The Tech onomic Forecast Top Digital Shifts You Can’t Ignore

Your excellencies, ladies and gentlemen, it is a privilege to be here with you today to talk about the technologies that finance cannot ignore for the future. And innovation matters. Money has been reinvented itself forever. Gold started to be used as a currency not far from here 8,000 years ago. Then we invented paper money, banks, central banks, even bubbles and crashes, then financial repression, Bitcoin, quantitative easing.

It's a constant reinvention. Of course, it running parallel with humanities big discoveries, writing, mathematics, first decimal mathematics in the Arab world, complex numbers and physics, relativity, quantum quantum physics, and finally the man even went on the moon. Why am I showing you this today? Because these two lines, science and finance, used to run in parallel. Today, they are crashing into each other and it changes everything.

So, let's start. Digital money. You know everything about it. We know that stable coins work. The next big thing, the real big deal is universal tokenization.

Everything on chain 24/7, instant change of ownership. It's traceable, it's a transparent price discovery. There is no middle man, it's cost-effective. It's happening. You have all seen Larry Fink's article last week about it.

I think that tokenization will do to private markets what ETFs have done to public markets. It blurs the line between public and private. It's coming because simply it's better and even our fiat currencies are becoming digital. It's CBDC. We know that.

So, should we immediately close all the banks, stock exchanges, auction houses, and all of that? Well, not yet. First, there is a bit of work to do on infrastructure, as you know, on governance, addressing questions like privacy, security, interoperability, so that trust grows. Remember, currently people are buying physical gold and putting it in safe. It will take time.

And then there is another question, money creation. If you forget all the rest, the core mission of a bank is to collect deposits and make loans with a layer, of course, of risk management, capital buffers, supervision, uh fractional reserves, you name it. But that's how money is created. And that's something that will also have to be transformed because if all deposits go to stable coins or CBDC, who makes the loans? Who take the risk?

We don't know. Money creation is at the heart of it. If you go to Reddit, you will [snorts] find memes that tells you that some companies have found a way to create money out of thin air without banks. Of course, it's a joke, but it's a transition to artificial intelligence. The elephant in the room, you have heard a lot about it.

We all use AI and we all know that the next step is agency, autonomous decisions taking by agents from our side, finance professional, from the client side. Is AI ready? Probably. And anyway, it's getting better every day. Are we ready?

Uh it's another question. But of course, it's much bigger than finance. And what I wanted to highlight today is the fact that it is a macroeconomic landslide. If AI doesn't work, we've lost trillions of dollars. If AI works, which we all think it it it does, we may lose millions of jobs, including these white-collar jobs.

And you can see on the chart, uh they are the bulk of the consumption and consumption is the bulk of the economy. It has already started to some extent in entry-level jobs in the low or consulting, uh it's starting to become difficult. So, who will help these people? Governments? They are already broke.

And what about the impact on the global growth? Because AI is outstanding at working, but it is a terrible consumer. It has very simple taste, uh energy and a bit of capital. AI doesn't buy houses or handbags. So, that's a question.

And that's even a bigger question because AI doesn't vote as well, people do. So, we think that we have a new relation between work, capital, and the entire society that is coming. So, is it hell or is it heaven? I've put two very very intelligent persons with very different point of views. On the top, let's call him YNH because I'm French, I cannot say his name properly.

He says there will be a useless class. Maybe 30% of the population will be useless and we will have to deal with it. At the other end of the spectrum, Mr. Kurzweil, he's a Google's AI visionary, says, "No. Relax.

It's going to be awesome. We will have money for nothing, universal basic income. And with technology at the end, we will approach immortality." Big questions, huh? When two geniuses of this caliber disagree as much on a topic, it means that consequences are incalculable.

We will need computing power and that's my transition to quantum computing with a warning from the gentleman who invented it. If we think we understand, we don't. And believe me, I have tried to understand it for years. So, I will share my ignorance with you. First, how does it work?

Let's take classic computer. One bit is a coin. You flip the coin, head or tail, zero or one. The system is deterministic. It looks at the result, zero or one.

Two bits, four possibilities, and so on. It processes information sequentially, one after the other. Classical computer, the power is about the speed. How many you do every second. Now, quantum computing.

Qubits, it's the same coin, but it is spinning. It is not deterministic. It is probabilistic. When it's spinning, it's both heads and tails at the same time. It's superposition.

