The credit rating firm Egan-Jones hears all the serious talk about an AI murder spree apocalypse and raises a mundane, financial one.
In a commentary bluntly titled “It’s Over,” the firm proclaimed that AI is about to obliterate the collective hyperstition and capitalist long con commonly known as “the economy.”
“AI has advanced so far that the complete disruption of the economy is all but certain, and firms that sell expertise by the hour, senior talent included, are first in line,” its summary reads. “Expected compressed margins in professional services, lower returns to venture capital and short-term pressure on home prices as screen-based jobs are disrupted.”
AI’s supposed existential risks are the talk of the town right now. The industry’s leaders, including Elon Musk, Dario Amodei, and Mark Zuckerberg, recently went to the White House to sign what was effectively a pinky promise to self-regulate and not build models that would destroy the world.
Back on terra firma, experts continue to fear how AI automation could potentially upend entire industries and destroy whole categories of jobs.
These fears aren’t new, but the reason that Egan-Jones is making its grim pronouncement now is “that the capabilities of the latest models appear to have surpassed a threshold of quality in their output and speed for widespread adoption.”
Not only will companies use AI to economize their operations, the outfit predicts, but AI will create an “entirely new paradigm in which firms with very few people are far more successful, and some may have no people at all.”
Because startups that embrace AI can grow with less investment, Egan-Jones avers, capital will start to mean less to the companies that once relied on it. “The result is a quiet deflation in the value of money: venture firms lose leverage, and their returns compress.”
It will also annihilate consulting firms and other professional services. Advice can come from AI chatbots now, and not just guys in suits. Some consultancies are already culling their ranks in AI-related layoffs.
It bears noting that Egan-Jones is a minor credit agency, so its predictions don’t carry the same weight as the big three. Many economists say that our picture of AI job loss isn’t clear right now, and may be overblown, because employers find it expedient to attribute headcount reductions motivated for purely financial reasons to AI. In any case, it speaks to the state of affairs that economic extermination is being seriously touted as our future.
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