Wall Street Has AI Psychosis

"Tech leaders like Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei have already estimated that half the entry level white collar jobs will soon be gone, and earlier this year, Anthropic's release of new agentic tools spurred a Wall Street selloff. 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."

"Wall Street, like the rest of us, is in a persistent state of anxiety about AI, and it doesn't take much to trigger a mini-panic. Financial markets don't necessarily map to reality, but the jitters reflect a wider disquiet. The AI future is in a William Gibson zone-it's here, but unevenly distributed-and the news from those already living in the agent-packed, AI code-writing universe is both exciting and unsettling."

"No one-no one!-knows 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 pa"

Alap Shah, a financial analyst and tech entrepreneur, gained sudden prominence after coauthoring a blog post titled "The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis" with research firm Citrini. The post presented a thought exercise predicting that AI would cause unemployment to exceed 10 percent and trigger a major stock market decline by June 2028. The scenario described a negative feedback loop where AI agents displace workers, reducing consumer spending and forcing corporate layoffs. Though the predictions echoed existing concerns from tech leaders like Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, the blog post coincided with an 800-point Dow decline. The market's dramatic reaction reflects broader anxiety about AI's economic consequences, though the actual impact remains uncertain and unevenly distributed across sectors.

Read at WIRED