A 7,000-word piece of science fiction published on Substack by an obscure investment research firm helped trigger a worldwide market meltdown recently. Written by the 33-year-old founder of Citrini Research, the post describes a world where, only two years from now, AI had devastated major sectors of the global economy.

This dystopian future may well come to pass. If it does, however, it will be because of choices we make, not the technology itself. And our choices should be informed by history: This is not the first time, after all, that a synthetic product has threatened to displace a natural one. One of those products is blended into the tires of your car. Another is woven into the color of your jeans.

The Citrini article argues that intelligence has always been the rate-limiting step in economic activity. Capital grows. Natural resources can be replaced. But only humans can think. And that’s what makes them (economically) valuable. If AI makes intelligence abundant, then the value of merely human intelligence should plunge — and with it the income from many forms of white-collar work. It’s not an outlier view; Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva and computer scientist and Nobel laureate Geoffrey Hinton have all warned of AI-induced job destruction.

© The Japan Times