The legend goes something like this: an ancient Persian king asks his closest advisor, his vizier, for a new game. The vizier returns with a simple wooden board, marked with 64 squares and pieces of various sizes. The most important piece is the king. The second-most important piece, of course, is the vizier. The object of the game is to capture the opponent’s king by guile and strategy. And so the game comes to be known, in Persian, as shahmat–death to the king. In English, we call it chess.

The king is so pleased with the new invention that he tells the vizier to name his own reward. The vizier doesn’t want much—no palaces, no jewels. He gestures to the chess board, with its neat rows of squares, and says, give me one grain of rice for the first square, two for the second, and so on, until the board is full.

What the king doesn’t realize, when he accepts this bargain, was that his vizier’s request was exponential in nature. Although the piles of rice are manageable to begin with, they grow to colossal size as they double: 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256. By the time the king reaches the final square, he’s ruined. The vizier has earned 18.5 quintillion grains, more than all the rice in the world.

It’s an old story, and apocryphal. But not much has changed. In the game of chess, the vizier became the queen, inheriting the vizier’s powers. And the king is all of us—vulnerable, broke, and utterly unable to visualize exponential growth.

We’re accustomed to thinking of growth as a linear process. Economic psychologists have shown that people consistently underestimate the magnitude of compounding interest, which piles up like those grains of rice. They call the phenomenon “exponential growth bias,” and it’s not limited to saving money. It also makes it difficult to comprehend the spread of a virus like COVID-19, and can blind us to the exponential nature of the technological changes around us, as computing power, solar panels, drones, virtual reality headsets, satellites, electric vehicle batteries, and 3D printers get faster and cheaper. We are on the cusp of extraordinary, accelerated, irreversible technological change. And like the king, we cannot see it coming.   

From the dirt-cheap computing power that makes machine learning possible to the DNA sequencing and gene therapies that will drive revolutions in medicine, technological innovation is accelerating at an unprecedented pace. So, too, are its myriad interrelations, which are already causing our physical, biological, and digital worlds to converge. Simultaneous breakthroughs in AI, nanotechnology, biotechnology, materials science, energy storage, and quantum computing will bootstrap one another, multiplying emergent possibilities. Some economists refer to this coming transformation as the “Fourth Industrial Revolution;” the London-based entrepreneur and writer Azeem Azhar prefers the term “Exponential Age.”

According to Azhar, the Exponential Age will usher in “a wholly new era of human society and economic organisation.” He writes that those people and companies able to harness exponential technology will take over the world—while our institutions, “all the lasting norms that define how we live,” will be left behind. That is to say, although technology moves quickly, culture only adapts to that change incrementally. 

Of course, this is by design—stability is what defines an institution to begin with—but it’s a design drafted in a different age. Today, we’re witnessing extreme tension between an old-world, linear model of change, and the reality at our fingertips. Decision-makers are frequently unable to look beyond electoral cycles; laws, social norms, and political systems aren’t equipped to move on an exponential curve. This latency, which Azhar calls the “exponential gap,” is at the root of the world’s most pressing problems, from income inequality to the polarization of our politics. Not only do we struggle to visualize the cadence of exponential growth, but we fail to adapt to it—at our peril.  

So here we are, looking at a graph with two lines. One line represents the exponential growth of technology, a cumulative metric of halving battery sizes, bigger machine learning models, plunging cloud computing costs and faster processing speeds. It looks like an upside-down roller coaster, moving from a slowly ramping, nearly imperceptible climb to a sudden liftoff. The second, flatter line is the plodding linear growth of our institutions, customs, and practices. Can we split the difference? Do we want to?

Azhar is bullish; he believes the rise of the top line cannot be slowed. Acceleration is already baked into our economies, the processes of today’s technological innovations are decentralized and difficult to control. Further, we actually need exponential change, as our most urgent problems can only be tackled with the help of exponential technology. We cannot hope to decarbonize our economies, for example, without cheaper, more efficient solar cells, smaller, longer-lasting batteries, and innovative, low-carbon building practices, like large-scale, on-site 3D printing. Climate change, too, is exponential—and we have no choice but to keep up.

The only thing to do, then, is speed the bottom line along, helping our institutions “harness the power of exponentiality, and the rules and norms that can shape, for the needs of our society.” There is some precedent for this. The cultural transformations that took place worldwide after the Second World War led to the very rapid creation of new institutions like the International Monetary Fund and the United Nations. In our current cultural moment, the COVID-19 pandemic plays a similar role, acting as a catalyst for the rapid adoption of previously-unimagined cultural changes: the digitization of education, the re-appraisal of the very nature of work, and so forth.  

If trauma is what facilitates the evolution of social norms and slow-moving institutions, then we’re in a dark kind of luck; the future will not be short of upheavals. But disaster often brings people together, providing a context for purposeful, community action that doesn’t always exist in daily life. Perhaps exponential change—and its own seismic effects—can also spur positive change, by reminding us of our shared destinies.