LAURIE: Welcome and good afternoon. Thank you for joining us for the fifth Nesta Talk Event this autumn. These events are put on by Nesta and designed to be a conversation with today's most interesting thinkers focused on the big topics that define our future. We're really pleased to be welcoming Azeem Azhar today to discuss whether our societies can stand the pace of technological change. Before I introduce Azeem I would introduce Nesta and myself. Nesta is a UK-based innovation agency for social good. In our new strategy published this year we have three missions: Giving every child a fairer start, helping people to live healthier lives, and building a more sustainable economy. I'm Laurie Smith from Nesta's discovery hub and I lead lots of foresight research. We scan for emerging trends, technologies and interventions, embedding strategic foresight at the heart of the organisation and help us to anticipate new challenges and opportunities. Now to Azeem, who is on a mission to explain how societies and ways of life will change under the force of exponential technologies. He does this from the vantage point of over a 25-year career as an entrepreneur, investor and analyst in the tech industry. Today, he runs a highly cited newsletter, Exponential View, that has 187,000 subscribers and he also hosts the Exponential View podcast. In his new book, Exponential, which we will discuss today, he outlines the four areas of technology that are accelerating at exponential rates - AI and computing, biology, renewable energy and manufacturing. A few housekeeping notices. Initially, Azeem is going to spend 5 or maybe 10 minutes providing a short overview of the book and then I'll speak with him for about 20 minutes or so. We'll then move on to questions from the audience. There is a handful of questions that have been submitted in advance and please join in the conversation in the comments box on the right-hand side of your screen and ask any questions throughout the event. Also, if you would like to view closed captions, they are accessible via a link in the description. So over to you, Azeem!

AZEEM: Thanks so much, Laurie, and thanks, Nesta and thanks to everybody who is giving up lunchtime to join this discussion. I hope you managed to get a sandwich or something at your desk or couch, or bed, whenever you happen to be sitting in these days of hybrid working! It's really exciting to be here and to talk about my book - as all authors do, I have to hold up a copy of it. Please do go and find a copy, and if you do read books on the Kindle eBook reader it is available for 99p at the moment, which is, considering I put many, many years of work into it, feels like a real bargain. So just in my opening remarks, just a few minutes, I'll try not to go to 10 minutes because having spoken to Laurie I'm pretty certain the discussion will be more interesting once he and I are having a conversation, but let me frame what the book and the thesis of the argument is. Much of this, I think, will be familiar to you, because you live in this world. I wanted to draw attention to how technologies shape us and the societies in which we live, but also make the point that not only does technology shape society - society can shape technology. That second aspect is a part of the debate that is often lost when we live in these moments of frenetic change and the occasional hagiography of the technologist and the technology entrepreneur and it's important to understand that framing because I think that we find ourselves today at, or just past, a really, really important turning point, and that turning point is a shift, a phased transition in the way that we'll order society, because of the capabilities and impacts of a range of technologies that are improving at exponential rates. The relationship between technologies and social, political, economic affordances is a really important one to understand, so I'm speaking to you today from grey Cricklewood, I'm on the borders between Cricklewood and Golders Green in London, and where I am today was once fields, so I'm now between zone 2 and 3 of the tube network and yet my house was almost within living memory on farmland. By 1930 or stood, the house stood as it stands today with pretty much the same floor plan. The roads were laid out as they are today. There was electricity coming into the home - in fact, it's the same mains connection that was laid nearly 100 years ago. There was a telephone system and of course there were cars on the streets. In that short 30-year period this farmland turned into something that's distinctly recognisable today, and the catalytic technologies of the time - the car and internal combustion engine, the telephone and electricity - were responsible for shaping that world that looks so recognisable now. Those three general purpose technologies were so powerful that even 100 years after they had emerged into the world, the world's largest companies were all connected in some sense to big phone companies, electricity companies, or using or producing oil and building vehicles that use the internal combustion engine, so it is a remarkable period of time based on these GPTs - general purpose technologies. So the argument that I make today is that we're undergoing a transition that is at least as significant - I think it's more significant - and it's also driven and catalysed by general purpose technologies. A general purpose technology is one which can be applied very, very widely in our economies, in many different industries and in many different parts of those industries, and the thing about general purpose technologies is that because they are so generalised and so available, they do create many, many potentials hither and thither and left and right. What's distinct about today's set-up is that the general purpose technologies that I investigated - computing and AI are the ones we are probably most familiar with but also the new realms of biology where we're able to rewrite what organisms do and we can lean on the beauty and efficiency of nature to do other useful things for us, new energies and storage, and the most insipid of them all which is what we're going to do through manufacturing with additive manufacturing is that these technologies are improving on a price performance basis at exponential rates which I mean at least 10% compounded improvement every year. Now, that's really important because what happens is that you take a technology that is too expensive at one point, but because it improves in price by, say, 40%, 45% or 50% every year which is what has happened in the 60 years with computer power at some point it becomes cost effective or better than another way we were using to achieve a particular goal. So at some point, computer power became so cheap that we now use it to create trivial filters on our social networks and on our cameras and the amount of computing power we leverage to do that is greater than all the computing power that the world had at the time of the - choose your moment in history, the Manhattan project, the Apollo moon landings, whatever it happens to be. So the second characteristic here is that these technologies get much, much cheaper and because they get much, much cheaper, we will use them more widely in our economies, more rapidly, and there are a number of other dynamics which we might jump into that I describe in the book that explain why this comes about, and what the outcomes are for innovation and for change in the economy. So that's all good and well - we understand that technologies shift the way societies get structured, we can believe - and I argue and I demonstrate in the book that the pace of change today is far faster than in previous times and that this is driven by the fact that technologies are getting cheaper and cheaper and cheaper. The challenge is that the technologies will race away a bit like this sort of kind of curve on the cover, but the way in which we live in the world is governed by institutional norms. They are either very formal institutions like things that perhaps have physical buildings, like the UN, or the courts, or they might be formal institutions like legal systems or firms or employment contracts, as well as informal norms and customs and habits. Now, all of those things are really, really useful in making a society function but they don't necessarily adjust as quickly as the potentials of the technology that we are dealing with today. That is what I call the 'exponential gap' - the gap between the potentials of the technology, how they get seized upon and used by particular groups extensively, how they demand different ways of management in the same way that we handle gaseous water known as steam very differently to how we handle liquid water. Both are useful but they both need different regulatory mechanisms to be used safely. The exponential gap is, for me, the descriptor, the analytic and it is the cause of so much friction and change that we see, whether it's in industrial structure or in the labour markets or in geopolitics or in conflict or in the way our democracies function, and that the urgency that we need to act on is to find ways of closing that gap. So I've spoken for six minutes and I'd love to bring Laurie back on and we can have a discussion.

