At this point, the parade of doomsayers warning of the collapse of the AI bubble is almost endless.
Renowned financial commentators like Harris Kupperman have warned that the math on data center investments is unsustainable, economists like Michael Roberts have called AI the “biggest economic bet in US history,” and even the International Monetary Fund has begun fretting that the world economy is on a knife’s edge.
But in the ongoing AI gold rush, the wealthy and powerful keep pumping money into AI and its attendant industries anyway.
Now, crypto investor and finance media guru Raoul Pal is warning of his own kind of AI doomsday — but one where an AI takeover, not a bursting bubble, brings the conventional economy to its knees.
“The next four years are going to feel very different to anything we’ve lived through,” Pal wrote in a post on X-formerly-Twitter.
The post is nakedly self-promotional — it appears alongside a clip of the finance pundit’s “When Shift Happens podcast,” and is followed by a link to buy his book, “The Everything Code” — but even so, Pal does raise some bold claims to his 1.5 million followers.
“Your wages haven’t kept up with the cost of living for years now,” he exclaims. “Governments have to keep debasing the currency to fund everything, and it’s eating into your pay every single year. That part isn’t new.”
“What is new,” Pal continues, “is that we have maybe four years before the world as we know it stops working the way it does now. The exponential technologies… AI, robotics, energy, crypto… are moving so fast that the systems built for the old world can’t keep up.”
Eventually, in Pal’s reading, the development of these industries will lead to an economy in which the average person “can’t trust what you see or hear anymore.”
“Even the idea of running a business stops meaning what it means today,” he says — a moment he calls the “Economic Singularity.”
As the saying goes, strong claims require even stronger evidence. Bold though Pal’s prophecies are, they rest on some vague observations of the world taken as gospel.
Persistent inflation, for example — which seems to be the foundation of Pal’s metaphysical theory — is not a new phenomenon, and the crypto investor is far from the first one to observe it. As the economist Richard Wolff observed in 2022, inflationary pressure is a longstanding feature of capitalism, not a portent of end-times.
As for whether macroeconomic conditions will be drastically changed four years from now, that may very well be the case, but the same could likely be said for 2004 versus 2008, or 2016 compared to 2020. Those moments of severe economic crises changed things dramatically for working class people, but the structures of capitalism survived.
Pal’s arrival as one of many woo woo doomsayers at a time of severe financial hardship for millions isn’t a coincidence — he’s an oracle for people in desperate need of order among economic chaos.
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