Azeem Azhar's Exponential View

Elif Shafak is an award-winning British-Turkish author and human rights activist. She has published 16 books, 10 of which are novels. The New York Review of Books called her latest novel, Three Daughters of Eve , a “marvelous lesson in multiculturalist angst, the clash between modernity and tradition, and the vicissitudes of personal struggle.” Elif and Azeem Azhar discuss the polarization of cult...

Marietje Schaake is a Dutch politician and member of the European Parliament (MEP) from the Netherlands. The Wall Street Journal called her “Europe’s most wired politician,” and Politico named her the “ultimate digital MEP.” Marietje is a member of the Committee on International Trade and the vice chair of the Delegation for Relations with the U.S. She established a Digital Agenda intergroup, gath...

Emil Eifrem is the CEO and cofounder of Neo4j, the graph database platform powering some of the largest companies today. Emil is the creator of the property graph model, and he coined the term “graph database” to describe the technology that would change how we understand big data. Neo4j’s technology was used to reveal the rogue offshore financial relationships in the largest journalist leak ever,...

Jack Clark serves as the policy director at OpenAI. He has contributed to the development of the AI Index, an AI forecasting and progress initiative that is part of the Stanford One Hundred Year Study on AI. Azeem Azhar and Jack discuss the state of artificial intelligence development, the geopolitics of technology, and the implications of automation on society. www.exponentialview.co Hosted by Si...

Gina Neff is a senior research fellow and associate professor at the University of Oxford. She studies innovation, the digital transformation of industries, and how new technologies impact work. Gina has published three books: Self-Tracking in 2016, Surviving the New Economy in 2015, and Venture Labor in 2012. Gina and Azeem Azhar discuss technology development from a sociological perspective, as...

Michael Liebreich is a leading global expert on clean energy and transportation, smart infrastructure, technology, climate finance, and sustainable development. He founded New Energy Finance in 2004, which was acquired by Bloomberg in 2009. Michael and Azeem Azhar discuss the significance of the U.S. National Climate Assessment and IPCC’s report, the importance of staying below two degrees, and th...

Casper Klynge is the world’s first tech ambassador, with a global mandate and staff in Copenhagen, Silicon Valley, and Beijing. His appointment as the Danish tech ambassador in 2017 marked a new phase in diplomacy and international relations, and was the first time a nation-state deployed an ambassador to represent its citizens to the world’s most powerful technology companies. Casper and Azeem Az...

Kate Raworth is a senior visiting research associate at Oxford University’s Environmental Change Institute, where she teaches environmental change and management. She is also a senior associate at the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership. Kate is focused on exploring the economic mindset needed to address the 21st century’s social and ecological challenges. Kate and Azeem discuss the...

Anousheh Ansari is the world’s first female private space explorer and the first Iranian astronaut in space. She is the CEO of XPrize Foundation, an organization that supports radical breakthrough solutions to some of the greatest challenges facing humanity today. Azeem Azhar and Anousheh discuss the ways space development could help us tackle climate change and pollution and achieve sustainable c...

Lisa Witter is an award-winning executive, a serial entrepreneur, and the cofounder and executive chairman of Apolitical, a network that helps public servants around the world share inspiring ideas, solutions to challenges, and the best professional resources and opportunities. Azeem and Lisa discuss reviving trust in government, the road map for building the public service workforce of the future...

Matthew Taylor is the chief executive of the Royal Society of Arts, a UK organization committed to finding practical solutions to societal problems. Before leading the RSA, Matthew was the chief adviser on political strategy to former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair. Azeem and Matthew Taylor discuss the well-being economy, the meaning of good work in an age of automation, and the state of democracy....

Azeem Azhar speaks with Andrew Yang , an entrepreneur and author who is running for president in the 2020 U.S. election. At the heart of Andrew’s platform is the “freedom dividend,” a universal basic income of $1,000, payable to all Americans every month. Azeem and Andrew discuss the core ideas behind Andrew’s platform, why they are necessary, and how to get there. www.exponentialview.co Hosted by...