LAURIE: Thank you, Azeem. So perhaps you can sort of start with the overall tenor of the book - well, not only the book but I suppose to an extent your podcast and newsletter. So in the round you seem to strike quite a positive tone about the future of technology and I suppose I was wondering, what makes you, on balance, feel a bit optimistic?

AZEEM: Well, I'm not sure how optimistic I feel. When I've read the reviews of the book I've been criticised for being too optimistic, I've been criticised for being too pessimistic! Those on the right have argued that this is full of socialist nonsense and those are the left have said I'm far too sympathetic towards the market! So you know, I think people have read into the book slightly different things coming from their own perspectives. My view is that we can be - we can observe underlying processes that show that these types of core technologies that are really interesting and powerful will be getting cheaper and cheaper, or the corollary of that is they're going to get more and more capable, and that is reason to be optimistic. It's reason to be optimistic because if you think about the human condition for a long time, it was determined by energy poverty and food poverty and, you know, vulnerability towards very, very simple diseases and in large parts of the world, we've really, really tackled that. We still have much more work to do, but the reason one needs to temper sort of a starry-eyed optimism about technology saving everything is that technology is destabilising and technology changes power relationships and technology is designed by humans to do particular things. So it's not like manna from heaven or a bolt of lightning from Zeus, it is a fashioned, directed force and the governance of that technology and the principles by which we build it and choose what to build and choose what we design to build and then choose how we manage it becomes really, really important and that's around the politics. So the question is not so much whether we have a power, it's whether we can wield that power with a sense of justice and broader good, and those are the reasons why one might feel less optimistic, because there are signs that alongside all of the headline numbers that have improved the human condition, there are many, many risks and problems baked into that.

