousand and seven and about
twenty fifteen, which was in technology, things that we now
called AI went from being slightly mundane and not usable
to suddenly quite useful.
Speaker 2 (14:08):
I think historically, technological innovation sometimes seems like its own
story that's somewhat separate from everything else. In the nineteen thirties,
the world was in the grip of the worst depression
in modern economic history, but if you look closely, quite
a lot of innovation was happening in the US economy
that would turn out to be enormously consequential. Right There
(14:30):
was actually growth again in.
Speaker 3 (14:32):
The nineteen seventies.
Speaker 2 (14:34):
Most people thought that the world was in stagflation, but
that was actually the decade when Microsoft and Absolutely were founded.
Speaker 1 (14:41):
And Intel was building chips for the very first time
and so on.
Speaker 2 (14:44):
And that turned out to really matter in cold War
one because the Soviets were able to steal and copy
the technology of nuclear weapons, also space flight, but when
it came to copying microprocessors, they utterly failed. Even though
they could steal them, they couldn't work out how really
to replicate Moor's law. And I think in that sense
what happened in the nineteen seventies in Silicon Valley turned.
Speaker 3 (15:06):
Out to be strategically hugely.
Speaker 2 (15:08):
Important once the Soviets realized that the next generation of
weapons would depend on microprocessors and computers. That's why from
a technological point of view, they couldn't possibly win Cold
War one.
Speaker 3 (15:21):
That Cold War two, I think has similar characteristics.
Speaker 2 (15:24):
It's going to be decided by at the technological frontier
at the moment. There are two respects in which I
think this is much closer than Cold War one. Number one, Obviously,
the Chinese economy is bigger than the Soviet economy. Ever
was I mean, it was forty four percent of USGDB
at peak and falling away from the mid nineteen seventies.
(15:44):
China overtook the US in twenty fourteen on a purchasing
power parity basis, It's not that far behind on a
current dollar basis. So that's point one point two. Just
the way that the Chinese economy works, because it has
a very large and dynamic private sector, is more likely
to use competitive innovation than the soviets of a could.
Speaker 1 (16:03):
But there are a couple of things that we could
pick up, and one is that the dynamics of Moore's law,
which was this relationship that saw silicon chips getting cheaper
and cheaper and cheaper every year, or you were getting
more processing banged for your dollar spent, was a highly
socialized process. It required a lot of competitive firms fundamentally
(16:24):
collaborating across an ecosystem, not just in California, but in
many other parts of the world. And that is a
characteristic of a free operating market, which it doesn't feel
exists in China, and that within China they don't have
the full stack of market participants when it comes to
the semiconductor industry that you need. I think the second
(16:48):
challenge I would raise is really about the spirit of research,
which ultimately these things are built off really really basic science.
The US still has a lead in pure research, and
there are academic freedoms that exist in the US that
don't exist in China because the lines of research are
(17:10):
not clearly drawn. For scientists, there are lines they cannot cross,
but they're not told, ay priori what they might be.
Speaker 3 (17:16):
Well, let me come back at you.
Speaker 2 (17:19):
In both points, the most high end semiconductors are not
manufactured in the United States, as you well know.
Speaker 3 (17:25):
They're manufactured in Taiwan, which is an.
Speaker 2 (17:28):
Island that, according to the People's Republic of China, is
part of China, and its contested status in that sense
is going to be even more explosive than the contested
status of Cuba was in the early nineteen sixties. The
second point is that scientific talent is quite widely distributed globally,
and it's produced in greater volumes.
Speaker 3 (17:50):
In China at this point than it is in the
United States.
Speaker 2 (17:53):
Now, that really didn't matter when the United States was
able to attract the.
Speaker 3 (17:58):
Talent from all over the world.
Speaker 2 (18:00):
But one of the consequences of the rise of Cold
War two is that process has really broken down. Legal
immigration into the United States for talented people has come
to a near standstill. So the US is throwing away
its opportunity to win Cold War two, and the way
to win it is just keep importing the talent, including
the talent from China, and then the Chinese can't possibly compete.
(18:24):
The Chinese don't have the chance to import talent. Pose
nobody wants to emigrate to the People's Republic of China. Surprisingly,
so this is a really critical point which brings us
to something we haven't talked about yet, which is super
important demographics and migration.
Speaker 1 (18:38):
And your point about demographics is that many countries are
in retrogaatee, not just Japan, not just Italy, but also
China and large parts of Eastern Europe are well below
the replacement.
Speaker 2 (18:48):
The population of China could fall by as much as
half between now and the end of this century.
Speaker 3 (18:54):
That is a.
Speaker 2 (18:55):
Plausible projection from the United Nations, if you assume that
the fertility rate doesn't go back up. Even the median
projection from the UN Population Prospects says that the population
of China will fall by about a third. How can
the Chinese economy possibly have sustained growth at even five
percent with a shrinking population, a shrinking workforce.
Speaker 3 (19:16):
A twenty nine percent of the economy is building terwer blocks.
