Traders who have ignored threats to Fed independence, erratic trade policy, and the deportation of much of the American labor force just panicked over a citation-free piece of fan fiction.

  

From CNN:

Fears of AI disruption continue to weigh on markets. Citrini Research on Sunday published a report on Substack laying out hypothetical scenarios for how developments in AI could disrupt certain parts of the economy. Stocks that were mentioned in the report tumbled on Monday.

American Express shares (AXP) sank 7.2% and had their worst day since April. Shares of DoorDash (DASH) and private equity firm KKR (KKR), two other companies named in the post, sank 6.6% and 8.89%, respectively.

Calling this a report is really stretching things. It is another one of those bloated “letter from the future” fanfics that are alarmingly common in the tech visionary world. Despite its absurd length, there is virtually nothing of substance here. I’m not going to attempt any kind of comprehensive takedown (fortunately, Ed Zitron has taken care of that in an annotated version I’ll be quoting from).

I tried to read the original first, but I only made it about a third of the way through—I don’t get paid for doing this, but if I did, you would not be paying me enough to do that—but with the snarky comments from Zitron reminding me that I was the one who was crazy, I managed to make it to the end.

There is not a single page here that doesn’t say something worth criticizing, so I’ll limit myself to the passage that caused so much damage in the financial services sector today.

 

 

 

 [Friction going to zero is a favorite incantation of the singularity crowd, but we'll have to come back to that in a future post.]

It should go without saying that a rational market would not rush to dump financial services companies because someone claims (with no support whatsoever) that AI is about to replace credit cards with crypto.

There is nothing of value in the Citrini "report," nothing useful to be learned, but the fact that people are listening to it tells us a great deal, none of it good.