You make a good point about emotional dependency. I wasn't considering that, much.

This evening, I've been reading Arthur Hayes'latest and it is a little surprising how in step with Yang he is:

Profit maximizing corporation will quickly fire a sizable chunk of its knowledge workers if the AI tools are 10 or 100 times faster than a qualified human....The market will assume unemployed workers cannot meet their monthly payments on consumer credit and mortgages. Then the banks that survive will severely restrict the amount of consumer and mortgage lending because they do not know how the previously wealthiest workers will earn a living in the age of AI. Without the flow of credit, demand for real goods collapses. This is how a banking crisis completely grinds Pax Americana’s economy to a halt.

This will be a rerun of the regional bank crisis in early 2023 that destroyed three banks in a fortnight. But this time it will be much worse, as the genesis of the crisis is the unstoppable nature of AI, a narrative the market believes and is terrified by. Sell and withdraw first; investigate later. This is how investors and depositors will approach this situation as soon as everyone knows that everyone knows that all white-collar workers will lose out to AI tools and thus cannot pay their bills.

Once AI takes your accountancy, legal, investment banking, etc. jobs, they ain’t coming back. Maybe after a few years of retraining, you can get another job in whatever newfangled employment sector emerges because of AI, but that will take many years if it happens at all. You cannot service your debts in the meantime, and the market will price that collateralized auto loan debt obligation as ‌zero.

Everyone knows that everyone knows that AI is the most transformative general-purpose technology in human history. The consensus also believes that once AI comes for the arrogant college educated paper pushing lawyer, Lord Elon or more likely his Chinese competitors, will launch AI-powered robots that reduce the price of labor to near zero. Faced with these “truths”, the Fed must print bigger than it’s ever printed before. And the best part is that the politicians are so afraid of AI-sponsored credit deflation, they will gladly support another round of QE infinity.

Who am I to disagree with the likes of Yang and Hayes? But it seems to me that markets get very weird around things that everybody expects to happen. Right now, everybody expects massive white collar job loss courtesy of the Terminator (wouldn't it be just poetic if that bureaucratic term cum sci-fi horror actually returns to its hr roots?).

I don't expect that everyone is going to emerge a vibe coder like a butterfly from their pre-AI cocoon, but I really don't see how this thing that is going to obliterate all the things that people are doing will yet remain out of reach for those very same people.

I am pretty confident that hiring good people is still a good idea. Some of them will have ideas that reveal how small a closet we've been standing in all this time.

eg. Film, tv and movies are something like half a percent of GDP. This is a thing that didn't exist much more than 100 years ago, and which we could all probably be just fine. Yet there it is. I expect AI will get turned into at least one major new art form of such scale.

I intend to ask the hiring party, as in seriously, what on earth is moving them to hire right now. I didn't think I'd ever need to wonder about that, but I honestly do.

do report back.