Speaker 2 (19:19):
But these are terr blocks for nobody, and I don't
think we're thinking enough about what that means.
Speaker 1 (19:23):
But we can perhaps bring in one of the technologies
we talked about earlier, which was these AI technologies, because
of course they are productivity magnifying technologies, at least that's
a theory. So let's assume for the discussion that they
allow one person to do the work of three or four.
That might suggest that countries like China or Italy should
invest more heavily in these AI technologies because they are
(19:46):
running out of human workers. So could a country like China,
with its investments in robotics and AI, use those technologies
to in some way defray the downward pressure of this
demographics that they're having to deal with.
Speaker 2 (20:00):
They are clearly in China investing with that in mind.
But I'm not sure that that solves the problem, because
I think the problem is somewhat more complex than we
don't have enough people to assemble the electric vehicles. There
are a couple of other aspects to this which I
think are interesting. One is that if you have a
population which is aging, you have to be supported by
(20:24):
a relatively smaller working population.
Speaker 3 (20:26):
There are just distributional problems.
Speaker 2 (20:29):
Right twenty years ago, and I said the politics of
the twenty fourth century will be about generational conflict, not
class conflict, and we're still at an early stage of
the generational conflicts that are going to play out. As
younger people say to themselves, wait a second, I seem
to be having a pretty hard time in order to
support the older generation in very prolonged retirement.
Speaker 1 (20:51):
There are strong echoes of that in the US with
college debt burden, in the UK with the cost of housing,
and in France and in Italy as well. And China
has got a huge one coming.
Speaker 2 (21:05):
It's going to age as rapidly as Japan has, but
at a lower level of per capita GDP. I think
there are all kinds of really quite unforeseeable problems. So
I think that that doesn't get solved by robots. And
I think there's another problem for aging societies. I mean,
it's the young people who have the cool ideas. And
if you have an aging population, it seems to me
(21:28):
that by definition, you will be less innovative in relative terms.
Speaker 1 (21:32):
So historically, are there examples that you can think of
where nations or states of some sort have really bet
hard on technology to get them out out of one
of these quite existential threats.
Speaker 2 (21:44):
No, this is new territory because the problem in the
past was altogether different. Human life expectancy, we forget, this
was pretty short for most of history, and so you know,
people didn't feel young at fifty nine. I still kid
myself that I'm relatively youthful, at least physically.
Speaker 1 (22:03):
You're about to take up a new sport in golf,
I understand.
Speaker 2 (22:06):
Well, I don't regard golf as a sport, to be honest,
but yeah, it's the kind of thing you do when
you hit sixties. But the interesting thing is that all
the times of technological innovation that we look back on
as we have in this conversation happened when societies were
extraordinarly youthful by our standards, and the elderly were a
really small share of the population.
Speaker 1 (22:34):
So where have we got to. There are some new technologies,
the internet and artificial intelligence. They feel like a paradigm shift.
There are some more linear trends, demographics being a key
untold story, and these together are driving a real Cold
War two between between China and America. Some scholars argue
(22:57):
that in many cases where great powers, especially if they're
ideological differences that are hard to reconcile, find themselves competing,
they will fall into a war.
Speaker 2 (23:09):
I think if we're going to rerun this and have
Cold War two, we should not assume that we're guaranteed
to avoid a hot war. Both societies in their different
ways of wrestling with problems of aging that were not
familiar to Cold War one participants. The technologies include the
old ones nuclear weapons, but there are a bunch of
new ones.
Speaker 1 (23:29):
Too, hypersonics, AIS size.
Speaker 2 (23:32):
AI, satellite warfare is going to happen on a larger scale.
So I have to say that I agree with Henry
Kissinger who said to me in an interview, not unlike
this last year, cold War II will be more dangerous
than Cold War One. That is a very sobering fault
to me.
Speaker 1 (23:49):
So after the end of World War Two, we developed
a whole set of new institutions from the United Nations
through two things like the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty. If
you look at the environment that we move into now,
is it a case of having to invent new institutions
or is it a case of transforming the ones that
(24:09):
we have.
Speaker 2 (24:10):
The United Nations, when you look closely at its record,
had a structural problem from the outset, namely the veto.
Speaker 3 (24:18):
Power of the permanent members permanent the permanent.
Speaker 2 (24:22):
Members included the United States and the Soviet Union, and
so they took turrents to exercise that veto, which meant
that the UN didn't actually do terribly much that was
consequential when it came to avoiding conflict, which is why
there were a lot of small and not so small
wars during Cold War one. That's right, So I think
we need to recognize that the UN never really was
a terrifically powerful force for preserving peace, that it has
(24:45):
been exposed very badly by the war in Ukraine.
Speaker 3 (24:49):
And let's go down the list. How about the IMF?
Speaker 2 (24:52):
How is the International Monetary Fund doing when it comes
to financial stability?
Speaker 3 (24:57):
Can I give an F grade?
Speaker 2 (24:59):
It has, I think, not perform brilliantly other than perhaps
at data collection, not at projection over the last twenty years.
And I'll keep going. The World Trade Organization's basically broken.
