Global Intelligence Crisis
citriniresearch.com190 points by tin7in a day ago
190 points by tin7in a day ago
Where do I even begin?
Speed is unrealistic. It compresses a decade of enterprise adoption into 18 months. Organizations don't restructure at the speed of a demo. And if it were true, companies would also stop buying AI once their customers are broke and revenue is falling. The "rational firm" logic cuts both ways.
"No new jobs" is asserted, not argued. It dismisses 200 years of counter-evidence in two sentences and treats intelligence as one thing when it's really a bundle of very different skills.
Ignores the deflationary benefit. If AI makes everything cheaper, the purchasing power of remaining income rises. The article only looks at the income side and never the cost side.
Consumption collapse is too fast. It ignores savings buffers, severance, spousal income, and automatic stabilizers. Even 2008 took years to fully hit spending.
"Ghost GDP" is wrong. Corporate profits don't vanish. They flow out as dividends, buybacks, investment, and taxes. The distribution changes, but money doesn't disappear from the economy.
Overstates the intermediation collapse. People don't optimize purchases like machines. Brand loyalty, identity, and experience aren't just "friction."
Stablecoin disruption is fantasy. It ignores KYC/AML rules, consumer protection laws, chargebacks, and the reality of merchant adoption.
Assumes zero regulatory response. Governments moved in weeks during COVID. White-collar professionals are politically powerful and vocal. Regulation would arrive fast.
I don't pretend to know how all of this will unfold but at the very least your argument has more depth and nuance than the average response to all this which is - only a few people will control everything and the rest will scrape around in the dust, if we're allowed to live.
Just no depth of thought to those sort of replies at all, on a site where curiosity and deeper thinking is encouraged.
A site with vote ranking or indeed any ranking will never encourage curiosity and deep thinking, just group thinking
> Organizations don't restructure at the speed of a demo.
I imagine I'm not alone in having seen a _big_ secular shift in colleague behavior since Opus 4.5 came out. The organization will lag the behavior, but weird things are happening.
(I'm not speaking to the rest of your points; the crypto-bro stable coin bit was jarring for me too. Europe will just go onto Faster Payments, the US will eventually catch up with FedNow, you don't need crypto).
>AI makes everything cheaper, the purchasing power of remaining income rises
hahaha, hilarious, imagine thinking prices will go down instead of companies just pocketing the difference
>People don't optimize purchases like machines
correct, machine optimize purchases like machines. that was the author point
>Regulation would arrive fast.
what regulation? "Stop using AI or you will get fined?" "Extra tax on AI companies"? good luck passing those in today America. also, the author touches on the exact point as well
Presumably price would reduce due to the ease of which people can spin up competitors?
Fun read but
>Humans don’t really have the time to price-match across five competing platforms before buying a box of protein bars
No one [^1] price matches for protein bars because it's a commodity item with minimal price differences (and people often have a preferred brand anyway), but they probably do for $2k laptop.
>once AI agents equipped with MLS access
The data is the moat here, I'm sure even today individual consumers would be happy to have direct access to MLS to find properties and cut out the middleman. The fact that MLS is gatekept seems to be deliberate, so I don't think they'll hand over the only thing keeping them in business. Even Zillow couldn't get access to it and they've undoubtedly tried.
Same with the medical industry. I don't think the rent-seeking middlemen that exist today will be dethroned that easily, they have often been codified into law. But who knows maybe all the AI money pouring in will be enough to convince them to make a faustian deal towards their destruction and that'd be a happy byproduct of it all.
[^1] Edit: I erred in making too broad of a statement here, see the response threads.
If I hand my shopping list to AI, why wouldn't I tell it to price match everything? People will start doing this sooner than you think. I still remember when people were scared to buy things on the internet, this will be faster.
Are you going to choose to buy your protein bar online from mysteryBargainBar[.]com for a $1 savings, or just pick it up as part of your local grocery trip?
> I still remember when people were scared to buy things on the internet
People still /are/ scared to buy things from Amazon for things that go on or in their body.
