- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
US stock markets have been hit by a further wave of AI jitters, this time from yet another viral – and completely speculative – warning about the impact of the technology on the world’s largest economy.
The latest foreboding is from Citrini Research, a little-known US firm that provides insights on “transformative ‘megatrends’”. Its post on Substack, which it called a “scenario, not a prediction”, rattled investors by portraying a near future in which autonomous AI systems – or agents – upend the entire US economy, from jobs to markets and mortgages.
Citrini’s scenario begins now and ends in June 2028, with US unemployment cresting over 10% and an Occupy Silicon Valley movement setting up camp outside OpenAI and Anthropic’s offices. In the interim, a series of events triggered by the widespread use of AI agents guts software companies and ripples outwards, hitting private credit and mortgages, and leading to an unchecked downward spiral.
Speculative as it is, the scenario has unnerved investors. The S&P dropped more than 1% on Monday, and the software component of the index fell to its lowest level since Trump’s “liberation day” tariff announcement in April. Doubtless some of the wobble is attributable to Trump’s latest tariffs, but Uber, American Express, Mastercard and DoorDash, specifically named in Citrini’s report, all lost between 4% and 6%.
Seems plausible /s
What I am seeing is algorithms price people out of housing, mortgages and rent; employers claiming AI does this and that, but is actually outsourcing and offshoring jobs to humans in places where Western wages can’t compete, despite being unlivable, from programming to customer service to “self-driving” vehicles, to art.
But also forensics, DNA mapping and gene editing.
I mean certain parts of this article indeed seem stupid, but some minor statements give away the game in ways I wish were more clear to every day people.
This shit should be shouted from the fucking rooftops even without AI in the picture. Our entire economy is a house of cards built on rent-extracting through introduction of pain points that may not have previously existed. Creating a problem and selling a solution.
It’s honestly laughable because it means on some level the investors reading this are absolutely aware that this is what they do and they are fucking fine with it. They think making things harder and extracting money from people for it is a good thing. Fucking ghouls.
Doordash isn’t rent extraction though, and is a system that benefits from a singular platform. That doesn’t mean Doordash is the best implementation of that service, but the example isn’t good.
Doordash absolutely is rent seeking, though. Restaurant operators are paying the rent—for being furnished with SaaS services that used to just entail calling the restaurant and placing a takeout/delivery order. Nevermind the SaaS platforms restaurants have to pay for in order to integrate their SCM software with the ordering apps.
We used to call to order a pizza. Now, both the restaurant and we—the consumers—pay various abstracted-away “fees” to have a middle man do the same fucking thing.
The restaurant doesn’t “own” the software, and it doesn’t “own” the data produced by its day-to-day operations. They pay to have third parties warehouse and manage their sales data for them, and sometimes even sell that data back to them for additional fees.
Delivering food has a cost and is a service. Before things like doordash you could only get delivery from select locations, by creating a network of drivers you can now get delivery from most restaurants.
Does doordash exploit people and restaurants, yes. However, providing a delivery service is not rent seeking there is something being offered.
Right, I agree that DoorDash is a bad example, I was just pointing out that the article makes some clear points about how our economy is organized and the investor class panicked not because they realized our economy is a house of cards built on unnecessary friction, but rather that they might have that house of cards taken from them.
It’s rent seeking from their own agents by having them take care of the depreciation on their vehicles instead of the corporation. Still not a perfect example, but it’s still a type of exploitation