So, what the computer does is putting probabilities on the zero and on the one, the alpha and beta that you see. They are complex amplitudes, complex numbers, the one invented 500 years ago, that describe all the possibilities at the same time. You add a qubit, you exponentially grow. So, a quantum computer power is not about speed, it's about how much you embrace. What do we do with that?

We do impossible simulation. You embrace all the possibilities at the same time. You accelerate science, discover drugs, materials, you accelerate machine learning, you optimize uh supply chains, financial markets, anything you want. So, that's very powerful. When do we get one?

We have to wait. We have the first commercial application, but it's mostly about research and development. The current focus is on the quality logical qubits as opposed to the quantity, but you have road maps, IBM, Microsoft, and Alphabet to 1 million qubit. Difficult to realize how much it is. Let's me illustrate.

Imagine a system with 270 qubits in 5 years. This processes at the same time two to the power of 270 complex numbers. It is the number of atoms in the observable universe. That's the power that it has. We're not there, but in 2025, Google's Willow made a calculation so quickly that Google's people themselves said maybe calculation happened in parallel universe.

They are serious people. I mean, uh his first name is Hartmut. You cannot be more serious than that. That's where we are and that's the transition to my last topic, which is space and military technology. Let's start with the latter.

If you want to know what is next in tech, don't look at banks, look at the military. They invented everything. I mean, we had weapons before having shoes. That's how it is. The current thing to look at is, of course, autonomous systems and ethics.

And I've put the Palantir as an example. There's nothing more advanced than the decision in terms of AI ethics than the decision to kill a human with a machine. So, that's something to watch. Then space, of course. It starts with satellites, interconnection of all of us.

Interestingly, from a place that is legally belongs to nobody and everybody. That's the outer space treaty. So, from a regulation perspective, it will transform telecommunication as well. Then you go further to other planets. Why would you go to the moon again?

Well, there are applications in tech in particular. You have very low temperature. And at the poles of the moon, you have constant solar energy. It would make sense to put a quantum computer, for example. You would have to bury it to protect it from radiations.

Quantum computers, they operate near the absolute zero in temperature. So, what do you need to go there? You need rockets. You need robots with artificial intelligence so that they are autonomous and can build your base. You need solar technology, batteries.

And if you have a company that know-how to dig holes in the ground like a tunnel company, well, it's better. And if you feel that this looks like the catalog of activities of a certain man, a man who also owns a fleet of satellites and who was also a former partner of the founder of Palantir, it's probably a coincidence. Mr. Elon Musk, the world's richest man, has everything to do that. And talking about riches, the rock that you see on the right is called the Psyche 16.

It's a small asteroid, 200 km wide, between Mars and Jupiter. There is gold on it. Between 1 and 20 billion tons. That's a million times the wealth of Elon Musk, but it's zero if we take it back. NASA sent a a mission there.

We started with gold, we end with gold. My conclusion could be that blockchain re-wires money, AI re-wires the economy, space provides infinite resources, and quantum computing accelerates everything to super intelligence. But it's not my conclusion. Super intelligence. For the first time in history, humanity will have a cognitive competitor.

Somebody better than us. Who controls who? That's the question that the Nobel Prize asked last year. Who controls who? Will we be obsolete?

It's a big question. And for the finance week, I've looked for answers. So, what CIOs do, we look in the past. Has it ever happened to find somebody who was better than everyone else at everything? Super intelligence.

And I found this gentleman, Isaac Newton. You cannot get closer to a super intelligence. This gentleman, when he was 20, 20, locked down in a farm, in less than 2 years, he reinvented mathematics with calculus, optics, he built a telescope, and gravity. Less than 2 years when he was 20. Then he invented pretty much everything.

And what is also interesting is that at some point, he became master of the Royal Mint, which is the closest thing you can find 500 years ago as being the Fed chairman for the British Empire, which was the most powerful in the world. Genius. Super intelligence. But one day, he reached the limit. The madness of people.

He said, "I can do everything, not the madness of people." Why did he say that? He said that because he lost all his fortune, all his fortune, by trading in the stock market, the South Sea stock, an infamous bubble. And this is how he traded. He bought a bit, he sold a bit, then he bought a ton, everything he had, and he sold everything.

It hurts, huh? It hurts. But it gives me hope. Because if this is the result of a super intelligence when it comes to finance, maybe we simple humans are not obsolete immediately. Thank you very much.

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