Azeem Azhar

It's even more than I managed to use.

But those tokens are actually pretty cheap, so the dollar value is not as big as it might sound.

Set against all of this, the tech giants will collectively invest, as we know, roughly $400 billion this year in the hardware to deliver AI.

They'll invest more next year, and they'll invest more the year after that.

I think it's telling that Microsoft's boss Satya Nadella is talking about planet scale token factories.

So is this all crazy talk?

Is this exuberance?

Is this excitement running ahead of where we are?

Are we building capacity that we will never use?

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.