LAURIE: Well maybe being accused of both optimism and pessimism indicates that you've got it about right! Leaning to the central thesis of your thinking around exponential technologies, what could those involved in innovation for social good - what are the most important messages for them? So for organisations, say, like Nesta or people involved in that sort of space?

AZEEM: Well, you know, I think one of the key ones is an understanding of what will happen with the price and then the available of these technologies and what is maybe difficult and expensive today will be much, much cheaper in the future and actually much easier and you can see that just in the field of AI. I tell a story in the book about a school student called Laura O'Sullivan and I met her at a science competition in Dublin that I'd been asked to sort of go and attend and look at and at the time she was 17 and she had built a simple model machine vision system that could look at scans of cervical smears and with very, very high accuracy, predict whether they would be anomalous or not. The tools and techniques she used for this, which was her first ever programming project, I should say, were techniques that had been developed only two or three years earlier in a postgraduate research lab in California, and in the olden days, Laurie, 20 years ago, when I was in my late 20s, it didn't take three years for things to go from the lab to a high school project - it took decades. So this idea that actually these high-end techniques become available very quickly, they also become not only cheaper, but easier, is a really important one to grasp. I think the second thing that is perhaps less theoretical and more practical and tangible is this question of power. In one of the chapters of the book I make a point that the companies that make use of these technologies well, they tend to have this increasing return to scale, which means an increase in terms of power and there is a temptation when you look at questions of social good to say, "Who best uses these technologies"? And what one can often do then is look at the very largest technology companies in the world and say, "Well, we should partner with them" and my argument would be that you have to be very, very careful about that, because what we've observed is a tremendous shift of power, of legitimacy and accountability, towards those companies, sometimes for the good, sometimes for ill, and if your default response is, "I must work with one of the big five" I think what you do is you ignore some of the real benefits of these technologies which is that they are democratised and that they can be built with the tools that are available from the ground up.

LAURIE: That's really, really interesting. Just thinking about, again, sort of going back to the sort of thesis around sort of exponential technologies, there are a number of people like Robert Gordon and Tyler Cowen who make the case that innovation is faltering and how does this sort of thinking square with your own around technologies growing exponentially?

AZEEM: Well, I'm a bit simple-minded about this and I just look at the price and I'm familiar with a lot of the research around the sort of sense that progress is getting more expensive in some ways and if you look at some of that research, it's asking a slightly different question, which is, you know, what is the gross total number of dollars required to make a scientific breakthrough and is that number growing? And in many cases it is growing. The question that I pose instead is, what's actually happening to the price of gene sequencing or cell programming or lithium-ion battery storage and is that really declining by, you know, 15, 20, 30, 50 sometimes a higher per cent per annum? And that's what the historical data has said and then when you look at what the - the underlying process of that price decline is, it can often be - it's not necessarily related to scale and I'm not really interested in scale effects that result in price decline - that point being that if you buy 1 million widgets from a supplier they will give them to you at a lower per unit cost than if you buy ten, I'm not really thinking about that question, I'm really thinking about this question that, as we develop these technologies, we get better at making them and we go through what's known as a learning curve and it's that learning curve effect, which was described by Theodore Wright in 1936, which is a better predictor of how the price of these technologies will decline and I think the thing that's fascinating is that that's what we – Wright’s law predicts them very well and that's what we see across all of these domains that are very, very different - 3D printers to lithium-ion batteries to wind turbines to cell processing to silicon chips - they are different things and yet Wright's law is a strong predictor of what's going on. So I think we can coexist with the argument that it gets more specify to make certain scientific breakthroughs. We can even coexist with the idea that we're kind of running out of new ideas in physics and we need a new paradigm because we're sort of hitting on the door but for the intents and purposes of looking at how societies might shift and what those underlying technologies will do, we've got a good dataset and I think quite a reasonable predictable model to argue that this can continue for a little while longer.

LAURIE: So in that sort of data-driven approach, of' presumed looked at a number of different technologies to select your four. Were there any, when you looked at them, that surprised you, when you thought that should definitely be on the list of four but it turned out not to be or something in your list that really surprised you and you sort of dug into?