Azeem speaks with Reid Hoffman , “the sage of Silicon Valley.” Reid is an internet entrepreneur, executive, and investor best known as the cofounder of LinkedIn. Reid and Azeem discuss the business culture of Silicon Valley, in particular the concept of “blitzscaling.” They dive deep into Silicon Valley’s attitudes toward government, the role of the state in innovation, and maintaining techno-opti...

Azeem Azhar speaks with entrepreneur and investor Elad Gil about Silicon Valley, scaling companies from 10 to 10,000 employees, the state of blockchain, and how blockchain and artificial intelligence will overlap. Elad is a serial entrepreneur, an operating executive, an investor, and an adviser to private companies including Airbnb, Pinterest, Square, and Stripe. Elad was the VP of corporate stra...

Azeem Azhar speaks with Dr. Mariarosaria Taddeo , deputy director of the Digital Ethics Lab at the Oxford Internet Institute. Dr. Taddeo is a philosopher, an ethicist, and a researcher focusing on cyber conflicts, cybersecurity, and the ethics of data science. Cyber attacks are escalating in frequency, sophistication, and impact. Azeem and Dr. Taddeo unpack the state of cybersecurity and warfare,...

Azeem Azhar speaks with venture capitalist Bill Janeway about the three-player game between the mission-driven state, financial speculators, and markets in the innovation economy. Are we stuck on the dark side of this configuration? How do we move forward? www.exponentialview.co Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal d...

Azeem Azhar speaks with Kai-Fu Lee , a VC investor, technology executive, and one of the most prominent figures in the Chinese internet sector and AI. They discuss the Chinese government’s techno-utilitarian approach to technology, the ambition of China’s technology founders, and the future of job automation. www.exponentialview.co Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for...

Azeem Azhar’s Exponential View podcast is back, exploring the intersection of political economy and exponential technologies. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

A recording of an Exponential View salon held in London in May 2017. “The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter,” said Winston Churchill. But whatever you think of it, democracy has served us well. An increase in democracy is almost always matched by an increase in GDP. According to MIT economist Daron Acemoglu, a country that switches from autocracy...

With more than 40% market share in mobile games, 1 billion monthly active users, and 2.6 billion unique devices, the game development platform Unity has a profoundly important role in booming gaming and VR markets. Azeem Azhar talks with Dr. Danny Lange , VP of AI and machine learning at Unity, about the role of these technologies in revolutionizing the ways games are developed and monetized. Dr....

For the tech community, code has an almost exclusively uniform meaning: a set of instructions, until recently written only by humans, that specify any action a computer should execute. In his most recent book, The Code Economy: A Forty-Thousand-Year History , Philip Auerswald talks about “code” in a broader meaning of the word — it is the “how” of human productivity, the manner in which we create,...

Scott Santens is a writer and an advocate for universal basic income. His articles have been featured in TechCrunch, the Boston Globe, and Politico, among other places. Scott has coauthored two books: What Do We Do About Inequality? and Surviving the Machine Age: Intelligent Technology and the Transformation of Human Work . He also moderates the sub-Reddit /r/BasicIncome. Scott talks about why he...

Marko Ahtisaari is the CEO and cofounder of The Sync Project, a collaborative venture of scientists, musicians, technologists, and patients, working toward developing functional music that responds to each individual body and serves as precision medicine. Marko is also a director’s fellow at the MIT Media Lab, working on the Open Music Initiative to develop a new distributed ledger system to ident...

A discussion with Columbia University professor Jeffrey Sachs . Jeff is one of the world’s foremost thinkers on economic development; he advises the UN and a host of governments. In a wide-ranging podcast, he and Azeem Azhar talk about how technology has improved the lives of countless humans. They explore how automated systems will increasingly replace both routine and high-skill jobs. How will o...

Kate Devlin , computer scientist and robot-sex expert, on robot intimacy and a new age of sex, relationships, and social life. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.