Azeem Azhar

If phi is one or above, you get exponential takeoff, but in general, phi has been below one.

That's where I got caught out.

1990, endogenous technological change was the paper.

I had just read my

summary and of course not the detail and thank god i had nathan there to uh to set me right but then my question to you is looking at that do you and what you see do you see a path where we get over the burden of knowledge and we do get to see that exponential

So look, but let's do this.

Let's stay on this future track just for a second and I'll bring us back to ground because people are living lives in 2026 and we need to help throw some light on that.

So it does feel to me that this is something that is on a knife-edge balance, which is that if you are able to automate research end-to-end, and we're starting to see a number of companies out there funded by private capital trying to do this, you could, in principle, get to a point where

discoveries happen faster and faster.

One of my favorite examples is, you know, why didn't your parents use LED light bulbs when you were a kid?

LED light bulbs are better.

They use less energy.

They're more controllable.

And the reason they didn't was a problem of knowledge.

We didn't know how to make them.

It was a 100-year journey from the basic physics to

through to the first transistors 50 years later in the 1950s and 60s through to the first red LED in 1960.

I was explaining to my team that the reason the Cylons in Battlestar Galactica in the 1970s and Knight Rider both have red LED things around their face, the kit car, is because those are the only LEDs we could make at the time.

And that was the future.

And we didn't get blue LEDs until the late 1990s.