{"id":314205,"date":"2026-02-24T05:41:08","date_gmt":"2026-02-24T05:41:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/314205\/"},"modified":"2026-02-24T05:41:08","modified_gmt":"2026-02-24T05:41:08","slug":"the-citrini-post-is-just-a-scary-bedtime-story","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/314205\/","title":{"rendered":"The Citrini post is just a scary bedtime story"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Art by Nano Banana Pro<\/p>\n

If you don\u2019t like posts about AI, I have some bad news: For the next few years, there are probably going to be a lot of them. It\u2019s not often one gets to live through an industrial revolution in real time, especially one that moves so quickly. There will be very few pieces of the economy \u2014 if any \u2014 that this revolution doesn\u2019t touch, and it will have major implications for other things I write about (geopolitics, society, etc.). AI is not going to be a special, compartmentalized topic for a long time; it\u2019s going to be central to a lot of what\u2019s going on. If you find that boring, well, all I can say is, we don\u2019t get to choose the times we live in. <\/p>\n

Anyway, today\u2019s post is about the macroeconomics of AI, so that\u2019s fun. I started out writing about macro long ago, and I haven\u2019t really kept up with it in recent years.<\/p>\n

Every couple of weeks, someone comes out with a big post about how AI is changing everything, and the post goes viral and everyone talks about it for a few days. A couple of weeks ago it was Matt Shumer\u2019s \u201cSomething Big is Happening<\/a>\u201d. This week it\u2019s Citrini Research\u2019s \u201cTHE 2028 GLOBAL INTELLIGENCE CRISIS<\/a>\u201d (yes, the title is in all caps):<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

THE 2028 GLOBAL INTELLIGENCE CRISIS<\/p>\n

Preface\u2026<\/p>\n

Read more<\/p>\n

a day ago \u00b7 2338 likes \u00b7 76 comments \u00b7 Citrini and Alap Shah<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

The post paints a picture of a future in which AI disrupts lots of different kinds of white-collar work and service-industry business models in industries like software, finance, business services, and so on, and in which this disruption causes an economic crisis. <\/p>\n

This is really two theses in one \u2014 a microeconomic thesis about which industries and jobs AI will disrupt, and a macroeconomic thesis about what this will do to the economy overall. People are debating both. For a counterargument to the idea that AI is about to take all the white-collar jobs, I recommend this post by John Loeber:<\/p>\n

\"X<\/p>\n

John Loeber \ud83c\udfa2@johnloeber<\/p>\n

https:\/\/t.co\/zAdYyDTjMV<\/p>\n

1:43 AM \u00b7 Feb 23, 2026 \u00b7 1.05M Views<\/p>\n

101 Replies \u00b7 239 Reposts \u00b7 2.41K Likes<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

And I also recommend this post from January by Seb Krier<\/a>, which of course doesn\u2019t address the Citrini piece, but which does paint a vivid scenario for how humans might still have jobs in the age of AI.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t really have a dog in this microeconomic fight, because, frankly speaking, I don\u2019t have an expert-level understanding of either the industries or the jobs in question. It has been interesting to see the market react to the Citrini post, though. A bunch of software and finance stocks fell<\/a>, including many companies that Citrini mentioned by name:<\/p>\n

This is pretty interesting, from a finance perspective. It\u2019s pretty normal these days to see companies\u2019 stocks falling based on news of AI\u2019s disruptive potential \u2014 IBM just fell when Anthropic revealed that its AI models can handle COBOL, and a bunch of cybersecurity stocks fell a few days ago when Anthropic\u2019s models found a bunch of security flaws<\/a>. But those were real announcements of model capabilities; Citrini\u2019s post was just a scenario for how some current business models could be disrupted. <\/p>\n

Was that scenario really news? Did none of the analysts tasked with keeping tabs on Visa and Mastercard stock really think about the possibility of AI disruption until a blogger sketched out a sci-fi future mentioning those companies by name? I have my doubts. Instead, this smells more like a wave of sentiment \u2014 basically, a bunch of traders read the post, got spooked, and coordinated their panic-selling on the stocks that the post mentioned. <\/p>\n

(The inclusion of DoorDash in the stocks that fell suggests this as well. DoorDash is no marvel of software engineering; it was always easily possible to clone the platform even before AI. Its profits are based on a first-mover advantage and network effect, which Claude Code can\u2019t simply conjure up out of nothingness.)<\/p>\n

But in any case, time will tell whether Citrini was right about those companies and those business models. I have a lot more to say about the macroeconomic thesis \u2014 the idea that the rapid destruction of a bunch of American companies will cause a financial crisis and a recession. Citrini posits an unemployment rate of over 10% \u2014 Great Recession levels \u2014 as well as a drop in consumption. <\/p>\n

Citrini doesn\u2019t use an explicit macroeconomic model, so we can\u2019t really see what assumptions they\u2019re making; it\u2019s not clear how they think the economy works in the first place, so we don\u2019t know exactly why they think the economy crashes. But we can make a couple of guesses. In fact, I see two vaguely plausible ways that an AI-driven service productivity boom could actually end up crashing the economy. Neither one is very likely, though.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Art by Nano Banana Pro If you don\u2019t like posts about AI, I have some bad news: For…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":314206,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[220,218,219,61,60,80],"class_list":["post-314205","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/314205","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=314205"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/314205\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/314206"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=314205"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=314205"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=314205"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}