AZEEM: When I started doing my research, which was really quite informal because I was writing the newsletter, one of the things that kept cropping up was the death of Moore's law. So Moore's law is a relationship that's described as silicon chips get smaller, or the components on silicon chips get smaller, every two years or so and as they get smaller that means the chips themselves get faster for a fixed cost and it is why your iPhone is hundreds of thousands times more powerful than the first computer that I had in 1981. And people were talking about the death of Moore's law and the reason they were saying this is that the process of miniaturisation was going to hit against the limits of physics, right? The electrons were going to get quantum drunk and wander places they shouldn't do in these transistors on the silicon chips, and as I dug deeper into the death of Moore's law the theory was well held but it wasn't what was happening for the price of computing for developers and machine learning engineers. They were actually continually being able to access more and more cheap computational power and so that in a sense was a surprise because it was an inversion of the general sort of received wisdom and it's not that those things in the received wisdom weren't directionally important, and it wasn't that it wasn't getting harder and harder for chip companies to make that measure of progress - it was. But the gains were significant enough that they were still able to. Then back in 2011, when deep learning emerged as a sort of viable technology, it created an entirely new use case for executing cycles and actually we were able to jump an energy level and use a different architecture for silicon chips moving from a CPU architecture to a GPU architecture but the GPU architecture and many of the GPUs were built on much larger circuits that were technologies that were actually a few years older but the difference in the design delivered the exponentiality. So that was quite a surprising result, I think, because it flies in the face of, you know, all the headlines and stories in New Scientist and MIT and Tech Review and Nature saying the death of Moore's law is upon us - and it might be, but exponentiality in computing hasn't come to an end.

LAURIE: In your introduction you highlight the exponential gap between the rapid growth of technologies and the much slower pace of institutional change. I suppose, as someone who works for an innovation agency with a public purpose, I would really be interested to learn what social innovation could try to do to bridge that gap?

AZEEM: That's a really interesting question. I think one of the major reasons we have a gap is because of agency and participation and, you know, one of the things that didn't make it into the book because it had to be a certain length - but it was a beautiful chapter! - was a long history of the idea of technology and how its meaning shifted over the, you know, the past thousands of years and how at some point in the last 150 years or so, technology started to not be a process and sort of a craft that we could all participate in, but become an autonomous force of its own that had to be, you know, ridden by those who could ride it for the rest of our benefit. That message became progressively reinforced through the 20th century and reinforced increasingly through advertising and media representation. When you get to the '70s, computing was very much a hobbyist activity that anyone could really participate in, but as soon as the sort of money started to show, systems started to get locked down and actually the experience that my kids have using computers today - much more powerful than the computers I had when I started - is a much less powerful experience than the one I had because I got to programme the computers and I got to wonder about them and that change, I think, has been a real issue. So from a social innovation perspective I think one of the things I try to argue in the book is about reclaiming the art of technology and the act of technology and encouraging participation and trying to become a maker rather than a taker.

LAURIE: That's really interesting. Another interesting sort of idea you mention in the book is this idea of sort of social facts, like Moore's law, you mentioned, so things that are true because we almost make them true. I mean, could this idea be used to ensure exponential technologies benefit citizens and if so, how?

AZEEM: Absolutely. I mean it's - Moore's law is this amazing social fact. It co-ordinated so many different participants in the semi-conductor industry and it became their clock speed and, you know, the process is so complicated to make chips and it involves so much specialist process and technology, it really requires a lot of different people to come together and believe it and I think we're starting to see the emergence of some new social facts around - predominantly around things like sustainability, most broadly. But just to give you one example, the idea of the circular economy is something that, if we start to all believe in it, is something that we can then believe and then make happen and over the last four years, you know, I've observed in occasional snapshots when I've been looking at the circular economy, the increasing breadth with which many different companies and groups are talking about it and talking about it as something that needs to come about and needs to happen. So there's not really a sort of underlying theory that, you know, that is a sort of Homo economicus style theory saying this is how it will be, but it's more about the fact it's coming about, and I had a discussion with a Goldman Sachs banker two weeks ago who was talking about the importance of the circular economy, so I think there are, just as an example, ways in which social facts can emerge and they can shift our priorities.

LAURIE: That's really interesting, and that's something I hadn't thought of at all. One thing I thought was great to see in your book was as well as offering a diagnosis, you also offer solutions. I suppose what role do you think citizens have in developing these solutions?

AZEEM: Well, I should say something about the solutions. So Geoff Mulgan, who used to run Nesta a couple of years ago, tweeted me saying, "I love his book but he doesn't give solutions". So I prefer the new Nesta that says I have solutions, rather than the old Nesta who says I don't, but hi, Geoff, thank you for the wonderful comments!

