The A.I. Boom and the Spectre of 1929

"As stocks plummeted on the morning of October 24th, 1929, a large crowd gathered on Wall Street outside of the New York Stock Exchange. Pat Bologna, a local shoeshiner whose life savings were invested in the market, dodged into a packed brokerage nearby. "Everybody is shouting," he later recalled. "They're all trying to reach the glass booth where the clerks are. The boy at the quotation board is running scared."

"In the age of online trading and algorithmic traders, the next stock crash, whenever it comes, will be a largely digital phenomenon. But its consequences will certainly play out in the analog world: wealth destruction, human anguish, fallout in the rest of the economy. On Wall Street, as the speculative A.I. boom continues to grow, even some financial titans are acknowledging that it might not end well."

As stocks plunged on October 24, 1929, crowds surged outside the New York Stock Exchange and panicked investors sought to sell, producing chaotic scenes and instant losses. The crash left profound national scars through wealth destruction, widespread human anguish, and cascading economic fallout. Modern markets are now driven by online trading and algorithmic systems, making future crashes largely digital yet with analog consequences. The speculative A.I. boom has prompted concern from major bankers who warn of an inevitable drawdown. Geopolitical actions, such as threatened tariffs, can trigger sharp, volatile moves in major indices that can quickly reverse as rhetoric changes.

Read at The New Yorker