- 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%.
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“Shook the US markets” is that last dip in the chart. Nothing happened and we’re losing our minds over it. There’s been 5 bigger drops over the last 3 months than what happened on monday.
Investors are obviously stupid fucking people spooked by any old horseshit and who buy into any old horseshit.
Unless there’s AI magic going on behind the scenes we’re not being told about, autonomous AI agents are nowhere near a reality and won’t be because LLMs are a dead-end in regards to that.
Seriously our world is run by the people least fucking fit to do so. I’m just some random asshat who knows fuck-all. I’m not smart enough for the people who run the world to be this fucking stupid in comparison.
You had me at “gallows in the streets”.
Their plan is to own everything so that the economy is irrelevant. What they want is to go back to the days where you worked for the mining company but got paid in company currency that could only be redeemed at company stores.
Instead of using DoorDash, developers – and civilians – code up their own food delivery apps, all of which compete, fragment the market, and destroy the margins of legacy businesses. Business for Uber and other ride-sharing apps also evaporates. Instead of using Visa and Mastercard, AI agents decide to do all business in cryptocurrency, because transaction costs are cheaper. This guts traditional payment providers.
To Citrini, this is a logical endpoint for tireless AI agents that have the time and capability to optimise everything. “Habitual app loyalty, the entire basis of the business model, simply didn’t exist for a machine,” it writes.
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.
Over the past fifty years, the U.S. economy built a giant rent-extraction layer on top of human limitations: things take time, patience runs out, brand familiarity substitutes for diligence, and most people are willing to accept a bad price to avoid more clicks. Trillions of dollars of enterprise value depended on those constraints persisting.
We had overestimated the value of “human relationships”. Turns out that a lot of what people called relationships was simply friction with a friendly face.
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.
What fucking stupid, late stage capitalist, Pollyannic naive horse shit. Wow.
DoorDash doesn’t provide a delivery service. They don’t pay delivery drivers to deliver, they don’t provide vehicles, benefits, or even consider drivers employees. People pay DoorDash for access to use their software/platform to receive requests from customers for delivery services. DoorDash offers a series of contract plans in which a driver pays fees for various tiers of DoorDash acting as a payment processor, can opt for a per-job rate reductions to guarantee a “base job rate” (without any guarantee of jobs assigned), and are otherwise uncompensated for “non-active” time.
The exploitation comes in the form of a monopolized rentier platform. In the same way that you might pay a landlord for access to a space to rest your pretty little head at night, restaurants and drivers pay premiums for access to a digital space to market services to one another. DoorDash doesn’t make anything other than software, and you can’t even “buy” DoorDash’s software.
Instead of creating value through the production of goods, DoorDash acts as a digital landlord that extracts surplus value (rent) from both restaurants and laborers by controlling the digital infrastructure necessary for exchange.
Just like a landlord, DoorDash owns the digital “land” (i.e. the application, algorithm, and user interface) connecting customers, merchants, and workers.By controlling this infrastructure, DoorDash acts as a tollbooth. It charges restaurants a high commission fee (ranging from 15% to 30%+) for every order. This fee is a form of monopoly rent, where DoorDash takes a portion of the restaurant’s profits simply for allowing them to access customers, similar to a landlord extracting rent.
DoorDash does not cook the food or directly employ the delivery workers as staff (again, they’re “contractors”, which DD has lobbied heavily to ensure). The restaurant produces the value (the food), and the driver performs the labor of delivery. They are a glorified phone service, however convenient or “neato” you might think they are.
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
The “feedback without any breaks” dynamic certainly is what the AI industry is capable of, but it isn’t because of how powerful AI is, it is because the humans working in the AI industry have brainworms that inhibit the suppresion of runaway feedback loops around their near spiritual beliefs about the capability of AI.
It isn’t the runaway capability of AI that is terrifying, it is the runaway rationalizations of AI cultists who can’t admit they chose a shitty horse to get behind and it is never going to go anywhere faster than it is already failing to do.
