Is A.I. Eating the Labor Market? + The Latest on the Pentagon, OpenClaw and Alpha School
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
It's your day to play. It's your morning to make the most of.
It's your way to love.
It's your climate to consider.
It's your answer to what should I watch? It's your money to save.
It's your song to analyze line by line. It's your 10 ways to find a little calm. It's your world to understand. The New York Times. Find out more at nytimes.com slash your world. Casey, how's it going? You had some big news over the weekend, my friend.
I did. I did. We're going to have to update the disclosure. Yes? Why is that? Well, for the past year or so on this show, I've been disclosing that my boyfriend works at Anthropic, but we're not going to say that anymore because I don't have a boyfriend. I have a fiance.
Hey!
That's so exciting. They say that getting married is the second most serious kind of relationship you can get into with a man besides starting a podcast with him. So we'll see how it goes, but I'm very optimistic. Have you decided on a theme for your wedding yet? You know, I have to admit, we're at the very earliest stages of the planning. And so if you have any, you know, ideas, I'm very open to that.
Well, I did start brainstorming possible wedding hashtags, you know, because every couple needs one of those. Absolutely. So how about these? Okay. AGI do.
Any others?
Say yes to the press.
Now, that one I like. That one I like.
That was good. Or, of course, the classic, my husband works at Anthropic. I'm Kevin Roos, a tech columnist at the New York Times.
I'm Casey Newton from Platformer. And this is Hard Fork. This week, another viral AI essay shakes up the stock market. What's really going on? Economist Anton Koronek is here to explain it all. Plus, Anthropic versus the Pentagon and more in our system update. Do we have to restart our computer after that?
Yes.
Okay.
Well, Kevin, another week, another viral essay predicting AI caused doom, roiling the stock markets. What is going on?
Yes. So the big news from this week was that an essay written by a company called Citrini Research went viral this week. The essay is called The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis. And it basically sketched out a near future in which the AI industry eats not only the labor market, but also the business models of a number of leading companies. There were lots of examples. It's a very long essay. But basically, this was one firm's attempt to say, here's what the next few years could look like if AI progress continues.
And what this firm says it will look like is pretty bad, Kevin, right? The suggestion here is that AI agents improve and take over the economy. And so as a result, you're going to see massive job losses, like a huge contraction in the stock market and a lot of individual companies that it named in the piece like DoorDash was a big one. This essay predicts these companies are going to have a really, really hard time.
Yeah, and I was not that impressed by the Citrini research essay. I thought it made a number of logical jumps that I wouldn't make, but it had a big impact. People are blaming this essay for triggering a massive Wall Street sell-off. Companies like DoorDash, American Express, and Blackstone, all of their stock prices dropped more than 8% immediately after this essay was published. We are now in the era of market-moving science fiction. where anyone with an opinionated and reasonably informed take on what AI is doing to the economy can now trigger billions of dollars in losses in the stock market if their essay kind of catches fire as this one did.
That's right, Kevin. And that's why I'm calling on all science fiction authors to register with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Your ideas are too powerful and they must be regulated.
We're not going to spend this whole episode talking about this one essay because I think it is symptomatic of something larger and more interesting that is happening right now, which is that economic uncertainty about where all of this is headed, where AI is going, what effects that's going to have on the labor market, on the productivity gains from companies that are implementing it, on the business models of some of our largest companies, it all feels really uncertain and tenuous right now.
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Chapters
3 chaptersSpeakers
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