Spring Rights List 2021
FORTHCOMING TITLES
EXPONENTIAL Shaping the World in an Age of Accelerating Change AZEEM AZHAR Praise for Azeem Azhar’s newsletter ‘Exponential View’ ‘Exponential View’ is a must-read and always provides a thoughtful perspective on our exponential world – Daniel Ek, Founder, Spotify I love the way ‘Exponential View’ carefully brings together and celebrates so many different perspectives, and I look forward to being challenged and inspired by it every week – Mustafa Suleyman, Co-founder, DeepMind
A refreshing lens on our near future from an influential tech entrepreneur, investor, advisor and communicator. At some point between 2016 and 2017, technology took over the public space. Mutterings about the application of new dark digital arts – the nefarious manipulation of our social media against us, the hacking of our very democracies – crescendoed. Computers got better at many things – playing games, translating between languages, describing what is in a picture – and we began to talk about AI taking our jobs, driving our cars and supplementing nearly all our human capabilities. Tech giants – Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Netflix – rose to impressive, then disturbing, new heights. At the time, Azeem Azhar had just sold PeerIndex, one of the startups he founded, and he went from being an overworked founder to a senior executive with a bit of time and space to look around. And he noticed something: across today’s disparate storylines – the political rifts, the rise of tech leviathans towering over civic life, the tsunami of AI development – there was a pattern. In short, a gap had opened between accelerating technological capability and incremental social adaptation, between everyday culture and the bubble of tech culture. Azeem dubbed this the ‘exponential gap’, and since then he has sought to find a way to bridge these two cultures, to unite technologists and humanists in a collective effort to shape our world for the better. Channelling the grand scope of Harari and Tegmark, the rigour of Zuboff and Mazzucato, and the entrepreneurial attitude of Brynjolfsson and McAfee, EXPONENTIAL is that bridge – across cultures, across the exponential gap – that offers readers a clear vista of our future. AZEEM AZHAR writes ‘Exponential View’, a widely acclaimed newsletter with over 55,000 subscribers. It deals with the impact of AI and exponential technologies on society and the economy and is accompanied by his highly lauded podcast, distributed by Harvard Business Review. Following an MA in politics, philosophy and economics from the University of Oxford, he started his career as a journalist with the Guardian and the Economist before founding PeerIndex, and is now a trusted advisor to firms such as PricewaterhouseCoopers, a venture partner at Kindred Capital, a board member of the Ada Lovelace Foundation and a regular international keynote speaker on topics such as the impact of AI, ethics and technology, exponential technologies and the human dimensions of technology. Agent: Jeff Shreve Publisher: Random House Business (UK)/Diversion (US) Publication: Autumn 2021 Status: Manuscript Length: 90,000–100,000 words All rights available excluding UK & Commonwealth (Random House Business), US (Diversion)
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The Science Factory
