Azeem Azhar

So go back and look at those essays.

In short, this is all about absorption.

This is all about the extent to which AI can be absorbed in the economy, in our world.

Are companies absorbing artificial intelligence fast enough?

Can the electrical and power systems absorb all the new demand from the data centers?

Is the economy absorbing any benefits at all?

And do people, do society, do us, do we want to absorb AI, all the things it brings with us at the speed with which it is emerging?

So let's just step through each of those questions of absorption.

On the firm, I've written a lot about this over the last few months, weeks and months.

Are companies really making use of this technology at all?

And I think we can even step back a layer and say, are people really using these technologies in any meaningful sense?

We talk about 800 million people using ChatGPT.

We talk about a couple of billion using these chatbots.

globally.

But are we using them the way that we've used other technologies when we talk about them being deployed, like the flush toilet or electricity?

Is it really use of one of these technologies if you just put the odd query into it rather than Google, but your life remains largely the same?

I mean, it's almost trivially easy to put a product in the hands of tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of people because of the App Store, because of iPhones.

And perhaps when we think about where we are in absorption, we need to go beyond someone downloaded the app and played with it a little bit.

And I'm sure within those 2 billion people, there are many people like me for whom our ways of working and ways of living have changed because of these tools.

But we need to be a little bit thoughtful about that.