Azeem Azhar

A famous episode of The Simpsons when the town of Springfield built a monorail.

Is this the monorail for the global economy?

I think to make sense of that, let's think about what computing really is.

I mean, computing is a way of systematically processing information using tools.

We call those tools computers.

And processing information is a really valuable thing to do.

The computers we use today are of a particular type.

They work in binary on these chips, but there are other ways of doing computing, ternary computing, where you don't have bits of 0 and 1, you have trits of minus 1, 0 and 1, and of course quantum computing with its fuzzy states.

But ultimately, being machines, they can compute faster and more consistently than humans.

And computing has proved to be really, really useful.

And we've shown that we actually just love having access to computing capabilities.

Let's compare it to something else that I really like, which is donuts.

So I love donuts, but there's a marginal, diminishing marginal utility with donuts.

The first one is great.

I'm not sure I will ever eat number four in a single sitting.

And I can pretty much testify that I have never got as far as four donuts in a single sitting.

And the same is probably true for you, but that isn't true with computing.

What happens with computing is we have an insatiable demand for it.

And it also has a positive price elasticity, which means that if the price comes down, we buy more and more of it.

We use more and more of it.