The thought exercise posted by Citrini Research on Substack over the weekend continues to ping around Wall Street.
In a piece published Tuesday evening, Frank Flight, macro strategist at Citadel, offered a rebuttal of sorts to the depressing scenario outlined in Citrini’s post that described a not-too-distant future in which AI has displaced millions of jobs, consumer spending has plummeted, and the benefits of AI’s relentless march accrue to a select few companies, their employees, and investors.
In his post, Flight takes on a number of assumptions that underpin the argument that underpins what Citrini dubbed the Global Intelligence Crisis 2028.
My favorite raises the issue of accounting identities, or simply the idea that losses from one sector of the economy show up as gains somewhere else.
We’ll quote Flight at length, with their emphasis:
There is plenty of discussion in Flight’s post, grounded in data, about how little hard evidence there is that AI is displacing workers.
There is plenty of discussion on LinkedIn about how AI is going to replace every worker.
But workers are the consumers of the output that your business creates. You, the worker, are on the supply and demand side of the economy, even when another day in the trenches of your firm’s preferred productivity tool and a slug of Teams meetings makes you feel like a replaceable cog.
Too much is made, in my view, of the idea that members of the class of “laptop workers” are doing things that don’t matter, or could be done cheaper, or by AI.
And far too little is made about the role every worker also plays in a US — and increasingly global — economy where the vast majority of growth and profits come from consumer spending.