I mean there are some directions that I put out there. I wanted to be a bit careful about this because I think the conclusions are driven by the context and location and resources of particular groups, so I don't think that there are necessarily single top-down solutions that I should strongly merit and what I try to do is find that balance between values and principles and tools and specific examples which have worked in particular contexts, and I think that's a really important way of thinking about how we address this age because it is really - a common theme I think is this idea of agency and subsidiarity, so agency for the individual and subsidiarity for decision-making to be made best proximally where they can be made.

LAURIE: So you talked about those solutions being more sort of localised but what of those most excites you, one of those do you think is the most radical yet credible.

AZEEM: Well the one I like the most, and I don't know if it's the most radical, is the idea of, you know, shifting how we think about resource allocation and resource management. So for the bulk of the last certainly 60 years we have divided the tools for resource management in society between the market and the state and the dominant monetarist neo-Liberal consensus that is been the market is really good at resource allocation for efficiency and for things the market doesn't do well chuck it over to the state which will just kind of deal with it and we've sort of relegated the role of the state. Now, there's obviously much more we can do with the state and I think that thinkers like Carlota Perez and Bill Janeway and many others have argued the importance of those types of interventions and, indeed, the Goldman Sachs banker who I spoke to two weeks ago was saying we need much better work from the state to kind of clear some paths for decarbonisation. But there's another area, mechanism, for resource management which has been overlooked which is the commons and the idea of having a self-governing group that can manage resources for its own benefit. You know, commons thinking is an analysis sprung up in its sort of formal way most famously through Elinor Ostrom, who was a Nobel laureate, who started to do this work at about the same time as the monetarist consensus was taking hold in policy circles in the early '70s in the US and in the UK and in her work she identifies it quite well that outside of the market and outside of the state, we can find ways of governing our resources and I think the exponential age provides many, many tools where we could govern our resources that I with a. That's what open source software governance looks like, that's what we could start to imagine happening on chain, in these decentralised blockchains as well and the idea of having common pools and common resources whether it is data commons or commons trusts, I think it sets the ground for many, many more public or semi-public goods upon which other things can be built.

LAURIE: And that leads us really nicely into some of the questions from the audience, some of which were sort of sent in advance. We have a question here talking about citizens and sort of commons and governance, so we've got a question here from Andy from Vincit who asks about digital democracy tools of the 21st century, which you talked about a little bit. Are there any tools that you think are particularly fruitful or have value, or perhaps appear to have value but actually don't have so much value?

AZEEM: I mean, it's a really, really great question and, you know, posed at the point where the - where the role of the social media platforms in skewing democratic debate is becoming pretty clear now and I think that there is a growing concordance that that upsets the way in which citizens have been informed, or misinformed. But the question, I think, is really about how do we - what kind of arenas now lend themselves to some form of democratic ability and governance and what kind of tools can we use? I think one interesting area, just on the former, is that many of these technologies are increasingly local. So decentralised solar power and localised battery storage provide some measure of energy self-sufficiency to a particular community. You're starting to see that happen in places like South Australia - there's an experiment in Cornwall as well. And then you start to ask the question, well, if these are entirely local resources, now, do we need to have ways of managing those and creating the policies for those that are local, rather than national? And that friction is starting to emerge. There's a battle at the moment between the city of Cape Town and ESCOM which is the national power provider in South Africa, because they are dealing with all sorts of brown-outs in power but Cape Town has enough to keep running. So that makes that happen. And the essence is where are the new loci of democracy? And what are the tools we can use? There are experiments going on in Taiwan around getting people to sort of engage regularly through digital tools in discussions around key issues. But the thing that I find most interesting is not specifically a kind of technologically driven approach, it's the idea of deliberative democracy through either citizens' juries or permanent standing citizens’ councils which can actually debate and discuss what the question is and that question can then be put, as it was in Ireland around the abortion issue a couple of years ago, to a referendum and it was pretty exciting and actually since the book came out, I think the City of Paris in the last month or so has announced a standing citizens' jury to evaluate issues and figure out what the questions should be. So I don't think all of this gets done through technology, and maybe the interface is a sort of smartphone interface, but we do need some new tools and we're seeing some experiments around it.

