\t\t\t\t\tSign up to see the future, today<\/p>\n
Can\u2019t-miss innovations from the bleeding edge of science and tech<\/p>\n
At this point, the parade of doomsayers warning of the collapse of the AI bubble is almost endless.<\/p>\n
Renowned financial commentators like Harris Kupperman have warned that the math on data center investments<\/a> is unsustainable, economists like Michael Roberts<\/a> have called AI the \u201cbiggest economic bet in US history,\u201d and even the International Monetary Fund has begun fretting<\/a> that the world economy is on a knife\u2019s edge.<\/p>\n But in the ongoing AI gold rush, the wealthy and powerful keep pumping money into AI and its attendant industries anyway.<\/p>\n Now, crypto investor and finance media guru Raoul Pal is warning of his own kind of AI doomsday \u2014 but one where an AI takeover, not a bursting bubble, brings the conventional economy to its knees.<\/p>\n \u201cThe next four years are going to feel very different to anything we\u2019ve lived through,\u201d Pal wrote in a post<\/a> on X-formerly-Twitter.<\/p>\n The post is nakedly self-promotional \u2014 it appears alongside a clip of the finance pundit\u2019s \u201cWhen Shift Happens podcast,\u201d and is followed by a link to buy his book, \u201cThe Everything Code\u201d \u2014 but even so, Pal does raise some bold claims to his 1.5 million followers.<\/p>\n \u201cYour wages haven\u2019t kept up with the cost of living for years now,\u201d he exclaims. \u201cGovernments have to keep debasing the currency to fund everything, and it\u2019s eating into your pay every single year. That part isn\u2019t new.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWhat is new,\u201d Pal continues, \u201cis that we have maybe four years before the world as we know it stops working the way it does now. The exponential technologies\u2026 AI, robotics, energy, crypto\u2026 are moving so fast that the systems built for the old world can\u2019t keep up.\u201d<\/p>\n Eventually, in Pal\u2019s reading, the development of these industries will lead to an economy in which the average person \u201ccan\u2019t trust what you see or hear anymore.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cEven the idea of running a business stops meaning what it means today,\u201d he says \u2014\u00a0a moment he calls the \u201cEconomic Singularity.\u201d<\/p>\n As the saying goes, strong claims require even stronger evidence. Bold though Pal\u2019s prophecies are, they rest on some vague observations of the world taken as gospel.<\/p>\n Persistent inflation, for example \u2014 which seems to be the foundation of Pal\u2019s metaphysical theory \u2014\u00a0is not a new phenomenon, and the crypto investor is far from the first one to observe it. As the economist Richard Wolff observed in 2022<\/a>, inflationary pressure is a longstanding feature of capitalism, not a portent of end-times.<\/p>\n As for whether macroeconomic conditions will be drastically changed four years from now, that may very well be the case, but the same could likely be said for 2004 versus 2008, or 2016 compared to 2020. Those moments of severe economic crises changed things dramatically for working class people, but the structures of capitalism survived.<\/p>\n Pal\u2019s arrival as one of many woo woo doomsayers at a time of severe financial hardship<\/a> for millions isn\u2019t a coincidence \u2014 he\u2019s an oracle for people in desperate need of order among economic chaos.<\/p>\n