AI Reality Check: Is the Economy About to Collapse?

There have been some pretty dark articles published recently about all the ways in which AI is about to destroy the worldwide economy. Now, these include tales of mass unemployment and collapsing industries and white-collar workers trying to retrain for skilled crafts jobs like woodworking and plumbing. One of these pieces A World War Z-style dispatch from the year 2028, which was put out by a small financial services firm named Citrini Research, spread so widely and scared so many people that it was blamed for a temporary dip in the S<unk>P 500. All that's missing from these tales are the garbage can fires.

So how seriously should we take these economics doomsday articles? Well, if you've been following AI news recently, this is probably a question that you've been asking, and today I want to try to find some measured answers. I'm Cal Newport and this is the AI reality check. All right, here's the thing. Coverage of AI topics moves in waves.

You'll have a certain sort of take or idea that will become popular and everyone is writing and talking about it. And then sort of seemingly all at once, all the attention will move on to a new topic. As if the other one didn't exist. Like back in 2023, for example, um, I spent a lot of time trying to explain to people that a static feed forward large language model could not be considered conscious. I had fierce debates about this.

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