LAURIE: And I felt that's interesting to raise citizens' juries and one challenge around those is their sort of legitimacy because of course you only have a subset of the citizens. What are your thoughts on that sort of legitimacy question for them?

AZEEM: That is in the jury design and it's also in the - in what you ask the jury to do. So what I've seen work at a distance - I'm a trustee at the Ada Lovelace Institute and one of the researchers there, Reema Patel runs a lot of cities' juries on complicated issues like biometrics and the way that process works is to bring some kind of representative sample of the citizenry through a deliberative process that might take a little bit of time, it might take many, many hours or a few days, to identify what the key issues might be, and then you can take those key issues away to decision-makers and I think that the case study in Ireland is a very good one around the abortion debate. If you imagine, I mean we had a referendum, some of you may remember a few years ago, around the EU, I mean it was an absurd question to put to a big population - having a referendum about EU membership is not an absurd issue but the question is what question do you put and how do you frame that? And what might a citizens' jury have done? A citizens' jury might have ahead of that worked out what the issues ought to be and how the question ought to be framed in a way that is also a little bit descriptive about the direction of what happens given a yes or a no vote given that question. So I think that that's in the design of the system. I don't think they're inherently problematic.

LAURIE: All right, that's helpful. And we've got another question that was submitted in advance, which sort of relates to stuff about education. This is from Peter Findlay at GISC who is interested in strategic approaches to use technology in education and foresight. Do you have any thoughts about those approaches? Are they something that feature in your thinking?

AZEEM: Well I think it depends where you are in the world. So again, on the cutting room floor is the section on online education in China and what we - one of the things that the Chinese have obviously had to struggle with is the vast inequality of experience between the children who live in the tier one cities and those who live in tier four or in rural areas and for the last 15 years they've actually had a very large-scale online learning programme and it's incredibly heart-warming when you read - I mean I'm reading the translated interviews with many so of the students and they would say things like, "Well, I come from a small village and I felt that I was sitting in one of the best schools in Shanghai because of this". And - so they also had personal stories that are very powerful and they also had strong case studies of how it had improved economic outcomes and professional and life outcomes because of this. Now, that's China and that's the Chinese context. If we look at what's going on in the UK, we - I think the thing that I'm concerned with is that a lot of the IT skills that might kids have been taught have literally been things like they've been taught things like PowerPoint and Microsoft Word and font selection, as well as programming and computational principles and the latter is really brilliant and that idea that you can understand, you know, both the kind of core elements of computational thinking, and then I think also of data-based thinking, so how do you think with data? These are kind of fundamental skills that enable you to move forward. Now, I'm not close enough to the sort of broader spectrum of what every child gets taught and how they get taught. But I think that understanding those core skills becomes much, much more important than a familiarity with an interface or a particular application.

LAURIE: And this speaks to the question from Rohit Talwar from Fast Future Research about what additional steps we could take to accelerate social understanding and adaptation and how does that sort of fit in in relation to education?

AZEEM: It's a really, really good question and, you know, I think about what happened with - I think about storytelling here and one of the really powerful things that emerged in the early 1970s when we moved to this very technocratic version of market capitalism was that Milton Friedman was a great storyteller and he told stories well and his stories launched 1,000 ships, of course there were policymakers and funders and public affairs people behind that pushing things and making this happen but the stories become really, really important. If you think about Margaret Thatcher and her ability in ten words to frame an issue, it was very, very powerful, and then if you look at what happened in that period of 2016 to 2019 around the climate crisis - it wasn't that the science changed, it was that Greta Thunberg was able to tell a story in a way that resonated with people. So I think one of the things that we are slightly in need of is a storytelling around this and a storytelling that is not the hagiography of the single technology founder. I'm not sure Aaron Sorkin would make The Social Network today the way he did ten years or so ago, it is not that type of storytelling. Nor is it the type of storytelling saying, you know, we've got 50 Android tablets or Chromebooks or something that have been delivered. We need to figure out a way of capturing this opportunity in very, very simplistic and appealing and emotive ways. Now, I'm probably too nerdy to be able to do that - I mean, I hope my book is accessible enough to give people some of the tools and maybe it can inspire someone who can tell that story and capture that moment well.

