PERSON
Azeem Azhar
The analyst who gave the AI transition its most precise structural concept — the exponential gap between the soaring curve of technological capability and the comparatively flat line of institutional adaptation — and who insists, against both the cheerleaders and the doomsayers, that the outcome remains a matter of human choice.
Azeem Azhar is the economist of the exponential. Born in 1972 and trained in Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Oxford, he spent his early career in journalism — reporting technology for
The Guardian and business for
The Economist — before founding the
Exponential View research practice and newsletter that became the authoritative map of what he calls the exponential age. His 2021 book, published as
The Exponential Age in the United States, gave the world the concept of the
exponential gap: the widening chasm between the accelerating upward curve of technological capability and the relatively flat curve of laws, firms, schools, and habits of mind. What makes the concept useful rather than merely pessimistic is the precision of its diagnosis. The gap is not a moral indictment of institutions. It is a structural mismatch between technologies whose performance improves exponentially and institutions designed, quite