Ryan Knudson

This doomsday vision of the future helped fuel Monday's huge sell-off in the stock market for all sorts of companies that were either named directly in the post or that have business models that AI agents could replace.

So how concerned should we really be about the future laid out in the Citrini report?

That's next.

After Citrini's hypothetical vision of the future went viral, critiques of it started going viral too.

David says the criticism falls into two broad camps.

The first has to do with that ghost GDP concept, the idea that the value created by AI won't go back into the real economy.

The second big camp of criticism is that the piece focuses too much on the negatives of AI without getting into the possible upsides.

I've heard some critics say that human desires are limitless.

As long as humans have desires, there will be jobs out there to satisfy those desires.

There are a lot of jobs that don't exist anymore thanks to technological innovation, and yet we still find businesses to create and things to spend money on.

I mean, if you told somebody 100 years ago that your job was social media influencer or podcast host, they'd think you're insane.

But even though this whole report was just speculation, it still had a real-world impact.

So what does this moment tell us about Wall Street's understanding of AI?

By the end of the week, the stocks that had dropped related to the Citrini report had mostly bounced back, especially as more prominent analysts started spreading their counterpoints.

David says it'll take a lot to disrupt the U.S.

economy, which over time keeps proving its resilience.

Either way, there will be growing pains.

This week, the payments company Block, which owns Cash App and Square, announced that it was laying off 40% of its workforce.

The company's CEO, Jack Dorsey, said on X that AI was transforming how people do their jobs and that he wanted to get ahead of it.

He wrote, quote, we're already seeing that the intelligence tools we're creating and using paired with smaller and flatter teams are enabling a new way of working, which fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company.