It may be the first time that a work of fiction has tanked the stock market.
Last week, a viral blog post from Citrini Research titled The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis outlined a scenario in which, two years from now, artificial intelligence has progressed to the point that it eliminates jobs on a mass scale in nearly every industry. In Citrini’s doomsday alternative reality, this leads to a cratering of consumer spending, more AI adoption to cut costs, deeper unemployment, a stock market crash, mortgage defaults, and so on.
This “thought experiment” sounded realistic enough to investors that last Monday, all the major stock indexes opened sharply lower, and fell further over most of the day. Hardest hit were companies specifically mentioned in the memo, such as American Express, which lost nearly 8 percent.