LAURIE: That's really interesting because you mentioned sort of Geoff Mulgan previously and you mentioned in a paper a while back he talked about social imagination and he said we have a great technological imagination and can come up with these fantastic technologies, but our ability to imagine how society can fundamentally change is much more limited and assumes things are going to be the same in the future. Do you think that deficit exists or do you think that is a misreading?

AZEEM: Well, I think he is absolutely - I mean he is right about everything apart from the comments he gave on my book! Geoff is a great mind and we are lucky to have him.

Imagine the goldfish in the bowl and I am the goldfish and you come to me and you say, "Would you like me to change the water in your bowl"? And I would not have any concept of what the water is, nor would I have a concept of changing that water. So then the question is, well, how can we - how can we think about this? And there are a couple of approaches. One is the approach of using fiction and imaginations as a way of identifying potential futures and I think that has to be a collaborative and engaged exercise, because a lot of science fiction misunderstands the intersection between the technologies and how they change our values and what we want to think about. You know, the Jetsons' bubble car is a really - kind of a poor example compared to some of the science fiction that comes out of other arenas where you're starting to understand the social and economic impacts of this and how that changes the way people behave. So I think there's something to be done around this lens of fiction - something that I've read recently, and I spoke with the author, Kim Stanley Robinson on his book, The Ministry for the Future, has a style of fiction that's only looking out 20 or 25 years, that describes and frames what potential avenues or futures could look like and I think that that is one tool that we might be able to use.

LAURIE: That is really interesting because it speaks to some work we've done at Nesta about involving citizens in those conversations and those sorts of conversations and stories about the future which brings us back nicely to a question that Nico McDonald has put in the chat.

AZEEM: Hi, Nico.

LAURIE: He says: You advocate democracy, and he sort of was interested in your views on, I suppose, the EU referendum and should we have a similar source of - because you mentioned the EU referendum, should we have a similar sort of referendum around net zero and what is your thinking on that?

AZEEM: Well, I'm... I'm not sure. I'm not sure - the question is much more about what the question would be. You know, my take on the EU referendum is that the question - you can put things to referendum, but you have to be very, very careful about the question that you put, and you have to frame it in a way that has gone through some sort of process that allows us to understand what the real issue is. Really, really complicated questions should be with very, very great care be put to a very, very broad populous and a yes/no answer. One could imagine a net zero question being posed as, you know, "Should we head to net zero rapidly or should we allow ourselves to be incinerated on an uninhabitable planet" could be one way of putting it or the other way of putting it could be, "Should we worsen our living standards and not be allowed to go on holiday or should we just go as we are and rely on getting wealthier to tackle the adaptation to climate change"? I mean, it's the same issue framed very, very differently. So I'm not sure that there's necessarily a good way of asking that particular question as a referendum. I also think I'm not sure that policymakers have - what question they would ask. Because we're already - there is a complex system here, and if you want to build a fossil fuel plant today, the capital markets will charge you 15-16% higher interest rates than if you want to build a wind farm. If you want to hire people - great engineers and brilliant graduates - you're going to find it easier if your company is somehow working on the net zero transition on decarbonisation than if you're looking to start up defunct coal seams in Norfolk or off the coast of Cumbria. So there's a sense in which so many parts of the system have shifted - I'm not sure what the question would necessarily be.

LAURIE: Maybe an opportunity to use some of those more participatory and deliberative approaches.

AZEEM: Yes, possibly.

LAURIE: So we have another question here from Matt Seddon and he says: For institutions to evolve sufficiently quickly it seems the principles underpinning them require more explicit articulation so they can be more nimbly manifested in a new form. Put another way, it seems the philosophical consensus behind our institutions needs to be broadened if those institutions are to take a new form, especially if we assume different people are involved. And he is curious if you've thought about this at all?

