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Mark McDonald
Former Minister for Children and Young People of Scotland
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APPEARANCES
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Sep 18, 2026
Under the Banyan Tree - AI: Debate, direction and Dutch disease
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8:28Mark McDonaldGUEST
There are certain areas of markets where the AI trade is most clearly focused and particularly the AI infrastructure trade.
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8:35Mark McDonaldGUEST
And so for those areas, I think it's hard for any investor to really believe that they truly have a different and superior investment process for analyzing those companies because everybody is analyzing the same data, everybody's analyzing the companies through the same AI lens.
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8:53Mark McDonaldGUEST
One less exciting area of the AI trade, but one which has also been successful, is the AI implementation trade.
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12:52is a major question actually, right? Because who is going to benefit from this and what is the monetization we very often talk about? Are the companies really making money out of their investments? And there's simply a risk is that it creates such an intense environment, a lot of competition that ultimately the consumer just gets free apps or very cheap apps and the companies don't really make that much money out of it despite the fact that they've invested billions of dollars in it.
The Macro Brief - Understanding AI cycles
6:57
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2:07Mark McDonaldGUEST
I think, you know, with, with any new technology, there's a tendency for people to, uh, focus on what might be taken away from them.
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2:15Mark McDonaldGUEST
And so it's very easy to see, um, as AI progressively does, uh, more and more tasks well, um, that people begin to worry, uh, that it will begin to take over more and more jobs.
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2:27Mark McDonaldGUEST
Often, this tends to underestimate the degree to which people are flexible and to which the global economy is, um, is actually a, a complex system that will, will react.
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2:37Mark McDonaldGUEST
Um, and historical evidence suggests that new technologies, um, generally they're good for productivity, they're good for growth, and they generally generate more new jobs associated with the technology, um, than get, um, get replaced by the technology.
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2:52Mark McDonaldGUEST
So we generally think that this, um, this fear of, you know, large scale, um, AI, uh, AI-driven unemployment, uh, is, is a f- an overblown fear.

Piers ButlerHOST
That DeepSeek moment was not a one-off, and it's, it-- I guess it's kind of encapsulated in saying these US companies are spending billions of dollars, and actually China can do it much more cheaply?