It's not clear that it can be revived. And so
you asked yourself, well, hang on a second. If these
institutions are kind of dysfunctional, what was it that generated
at least some piece and prosperity after nineteen forty five,
(25:23):
and I think the answer is in fact line systems
that deterred the Soviets from the more.
Speaker 3 (25:31):
Crazy of the plan.
Speaker 2 (25:32):
So fundamentally, NATO NATO mattered much more than the UN
and much more than the European institutions when it came
to preserving peace.
Speaker 3 (25:41):
Therefore, if we want to ask.
Speaker 2 (25:43):
The question how can we avoid World War three, it
is going to be very important that the United States
builds a version of NATO for Transpacific relations.
Speaker 1 (25:53):
Interests are eternal.
Speaker 2 (25:54):
I think, well, this sounds like Henry Kistener's talking right
back at me, but I think in practice this this
is where the action is. Can the United States create
a sufficiently strong network of relationships that China can be
deterred from taking the kind of action that could escalate
towards War three.
Speaker 1 (26:12):
But there were other dimensions of risk that you talked about,
and one was artificial intelligence. And even in their non
weaponized state, because they're dual use, they can still be
quite dangerous.
Speaker 3 (26:25):
Just in the same way that the Peace of West failure.
Speaker 2 (26:28):
Devised the set of rules to stop religious warfare tearing
Europe apart interminably. Why should we not now devise a
convention to limit the use of these new and powerful tools,
especially now when the United States appears to have a
pretty clear lead when it comes to large language models.
Just as it was in the interests of the United
(26:51):
States to have a non proliferation treaty before the Soviets
overtook the US.
Speaker 1 (26:56):
Back then, of course, even the Swedes had a nuclear
weapons program.
Speaker 3 (27:00):
Imagine a world without the non proliferation treaty. It would
have blown up by.
Speaker 1 (27:03):
There right absolutely, and the Swedes would have reconquered Finland.
Speaker 3 (27:06):
In their dreams, in their dream The.
Speaker 1 (27:09):
Premise of today's conversation was that if we look back
on these few years, we'll realize that we were living
through a paradigm shift that was a new age. How
do you assess that premise? Is that something that is
now going to become reality.
Speaker 3 (27:25):
Not in the way that most people think.
Speaker 2 (27:29):
I think we're at that stage of Cold War two
where most people don't fully realize the implications of there
being only two AI superpars, only two superpars that could
conceivably have quantum computers, and that that's the real architecture
of the rest of our lives. They'll continue to be
high levels of trade between the United States. You can't
(27:49):
decouple theseoities entirely, but it'll just be much more selective
and there will be things that won't be tradeable. There
is a lot of change coming on the back of
this new Cold War, and it will affect everything. So
even the climate issue inevitably will become part of Cold
War two because you can't avoid climate change if you
can't constrain China, So everything ends up being a part
(28:11):
of this great geopolitical struggle. This illustrates something that is
very important. Indeed, something's changed because technology changes. The world
was changed by the printing press, changed by nuclear weapons,
is being changed by the Internet and AI. But certain
things remain constant because the logic of power is unaffected
by technology. So I think for me, the key to
(28:32):
understanding the future is you have to combine historical knowledge.
Speaker 3 (28:36):
With a grasp of what's new, what's technologically different.
Speaker 2 (28:39):
There's a paradigm shift happening in technology, no question, but
the age old relationships between powers, those don't change. You
have to understand both these domains or you will be
catnapping Neil.
Speaker 1 (28:54):
I think it's very appropriate that we're in a windowless
room having this discussion about Cold War II and this
paradigm shift. Thank you so much for making the time.
Speaker 3 (29:01):
Thank you. As a.
Speaker 1 (29:07):
Reflecting on my conversation with Neil, I'm struck by how
many factors, from global competition to demographic shifts, and of
course rapidly evolving technologies are all reinforcing this state of uncertainty.
Is this a sign of fundamental change in the nature
of human affairs? Technological progress is certainly speeding up, but
the collaboration made possible by the Internet is being replaced
(29:30):
by competition between two great powers China and the United States.
So our degree with Neil that we're seeing flickering of
a second Cold War. But I also think something more
fundamental is happening, a shift to a world built on
exponential technologies, with many new powerbrokers, not just the nation state.
(29:50):
Thanks for listening to the exponentially podcast. If you enjoy
the show, please leave a review or rating. It really
does help others find us the Exponentially. The podcast is
presented by me Azeem Azar. The sound designer is Will Horrocks.
The research was led by Chloe Ippah and music composed
by Emily Green and John Zarcone. The show is produced
(30:11):
by Frederick Cassella, Maria Garrilov and me Azeem Azar Special
thanks to Sage Bauman, Jeff Grocott and Magnus Henrikson. The
executive producers are Andrew Barden, Adam Kamiski, and Kyle Kramer.
David Ravella is the managing editor. Exponentially was created by
Frederick Cassella and is an Eat the Pie I plus
one limited production in association with Bloomberg LC
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