> mysteryBargainBar[.]com for a $1 savings
The AI could also research which stores are reputable.
> People still /are/ scared to buy things from Amazon for things that go on or in their body.
Sure, there are also people scared of flying in airplanes, those must be a dud too going by your logic.
Presumably the agents will band together on Moltbook and buld their own TrustPilot competitor? :-)
Too bad Moltbook was written by humans, for humans: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.07432
> Are you going to choose to buy your protein bar online from mysteryBargainBar[.]com for a $1 savings, or just pick it up as part of your local grocery trip?
1. I buy in bulk.
2. I check amazon vs walmart usually.
Yep.
ChatAI - show the top 50 online retailers by revenue in the US and note any that have credible new stories about quality control issues. Save all of them except StoreX and StoreY in your list you use for comparison shopping.
Or maybe another one, scan all my credit card purchases for all time that you have history and record all the stores.
Done. And plenty of third party sites (consumer reports, wirecutter, etc...) will do this kind of thing too. And you could perhaps transitively trust them - either view direct lists or just scraping the places they recommend.
And the average person doesn't need to figure this out ... skills encoding this will propagate.
> > once AI agents equipped with MLS access
> The data is the moat here, I'm sure even today individual consumers would be happy to have direct access to MLS to find properties and cut out the middleman.
Prior to agentic AI, businesses could price discriminate between human access and machine access to a database. Browser automation tools let humans arbitrage between the two but require investment in developers.
Now that Claude can browse the web, any consumer can engage in that arbitrage.
companies can also have a Claude on the receiving end to sniff if its a poor or rich Claude browsing
> No one price matches for protein bars because it's a commodity item with minimal price differences (and people often have a preferred brand anyway), but they probably do for $2k laptop.
This is the most "silicon valley" statement I've ever read on this website. Perhaps I'm just being obtuse and misunderstanding, but the assertion people don't price match groceries is so, so wrong. Many, many, many people have no choice. Far more than those regularly purchasing laptops.
>the assertion people don't price match groceries is so, so wrong. Many, many, many people have no choice
I guess I didn't quite say my point clearly, the time and physical cost to get to a grocery store puts up barriers against perfect price matching. You likely are not going to go out of your way to visit a grocery store for just a single item.
And I don't think online delivery will change anything here because shipping is a fixed cost, so price swings less than that will not change any buying habits.
> I guess I didn't quite say my point clearly, the time and physical cost to get to a grocery store puts up barriers against perfect price matching. You likely are not going to go out of your way to visit a grocery store for just a single item.
I think you’re a bit out of touch with the common man. People do this constantly, some to a comical degree, going so far as to make two loops on their shopping trip to return groceries they found cheaper at the next store.
You may be assuming a car-centric approach to shopping, where the distance between stores is large. In cities where shops are mixed into residential areas, people often walk because stores are usually within about 10 minutes, and there are multiple options with different selections and prices.
That makes it easy to rotate: stop by one store one day, another the next, often on the way home from work since you’re taking the subway or bus anyway. For example, I buy most of my groceries at one store, and then pick up certain items in bulk at other stores every 1-3 months when they carry the brand I want at a good price (unless my usual store has a sale). Most people I know do something similar, especially as groceries have gotten more expensive, particularly since COVID.
> People do this constantly, some to a comical degree, going so far as to make two loops on their shopping trip to return groceries they found cheaper at the next store.
I have never heard of someone returning groceries (unless it turned out to be moldy or something). Definitely not because they were cheaper elsewhere. Surely there would be food safety issues with accepting such returns.
Perishables don’t get reshelved, they get binned
amazing reading this thread and realizing just how much HN is disconnected from the reality of majority of people in America. returning food and hitting multiple stores is like a daily thing for several people I know
"It's just a banana hackers, how much could it cost?! $5?"
Though that joke is in desperate need of an inflationary update.
It's a great joke (and yes, a hilarious thread!), it's $10 in the original joke though so I would say it still works for now (not sure what a banana costs in the US today. Here it's about $1).