Before last week the name Alap Shah didn\u2019t ring a bell for many people. The 45-year-old financial analyst and tech entrepreneur had spent the past two decades working in relative obscurity. Then last weekend he coauthored a blog with the research firm Citrini titled \u201cThe 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis.\u201d It was a \u201cthought exercise\u201d about the impacts of artificial intelligence, and it predicted that in June of that year, AI would jack up unemployment past 10 percent and force the Dow down, down, down. Writing in a confident, Nostradamic tone\u2014as if auditioning for starring roles in the next Michael Lewis book\u2014the authors painted a picture of a flywheel in reverse: AI agents take jobs from workers, people spend less, and struggling corporations conduct layoffs on top of layoffs.<\/p>\n
There wasn\u2019t much in it that hadn\u2019t been previously heard, or speculated about. Tech leaders like Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei have already estimated that half the entry level white collar jobs will soon be gone<\/a>, and earlier this year, Anthropic\u2019s release of new agentic tools spurred a Wall Street selloff<\/a>. Nonetheless the report hit with the force of the blizzard blowing through lower Manhattan. When the closing chimes sounded on the New York Stock Exchange, the Dow was down 800 points. The name Alap Shah was now ringing bells.<\/p>\n The achievement is less impressive than it seems. Wall Street, like the rest of us, is in a persistent state of anxiety about AI, and it doesn\u2019t take much to trigger a mini-panic. Financial markets don\u2019t necessarily map to reality, but the jitters reflect a wider disquiet. The AI future is in a William Gibson zone\u2014it\u2019s here, but unevenly distributed\u2014and the news from those already living in the agent-packed, AI code-writing universe is both exciting and unsettling. Emphasis on unsettling.<\/p>\n No one\u2014no one!\u2014knows exactly how AI will impact the economy, but clearly it will be significant. Right now stocks are soaring, so it seems to make sense to keep the party going. But then along comes the latest doom manifesto, or a paper indicating that a traditional business sector might be threatened by AI, and suddenly money managers are reminded that the biggest issue of our time is totally unresolved. Case in point: earlier this month, a tiny company (valuation under $6 million) that had previously sold karaoke machines pivoted to AI-powered shipping logistics and put out a report saying that it had discovered some efficiencies in loading semi-trucks. That was enough to erase billions of dollars<\/a> from the share prices of several major logistics companies, none of which had karaoke experience.<\/p>\n