Skip to main content

Exponential: Azeem Azhar ****

This book produces distinct mixed feelings. It's both bad and good at the same time. 

Let's get the good in there first. Although not a particularly original observation, Azeem Azhar's portrayal of the exponential rise of technology in the modern world is important, both to emphasise why it is genuinely different from previous technological breakthroughs and also because Azhar does not simply give us either a 'tech is wonderful' or 'we are all doomed' portrayal of the impact of the internet, 3D printing and more on our businesses and lives.

While he does sometimes over-promise on what the technology is likely to deliver any time soon, Azhar notes, for example, that self-driving cars are a lot harder to implement on winding European roads that straight wide Californian ones. But more importantly, he is able to give us some balance. We see both the benefits, for example, to consumers and companies of the gig economy, but the potential downsides for workers. And we get some first hints at solutions. While I'm not sure that Azhar's suggestions for ways to mitigate the worst and make the most of the best of new technology go far enough, at least the suggestions are there and need to be noted.

So far, so good, then. Unfortunately, though, while Azhar's ideas may be interesting, the writing is not great. What we get feels like a wading-through-treacle dull business book. Even the publisher doesn't seem to know what it is - the jacket classifies it as a technology book, while its press release calls it a business book. It should have been a good, tightly-written science and technology book to really shine. As is true all too often with business books, some chapters don't have much more content than a magazine article, but manage to say it in far more words. The whole thing could do with a serious edit and restructure. It doesn't help that there's rather a lot of 'what I've achieved' referencing, which doesn't necessarily enamour Azhar to his readers.

Mixed feelings, then. There's good stuff in there, but you have to work to mine it from the dross.

Hardback: 
Bookshop.org

  

Kindle 
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Ctrl+Alt+Chaos - Joe Tidy ****

Anyone like me with a background in programming is likely to be fascinated (if horrified) by books that present stories of hacking and other destructive work mostly by young males, some of whom have remarkable abilities with code, but use it for unpleasant purposes. I remember reading Clifford Stoll's 1990 book The Cuckoo's Egg about the first ever network worm (the 1988 ARPANet worm, which accidentally did more damage than was intended) - the book is so engraved in my mind I could still remember who the author was decades later. This is very much in the same vein,  but brings the story into the true internet age. Joe Tidy gives us real insights into the often-teen hacking gangs, many with members from the US and UK, who have caused online chaos and real harm. These attacks seem to have mostly started as pranks, but have moved into financial extortion and attempts to destroy others' lives through doxing, swatting (sending false messages to the police resulting in a SWAT te...

Battle of the Big Bang - Niayesh Afshordi and Phil Harper *****

It's popular science Jim, but not as we know it. There have been plenty of popular science books about the big bang and the origins of the universe (including my own Before the Big Bang ) but this is unique. In part this is because it's bang up to date (so to speak), but more so because rather than present the theories in an approachable fashion, the book dives into the (sometimes extremely heated) disputed debates between theoreticians. It's still popular science as there's no maths, but it gives a real insight into the alternative viewpoints and depth of feeling. We begin with a rapid dash through the history of cosmological ideas, passing rapidly through the steady state/big bang debate (though not covering Hoyle's modified steady state that dealt with the 'early universe' issues), then slow down as we get into the various possibilities that would emerge once inflation arrived on the scene (including, of course, the theories that do away with inflation). ...

Why Nobody Understands Quantum Physics - Frank Verstraete and Céline Broeckaert **

It's with a heavy heart that I have to say that I could not get on with this book. The structure is all over the place, while the content veers from childish remarks to unexplained jargon. Frank Versraete is a highly regarded physicist and knows what he’s talking about - but unfortunately, physics professors are not always the best people to explain physics to a general audience and, possibly contributed to by this being a translation, I thought this book simply doesn’t work. A small issue is that there are few historical inaccuracies, but that’s often the case when scientists write history of science, and that’s not the main part of the book so I would have overlooked it. As an example, we are told that Newton's apple story originated with Voltaire. Yet Newton himself mentioned the apple story to William Stukeley in 1726. He may have made it up - but he certainly originated it, not Voltaire. We are also told that â€˜Galileo discovered the counterintuitive law behind a swinging o...