Viral Doomsday Report Lays Bare Wall Street's Deep Anxiety About AI Future
- Reference: 0180849230
- News link: https://slashdot.org/story/26/02/23/2338242/viral-doomsday-report-lays-bare-wall-streets-deep-anxiety-about-ai-future
- Source link:
> Concerns of hyperscalers overspending are out. Worries of software-industry disruption don't go far enough. The "global intelligence crisis" is about to hit. The new, broader question: What if AI is so bullish for the economy that it is actually bearish? "For the entirety of modern economic history, human intelligence has been the scarce input," Citrini wrote in a post it described as a scenario dated June 2028, not a prediction. "We are now experiencing the unwind of that premium."
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> Many of Monday's moves roughly aligned with the situation outlined by Citrini, in which fast-advancing AI tools allow spending cuts across industries, sparking mass white-collar unemployment and in turn leading to financial contagion. Software firms DataDog, CrowdStrike and Zscaler each plunged more than 9%. International Business Machines' 13% decline was its [3]worst one-day performance since 2000. American Express, KKR and Blackstone -- all name-checked by Citrini -- tumbled. That anxiety, coupled with renewed uncertainty about trade policy from Washington, weighed down major indexes Monday. The Dow Jones Industrial Average led declines, falling 1.7%, or 822 points. The S&P 500 shed 1%, while the Nasdaq composite retreated 1.1%.
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> [...] Monday's market swings extended a run of AI-linked volatility. A small research outfit that has garnered a huge Substack following for macro and thematic stock research, Citrini said in its new post that software firms, payment processors and other companies formed "one long daisy chain of correlated bets on white-collar productivity growth" that AI is poised to disrupt. [...] Shares in DoorDash also veered 6.6% lower Monday after Citrini's Substack note called the delivery app a "poster child" for how new tools would upend companies that monetize interpersonal friction. In the research firm's scenario, AI agents would help both drivers and customers navigate food deliveries at much lower costs.
[1] https://www.citriniresearch.com/p/2028gic
[2] https://www.wsj.com/finance/stocks/global-stocks-markets-dow-news-02-23-2026-06a32080
[3] https://slashdot.org/story/26/02/23/2110221/ibm-shares-crater-13-after-anthropic-says-claude-code-can-tackle-cobol-modernization
Let's think about this for a moment... (Score:5, Insightful)
If one single blog post can create so much uncertainty in these businesses that it triggers an 800 point drop in the Dow, what does that say about the fragility of the businesses themselves?
Re: Let's think about this for a moment... (Score:5, Interesting)
I think it says a lot about the amount of uncertainty in the market. Nobody knows what's going to happen next, and investors are skittish.
It's just what Kurzweil predicted -- as the pace of change keeps accelerating, peoples' ability to predict the future gets compressed into a shorter and shorter time-window, like driving at night and outrunning the headlights of your car.
Re: Let's think about this for a moment... (Score:3)
That the global markets are becoming more and more like the cryptocurrency markets.
In a way, they are similar - both run on pure speculation.
Re: (Score:3)
To borrow a quote from the post below, "as the pace of change keeps accelerating, peoples' ability to predict the future gets compressed into a shorter and shorter time-window,"
Building a new plant to produce polysilicon for solar panels took three years after two years of planning and design. The current RAM shortage is from a sudden change in demand. Assume it takes three years to build another one of them. Do you build it? Will the demand last or will the bubble burst and leave your investment stranded?
T
Re: (Score:2)
It says that Marx is laughing from his grave and calling for butlerian jihad of the new prolerariat, what else?
Re: Let's think about this for a moment... (Score:2)
It soes not take much to pop a bubble.
Re: (Score:1)
Let's see, what kind of rumor can we slashdotters collective spread to finally force the pop so computer parts are no longer so damned expensive?
That's not why the market nor IBM dropped (Score:4, Insightful)
The market dropped due to tariff mess in general, not some survey as this article alleges. The assertion that IBM dropped today due to some fear of AI economic effect is just wrong. It was the news of Anthropic threatening to eat IBM's own lunch, using Claude to help folks upgrade from COBOL, something IBM should have been able to do with its own AI tools.
This is market manipulation (Score:3)
One day it's "AI Bubble is Going To Burst", the next it's "AI Is Going To Eat The Economy".
Re: This is market manipulation (Score:2)
Both are simultaneously possible.
Re: 90 percent of people are useless and have no v (Score:2)
I agree. I'm curious how many jobs AI will impact in Laos and Thailand, for example. If anything, it's going to affect jobs that didn't produce much value in the first place.
Re: 90 percent of people are useless and have no v (Score:2)
Things is that folks already know perhaps most office workers are superfluous. AI won't shine a new light on that, though it could rationalize some shift in strategy towards them.
Several factors into why office workforce is padded, people wanting to brag about number of professional reports, people wanting sacrificial headcount for layoffs, leaders having no idea who is and is not useful, politics sometimes outclassing productivity...
Ah, the word famous Citrini Research (Score:2)
I was wondering when they'd weigh in.
is it me (Score:2)
or is TFS kinda hard to read?
Random blog post, or tariffs and politics? (Score:3)
I don't want to get too political here, but it's unrealistic to say that this one random blog post is responsible for the stock market drop when you have major political and economic events happening. I doubt most people have ever heard of this company let alone read their blog.
In terms of white collar work becoming obsolete, it's interesting how no one is pointing out that blue collar jobs would be even more obsolete. If an AI is intelligent enough to take all white collar work, then technically it's "over qualified" for blue collar work. But that wouldn't fit into the narrative being pushed that we should all go into HVAC and other blue collar jobs. Don't get me wrong HVAC is a great job, but it's even more vulnerable to AI than we are.
I don't buy any of these doom and gloom scenarios for a second. People thought computers would take their jobs and look where we are. The same thing is going to happen with AI.
but computers actually did take all the jobs! (Score:4, Interesting)
Computers were mostly women, who did basic math as a job. The machines replaced all of them.
Re: Random blog post, or tariffs and politics? (Score:3)
Genuinely curious, how are blue collar jobs that require climbing into attics and crawlspaces and generally performing physically demanding/relatively high dexterity tasks in addition to solving the vision and planning problems associated with any basic hvac, plumbing, or electrical job, more ripe for replacement by Ai than desk jobs that only need computation?
You need to solve a whole class of physical robotics challenges that no one has demonstrated they can solve at a speed needed to compete with a human
Wrong doomsday (Score:1)
There seems to be a concerted effort to flood the media space with AI related hopium as of late. All these x industry is doomed cuz AI articles not linked to any substantive advance or change in the AI landscape wreak of desperation. The real story is the AI bubble is bursting.
Re: Wrong doomsday (Score:2)
Perhaps one last ditch attempt before announcing IPO for the early investors to cash out.
multiple doomsday scenarios (Score:2)
Like a Russian nesting doll of doomsdays. We will remove one only to find another waiting for us.
Our fate has been a series of FAFO that has been decades in the making.
Post hoc ergo propter hoc (Score:1)
It was actually caused by Trump's ego-defending 15% tariff on the whole world.
Alright, kill the AI then (Score:5, Insightful)
It's bad news all around. If it doesn't work, trillions of dollars wasted. If it does work we have no economy. Time to shoot Sam Altman and the other AI bros into the sun. They can even use one of the rockets made by their fellow AI bro Elon.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
This isn't an "AI" problem at all, it is a problem of a weakening economy, brought about by decades of eroding fundamentals for short-term profits, sped up by a moronic rush to idiocracy and kleptocracy.
The "AI" is just one of the many corruption schemes.