Signature arguments.

Here's the central economic puzzle of our time. Population growth stalled in the 1950s. Idea generation — which depends on people — slowed with it. Economic growth has been coasting on the accumulated momentum of the post-war baby boom and the computing revolution. The engine is decelerating. And then, quite suddenly, AI arrives with a proposition that changes the equation entirely: what if labour could be *accumulated*?

Throughout human history, labour has been the one input to production that couldn't be stockpiled. You can accumulate capital — build factories, hoard gold, invest in bonds. You can accumulate resources — fill warehouses, secure supply chains, build reserves. But you can't stockpile human thinking. People go home. They retire. They forget. The production function of civilisation has always had this fundamental asymmetry.

Here's something that should unsettle every strategist in the room. Between 2010 and 2017, three fundamental inputs to human civilisation — energy, intelligence, and biology — each independently crossed from extraction regimes to engineering regimes. Solar costs fell 99.6%, from $106 per watt to $0.38. The Transformer architecture made intelligence scalable. Genomic sequencing collapsed from $3 billion to a few thousand dollars. These aren't incremental improvements. They're phase transitions.

What does that mean in plain language? It means civilisation is upgrading its operating system.

You can commit $200 billion in capital expenditure. You cannot will a power plant into existence.

This is the single most important sentence in AI strategy right now, and almost nobody in the technology conversation is saying it. AI's binding constraint has flipped. It's no longer capital or code. It's concrete, copper, and cooling. Physics, not software, is the bottleneck.

My AI agent spent $47 last Tuesday without asking me. It was purchasing API compute to run a research task I'd delegated. The transaction was legitimate, efficient, and — here's the point — conducted entirely between machines. No invoice. No contract review. No bank transfer. Just code calling code, debiting a pre-authorised wallet.

Now multiply that by a trillion.

Every board meeting I attend starts with the same question: are we in an AI bubble?

It's the wrong question. The data points to something different — a stampede. And if you're a business leader, the distinction matters enormously, because the strategic response to a bubble is caution, while the strategic response to a stampede is acceleration.

In 2022, I consumed about 1,000 AI tokens a day. It felt like a toy — a clever autocomplete that occasionally surprised me. By mid-2025, I was at a million tokens daily. AI had become a colleague: drafting, researching, challenging my assumptions. In February 2026, I hit 97,045,322 tokens in a single day. Cost: under $100. At that scale, AI isn't a tool or a colleague. It's a workforce.

Like the Eames' famous film *Powers of Ten*, adding a zero doesn't just mean "more." It changes what kind of thing you're looking at. A cell is not a small organ. A galaxy is not a large solar system. And AI at a hundred million tokens is not a faster chatbot. We're dealing with a fundamentally different relationship between human judgment and machine execution.

I write from London. That matters. Silicon Valley sees one world — an American-led tech order that set the rules and won the day. Shenzhen sees another. London sits between them. It is home to both DeepSeek's lab and DeepMind's main offices. It doesn't fool itself about being a tech power, which is why I think it can see the rift more clearly than most.

Here's a number that should reshape your strategic plan: the United States holds 75% of global AI compute. China holds 15%. Everyone else is working with what's left.

The question I hear most from boards and investors is some version of: *are we watching a bubble?* The FT has published over a hundred articles exploring AI-as-bubble. Michael Burry — the man who shorted the housing market — is short Nvidia and Palantir. The sceptics have history on their side: technology booms have a nasty habit of ending badly.

I think they're asking the wrong question. This isn't a bubble. It's a stampede. And the strategic response to each is entirely different.

Every general purpose technology looks overhyped in year three and transformative by year ten. We are in year three.

The steam engine, electricity, and computing each followed the same arc: early exuberance, a messy middle of institutional confusion, then a decades-long restructuring of how economies produce, distribute, and consume. AI is the third general purpose technology in a century, and if you judge it by today's muddled adoption metrics, you will miss the pattern that history is screaming at you.