A blog post, not an analyst note, briefly shook Wall Street last week.
Citrini Research’s “THE 2028 GLOBAL INTELLIGENCE CRISIS” (yes, the title was in all caps, the font of doom) imagined a 2028 in which artificial intelligence pushes unemployment above 10 per cent, collapses consumption and triggers a financial crisis.
Economist and Marginal Revolution blogger Tyler Cowen dismissed it as “incorrect right off the bat”, saying “very little is based on sound macroeconomics”.
Another high-profile economics blogger, Noah Smith, was similarly sceptical, dismissing it as a “just a scary bedtime story”.
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“Doomsday porn stuff,” said Saxo Capital Markets’ Neil Wilson. Even Citrini itself qualified that the post represented a “thought experiment”, not a formal prediction.
[ As AI anxiety jolts Wall Street, China wonders what all the fuss is aboutOpens in new window ]
Additionally, note that Citrini’s founder, James van Geelen, is a former paramedic turned newsletter entrepreneur with no analyst credentials. That hasn’t stopped Citrini building a large Substack following willing to pay $999 annually.
Thought experiment or not, credentialed analyst or not, markets reacted. Software stocks, already badly bloodied, were given another thump.
So did payment stocks such as Visa, Mastercard, and American Express. IBM suffered its worst one-day drop since 2000, although there was a little more context in this case, given AI giant Anthropic’s announcement that its AI tools could handle Cobol, a core part of IBM’s legacy business.
The episode illustrates just how fragile sentiment has become around AI. Hardly a day passes without the release of a new AI tool promising sweeping productivity gains that may spell doom for someone’s business model, even if not quite tomorrow’s earnings.
For all the breathless commentary, however, quantifiable impact is scarce. Goldman Sachs notes 70 per cent of S&P 500 companies mentioned AI on earnings calls, but only two firms quantified its effect on earnings.
In this vacuum, scenario-driven narratives can prompt outsized reactions, with investors pricing in uncertainty and acting on stories as much as facts.