AZEEM: That is a great question, Matt, and I'm going to commend you to go and pick up a copy of the book! I do try and tackle that and I think one of the things that's most important is to start with the fundamental principles and to return to them because if you can be principles-driven, you can ultimately be a little bit more agile in your application of those judgements. I think the challenge with being principles-driven is that it requires a lot of trust in those institutions, right, because they're going to make judgements against those principles, rather than against a checklist. So I do agree with you, principles need to drive that and then when we look at the question of what the institutions need to be, is it going to be that we can adapt existing institutions? You know, can we adapt the Bank of England or the Fed or the SEC to deal with the emerging challenges of cryptocurrencies and decentralised finance or will we need a new-style regulator? You know, the UK, of course, smushed together Oftel and the ITC a few years ago to create Ofcom because they thought the issues between broadcasting and telecoms were going to converge, so they took that approach. Or will we need to find entirely new institutions and have those emerge? And I think we're seeing a mix of all of that happening. So examples of new institutions would be things like the three Cs group, which is a bunch of countries like Estonia, running southwards, that is trying to build a regional bloc and you're seeing a lot of regional blocs, this mini-lateralism, arguably what's emerging with that horrible new acronym, what is it, ANZUKUS, is it, between Australia, the UK and the US, which is starting to emerge. So my sense is one needs to be principles and then we're going to be faced with a question of how much trust do we then have, and then we have to decide what can we refashion and what do we have to build anew and if we're going to build anew, how ambitious can we be with our first iteration?

LAURIE: And moving back to one of the issues of the circular economy which you raised earlier, we have a question here from Jasmine S, who asks: How do we encourage organisations to build a circular economy. It is a conversation that has been around for a few years so how can we encourage more rigour in its adoption?

AZEEM: Um, you know, there's - there's a number of things, you know, individual consumers can play a role, because they can - they can ask the question and they can ask the question more frequently and even as small shareholders you can ask that question. I wouldn't understate the power of the consumer. I think it has been one of the myths of the climate change debate that only policy can make a difference. We actually see people choosing to change their behaviour and that being reflected in aggregate enough to shift where capital gets allocated and, ultimately, capital is the sort of blood that pumps the change through our economies. So if you think about the shifts - so the 6% to 17% decrease in eating meet in the UK in the past few years it is not being delivered by policy but choice and you get the food companies saying, this is a massive trend, we've got to invest in it, and they start to make it feel. Or if you look at the switch from petrol and diesel cars to electric vehicles, go to Norway, which is a much bigger country than the UK, it's a much colder country, so all the arguments about electric vehicles not functioning well in cold, long journeys apply in Norway much more than they do here and Norwegians love their long journeys. In 2016 about 15-20% of new car registrations were electric vehicles and by September 2021 that's only five years later, that was closer to 90%, and you know, my reckoning would be at some early point in 2022, virtually no non-electric vehicles will be bought in Norway. Now, the policy is to ban those from 2025, the sale of them, so that is happening faster than the policy and the subsidies have roughly been the same over that time. What has actually driven this has been consumer behaviour and then a consumer switch turning into a fad or an ephemera, more than a fad, but a craze and change in behaviour. So there are things that we can do as consumers as well, alongside where our - you know and then our policymakers will read from that.

LAURIE: We are running out of time but using chair's prerogative, I will slip in one question. You mentioned getting a Sinclair ZX 81 in your youth and I was wondering what a child this Christmas might get this year that might be a new exponential technology.

AZEEM: Well, it has better not be my camera which has just frozen! I'm using an external camera. I mean we want to give people things that they can tinker with. Kids need to have things that they can tinker with and explore in different directions and we've seen things like, you know, the Raspberry Pi come out, but I suspect that there's quite an interesting set of biohacking things that are emerging in, you know, in that community out in the US and I would love kids to be able to play around and ask questions in that new vista, which is, you know, a better understanding of biology. And this is not to create, you know, strange genetically modified puppies, but just to give you the basic fundamentals of what's possible.

LAURIE: Well thank you so much, Azeem, for sparing the time to speak with me and to all of us. I can genuinely recommend the book, which I think provides an excellent overview of how our societies are struggling to keep up with the exponential force of technological change and, the audience, please do fill in a short survey - there is a link that's going to be shared in the chat and I think it's also available on the event description. Our next Nesta Talks To event will take place on Thursday, 11 November, where our CEO Ravi Gurumurthy will be speaking to Christopher Snowdon and Dolly Theis on: Should the government decide what we eat? Finally, I'd like to thank everyone in our audience for tuning in and their thoughtful questions, both now and those that were posted in advance. Azeem, was there anything else you sort of wanted to add?

AZEEM: No, it has been a real pleasure and thank you for the great questions and you can follow me on Twitter, AZ @EEM and just as a reminder, if you do buy the eBook, and you like eBooks, you can pick it up for 99p at the big eBook store from Seattle. But no, it has been lovely, thank you, Laurie.

LAURIE: Thank you very much, Azeem.