If everything is an AI crisis, then nothing is

LAST week, investors were given a 7,000-word jump scare by Citrini Research in the form of a dystopian memo that vividly described how agentic artificial intelligence (AI) would send the economy into a deflationary tailspin by 2028.

In this scenario, the worst things imaginable happen – businesses are gutted, stocks plunge and white-collar workers are made crushingly obsolete. This “memo”, which critics have variously deemed “market-moving science fiction” or predicated on “extreme and improbable” conditions, unfolds like a zombie apocalypse movie.

There is a terrifying headline here, an eye-popping statistic there – except it’s the economy that is the zombie and no shambling monster wants to devour our brains because AI has co-opted all the high-value cognition.