Critics of generative AI have for the most part been obsessed with a single question: What if the several hundred billion–dollar bet on the future of the world economy fails? This isn’t just a concern about the benefits of the technology. Bottlenecks exist at seemingly every stage. Energy supply is severely constrained by regional war in West Asia; information is limited by copyright laws; fewer than half of planned data centers are actually being built; and chips may too be in short supply.
Meanwhile, the usefulness of actually existing AI has proved hard to calculate. A paper by Nobel Prize–winning economist Daron Acemoglu calculated that the new technology has had little effect on productivity and is unlikely to do so in the future. For day-to-day users, who employ large language models at work, their experience is often one of having to pick through inaccuracies and confusions caused by machine “hallucinations.”
Given the hype surrounding AI, it is hard to avoid the feeling that the whole US economy is balancing rather precariously on a house of cards.
For enthusiasts, AI promises to usher in something that socialists have long dreamed of: a world without scarcity in which human beings can move finally from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom. While cynicism is an understandable response to this valuation-boosting hype, it shouldn’t prevent us from taking this possibility seriously. What if AI actually works?
Citrini Research, a New York–based investment research firm founded in 2023 by James van Geelen and known for its “guerrilla” thematic and macro research work, took a stab at answering this question last February. The result was a thought experiment, “The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis,” written as a fictional postmortem from June 2028. It details a systemic economic collapse triggered by the sudden unwinding of the scarcity of human intelligence. What this means is AI eviscerates service industries, causing mass…
Auteur: Nicholas Beuret
