Hello everyone, it's Azeem here, and as the year comes to a close, I have been reflecting on why I started this podcast nearly a decade ago.

It began as an attempt to understand how exponential technologies are going to shape the world.

And in truth, I just wanted to have some great conversations.

Now, that lens and those discussions have taken us

through many themes, including artificial intelligence, energy systems, biology, pandemics,

geopolitics, and many of the other deep structural forces that influence our world. And yet,

the very first episode back in November 2016 centered on a question

that remains as relevant today as it was then. How is work evolving in the face of transformative

technology? Back then, I discussed this with Ryan Avent, who was then a writer at The Economist.

But the question has been core to my analysis this year,

and it sits inside a wider set of concerns.

Artificial intelligence is starting to behave like a real general purpose technology,

and we're watching an enormous industry in economic architecture form around it.

It's raising the live question of whether this is sustainable

progress or the hallmarks of an investment bubble. Work itself has been rewired from labour markets

to agenic workflows and the way teams are organised. In the US and the UK, graduates are bearing the

brunt of changes in the labour market, but is the softening in demand for their skills

as a consequence of technology or something else?

The physical world has reasserted itself

as the build-out-of-compute and the struggle for energy and grid capacity

become the binding constraints of a move to an AI economy.

More than a decade ago, we used to say that software was eating the world. Today, we've realized that software is demanding a new one.

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