 Technology is power and we have ways of dealing with power. We understand its benefits in society and we also understand what happens when any institution gets too much power. In order to do that you need checks and balances. You need a balance of power. You need rival power centres that can hold one another to account and you might need some enforceable guardrails. And I think that's one of the things that we have lost in the period from the 1970s through to the early part of the 21st century which is that we've allowed markets to do their thing often in very very effective ways without necessarily recognising that there was an accretion of power. We're in an interesting time that I call the exponential age. It's the exponential age because there's a series of technologies that are getting cheaper and cheaper every year on a compounding basis. If you happen to plot that as a mathematical function it takes the shape of the exponential curve that we're so familiar with. It starts slow, there's a kink in the curve and then it goes up very quickly. It's compounding interest. And today in the start of the 21st century we see that computing is on that curve, things like memory storage on that curve but so too are lithium-ion batteries, solar photovoltaics and a whole series of technologies from the bio-economy like precision fermentation or genome sequencing. Now what that means is the technologies get better or to look at it a different way, they get much much cheaper. As they get much cheaper they're much more likely to be bought by businesses and consumers, put to use in industry and start to change the shape of industries. Now that's all happening very very quickly and it's really driven by technology improvement on one hand and entrepreneurs and businesses on the other. But entrepreneurs and businesses actually live in a wider space that we call society at large and society at large has got these institutions. Some institutions are very formal institutions, they are their laws, their regulations, they're written down agreements and some institutions are quite informal. An example of an informal institution is should people use their phones at their dinner table or should families sit around and have a chat. Now institutions don't have the benefit of rapidly declining prices, they don't have that exponential characteristic to them so they tend to adapt much much more slowly and then a gap emerges, the exponential curve runs like this, the institutions adapt like that, that gap is the exponential gap and that is my way of trying to explain why in 2015 onwards we've started to see so many challenges to the way we think about market structure and competition, the way we think about the relationship between the firm and its employees, the way we think about globalization and trade, how we think about the nature and patterns of conflict and of course how we think about how our democratic societies behave. When electricity was invented and found its way into particularly advanced economies it was revolutionary and it happened very very quickly in a matter of a few decades to getting the first cable into many homes for example in the United States and that was revolutionary but what's different this time round is that we have so many infrastructures in place whether it is mobile networks and electricity that the speed with which these technologies find their way into homes and into businesses is just much much more rapid. So if you take something like electric vehicles for example the time it takes for a market to go from about five or six percent market penetration that is new car sold being electric vehicles and about seventy percent of the car sold being electric vehicles is typically measured in sort of eight to twelve thirteen year time frame. We don't have enough countries that have done that but that's roughly what it looks like and that happens in the small country to do that first like Norway but it's also likely to happen in the enormous market of China which is tracking Norway's penetration curve just delayed by five or six years and so what's different this time is a much more interconnected economy a much larger economy and one where these changes are taking place in absolute terms in fewer years than the ones of the turn of the twentieth century. The Gulf of Mutual Incomprehension is what emerges between the technologists and those who understand how the technologies are behaving and really the rest of us who are living in a more everyday world and the Mutual Incomprehension is really about on the one hand that the technologies themselves have really really significant impacts outside of their form factor or their system you know the impact of an iPhone giving everyone the ability to hold a camera and everyone the ability to publish and everyone the ability to look at information goes way way beyond those applications it goes into changing the nature of journalism or the nature of disclosure or the nature of a citizen's ability to get information but on the other hand on the side of the typical person in society the incomprehension arises from not realising quite how quickly the technology might change, how quickly it might diffuse and I think quite often what is very very hard is what those unintended and emergent consequences of the technologies end up being. I think it's really important to note that these technologies will have very very different impacts in different societies for lots of different reasons as well so if you look at the trust data that comes out from a firm like Edelman one of the things that we note is that richer countries, more advanced economies are much much less optimistic about the potential of technology than countries that are less well off and still going through parts of their development phases we also need to recognise that technologies really aren't good or bad nor are they neutral, they play out in different environments, in different ways because of perhaps cultural behaviours because of what you're allowed to do and what you're not allowed to do or sometimes just because of specific trade-offs in those markets so a good example of a non-exponential technology like this is DDT which was used as a pesticide it was a great way of killing people it was a pesticide, it was a great way of killing mosquitoes now the problem with DDT in richer countries for example the southern parts of the US is that it has many many problems with this run-offs and what happens when it gets into the food system but in a country like India the risks of DDT were far worse than the risks of actually not applying the pesticide in the land and so while DDT ends up being banned very quickly in some countries in other countries it took longer because of slower regulators it was because the way the technology manifested itself in that specific society had different costs and benefits when we look at the issue of these new technologies we have to be alert to a couple of things one is the emerging digital divide or maybe it's now the AI divide maybe sooner it will be the quantum computing divide we have to think about that but the second thing that we need to do is we need to recognise that polities, political economies function when there is a balance of power between the legal system, between the elected officials between the market as represented by companies and by capital what we have seen is just the beginning never again will technological innovation move as slow as it is moving today as we move into this world where these technologies are very powerful they'll come to market through the market we need to just bear in mind that we need that balance to prevent there being either intentionally or unintentionally abuses of power technopessimism which becomes almost a mantra that the technology is bad the firms are bad and they're out to get us is really really quite unhelpful it's almost as unhelpful as a starry eyed utopianism we actually live in a space where we require critical reflection of pragmatic optimism about these technologies a recognition that there will be benefits and disbenefits and we have to engage to control and maintain those give people on both sides of this gulf of incomprehension the tools to understand what the processes are and what the risks are and what questions they should ask of the world around them