00:00We've got lots of micro-studies of the effects of AI.
00:02We've got Goldman Sachs, who's helpfully compiled this list of stories that we've seen from companies.
00:09I think the average of those stories that they find suggests that AI could increase productivity by 32%, which sounds
00:16awesome.
00:18Sarah, what should we read from these individual stories?
00:23I think this is where it gets really interesting, right?
00:25Because you have, on the macro side, basically, I think we can all agree that maybe there are some signs
00:31somewhere, but pretty much nothing is happening.
00:34And then on the micro side, you hear these extraordinary stories that I don't discount.
00:39I don't think that all these people are just imagining that they are witnessing massive transformations in how they can
00:44achieve certain tasks and get certain amounts of things done.
00:48So how do you kind of reconcile this?
00:50Yes. And, you know, the way that I think about it is that when you think about how an LLM
00:56or even agentic AI, which we will come on to later, accelerates, it normally accelerates you through a certain task,
01:02right?
01:03But jobs are not tasks and organizations are certainly not tasks.
01:06They are bundles of tasks and organizations are bundles of individuals who work in systems.
01:11Systems are full of, like, bottlenecks and groups of individuals who have to coordinate things and make decisions about things.
01:19And so what can quite easily happen is that you can massively increase productivity on a certain team or on
01:26a certain task within one individual's work.
01:29But then all that happens is that that kind of creates a bigger bottleneck somewhere else in the organization.
01:39On the first day of the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran, Morteza Bahadori arrived to a scene of unimaginable devastation.
01:48Two missiles had struck his son's school directly, he said, killing 168 people, mostly children.
01:56Nine-year-old Arya, his son, was dead.
02:00The evidence we've collected suggests that the strikes were conducted by the U.S.
02:04President Trump has said otherwise.
02:07We think it was done by Iran.
02:08I think it was nine-year-old.
02:09Because they're very inaccurate, as you know, with their munitions.
02:13They have no accuracy whatsoever. It was done by Iran.
02:16These two unreliable narrators, Iran and Trump, force us to look at the open-source evidence to understand what happened.
02:24But what we have is fragmentary.
02:26Satellite imagery suggests the school was hit during an attack on a nearby Revolutionary Guard facility.
02:33Multiple buildings show targeted precision strikes, including to the school.
02:38Iranian media have circulated this video, which the FT has verified to the location.
02:43Weapons experts confirmed that it shows a U.S.-made Tomahawk missile.
02:48Local officials also shared video of missile components.
02:51These include a circuit board labeled with the long-range missile manufacturer's name.
02:56Meanwhile, Trump has falsely claimed that Iran itself has Tomahawk missiles.
03:01And whether it's Iran, who also has some Tomahawks, they wish they had more.
03:05The U.S. only sells them to close allies like the U.K., Australia, or Japan.
03:10But Iran's information has some weaknesses, too.
03:13The video shows a strike next to the school, but not to the school itself.
03:18And there's no way of telling where these Tomahawk components really came from, or if they're from this specific strike.
03:25Experts who analyze our evidence says it all points to the U.S.
03:29The Pentagon tells us it's investigating, and U.S. media have reported that the initial results of their investigation also
03:36point to their culpability.
03:38Videos, social media posts, and satellite imagery have been crucial to help us understand recent wars in Syria, Ukraine, and
03:46Gaza, where there are often no independent observers.
03:49But human rights investigators say Iran is one of the most difficult environments they've worked in.
03:55So far, what I'm seeing in Iran, this is one of the most restrictive information environments that I've seen.
04:01And that's both a combination of kind of what Iran has been doing in terms of shutting down the Internet,
04:06but also the lack of access to things like satellite imagery.
04:11It was Planet Labs pictures that showed the damage to the school in Manab.
04:16But they've since put a 14-day freeze on new images from the region, citing security concerns.
04:20All of this reduces the amount of independent information we can gather.
04:26Governments on both sides are doing their best to shape the narrative.
04:29But finding truth on the ground is more important than ever.
04:38Japan is embarking on an ambitious push to extract rare earth elements from the ocean floor,
04:44betting that deep sea resources could strengthen its economic security.
04:48The effort is expected to accelerate under Prime Minister Sanae Takaiichi,
04:52who describes deep sea mining as the first step towards domestically industrializing rare earths.
04:58In 2011, Japan discovered resources near Minami Torishima,
05:03an atoll 1,900 kilometers southeast of Tokyo that is part of the country's exclusive economic zone.
