Azeem Azhar

ordinary and increasingly complex tasks that can be delegated to tens of thousands of AI agents and you've swapped labor for capital and you're just paying a rental to a cloud service for that.

And I think that that is a direction of travel that we've seen the number of people employed even by a huge company like Facebook is far smaller than was ever employed by General Motors and so on and so forth.

I know that we're going to go to questions in a few minutes.

One thing I would love to also for us to talk about is trade and tariffs.

You know, we've got a man in the White House who loves tariffs and certainly loves the threat of tariffs.

And we also have this geopolitical fragmentation.

Now, as a technologist, what I see happening is a number of different things.

We've seen from the political side, the building up of more and more walls around the internet.

So it's not just China's Great Firewall.

It's also, you know, Russia being able to seal off its internet.

there is now this political pressure, which is about around free speech in the US and a departure from European standards.

And of course, in technologies with the export controls, most importantly, in a way forcing China to start to do its own development in really hard technologies and sort of advanced semiconductors.

So I see a world where

There will be increasingly a couple of lanes of technology and that of course reduces the size of markets and adds quite a lot of friction to all of it.

It feels like that's a general drag on growth.

Vietnam?

Well, I love this line, technology is a substitute for globalization.

I'm going to come back to you after we finish this live on that.

In my first book, I talk about

the coming fragmentation that was going to be driven by changing technology.