05:10Following her landslide, election victory,
05:14Takaiichi has said she plans to ask the U.S. to join the Minami Torishima project.
05:19The initiative has taken on new urgency after China tightened export curves on shipments to Japan, including rare earths.
05:27Beijing dominates the supply chain for the strategic minerals,
05:30controlling 60% of mining and more than 90% of refining and magnet manufacturing.
05:36Interest in seabed mining has surged worldwide as governments seek to secure supplies of critical minerals
05:42essential for electric vehicle batteries and defense technologies.
05:46But significant challenges remain.
05:48Some experts question whether commercial deep sea mining can be economically viable,
05:54while environmental activists warn about the potential impact on fragile marine ecosystems.
06:03They should be thanking me, because many of them get 90% China, as an example, should be thanking us,
06:09but I don't expect to thank you, but they should be thanking us.
06:13Japan gets 95%, China 91%.
06:18Many of the countries, South Korea, gets a tremendous percentage of their oil
06:23and therefore their energy from the straights, or as they call it, the straight.
06:32And they should be not only thanking us, they should be helping us.
06:37What does surprise me is that they're not eager to help.
06:43Do we have a sense of what it means for the Trump administration
06:46if the war in Iran hurts Americans in their pocketbooks?
06:50There is, I mean, no real surer way to lose an election
06:56than to have prices at the pump spiralling in the run-up to it.
07:00So it's a big liability for the Trump administration
07:03as it approaches November's mid-term elections.
07:07Which, I mean, just as an aside,
07:09makes it all the more astounding that they went ahead and did this.
07:14Like we were saying earlier, there was presumably some degree of miscalculation
07:18that they didn't think stuff would get this bad.
07:21But it's such an own goal for the Trump administration.
07:25Not least because, despite the inflationary pressures
07:29that the US has had over the last while,
07:31I mean, you mentioned how affordability was becoming a challenge for Donald Trump.
07:37Prices at the pump were the one thing he could always point to and say,
07:41remember how bad this was under Biden?
07:43Look how low they are now.
07:44And it was like, yeah, a big kind of economic win
07:47without getting into the details of whether he was, in fact, responsible for it.
07:53And now that one kind of big economic win or big inflationary win that he had,
07:59he has willingly or without kind of like any necessity driving it,
08:06just turned it out the window.
08:11I spoke yesterday, on Sunday, that is, by phone to President Donald Trump.
08:17I tried him three or four times before and was a little bit surprised that he picked up this time.
08:22Nevertheless, he did.
08:23And he was keen to talk about two or three aspects of the war in Iran.
08:29First and most important being, he wants NATO allies, including Britain,
08:33particularly Britain, to help out in unblocking the Strait of Hormuz.
08:38But he mentioned China as well.
08:41He also said that his forthcoming summit with Xi Jinping in Beijing,
08:46two weeks from now, might be delayed.
08:49And that it would be too long to wait until then for China to step up as well
08:55and help him unblock the Strait of Hormuz.
08:59He was very chatty, I mean, keen to talk.
09:03This wasn't me trying to squeeze blood out of a stone or anything.
09:05He was, as Trump often is, very conversational.
09:11And I think the underlying tone there was genuinely worried about the direction of this war.
09:18This is an appeal for help from allies who he has not exactly been complimentary about.
09:24Yet he was really, really emphatic on the fact that they need to help get him out of this mess.
09:33Those are my words, not his.
09:35One of the reasons I think he was keen to talk to me was that he'd had a call earlier
09:40in the day
09:40with the British Prime Minister, Sakhir Starmer, in which he'd asked,
09:44he'd made this request for British help, minesweepers and the like in the Strait of Hormuz
09:50and not yielded anything.
09:52So I think his frustration with Britain, which he's expressed before, is now really lodged in his head.
09:59For Starmer, for Macron, for Friedrich Mertz, for other Western leaders whose help Trump is demanding,
10:09this puts them in a really tight spot because the war on Iran is seen as a war of choice,
10:14of Trump's choice, Trump's win, if you like.
10:18And it's extremely unpopular amongst public opinion across Europe.
10:24There is no appetite to join Trump in offensive operations.
10:28And yet there's no appetite for oil prices to keep going up.
10:33And if the Strait of Hormuz remains blocked, which it looks likely to do for some time to come,
10:40then there's going to be a growing pain point felt amongst their voters in Europe as well as in the
10:47United States.
10:48So they're in a worsening dilemma.
10:50But this is a dilemma, of course, created by President Trump.
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