Thought provoking, but I have just a few problems with it
Over the weekend a post online gained millions of views around the world.
It painted a doom-and-gloom prospect in a hypothetical 2028, where mass layoffs hitting white collar jobs especially hard caused a global recession, as mortgages and various credit schemes crumbled since they are built upon that middle class income which was now gone. All this because AGI got so intelligent over and beyond humans that human intelligence is now worthless, hence the 2028 intelligence crisis.
I summarize the premise as 3 fold:
- True AGI got so smart that it renders human intelligence obsolete;
- Enterprises and business entities decide that they want to maintain the same amount of output but with fewer costs and therefore less employment;
- The middle class completely vanishes, rendering all credit schemes built upon that steady income unsustainable and eventually implode.
It’s a great read and very thought provoking. If you haven’t read it, here’s the link: https://www.citriniresearch.com/p/2028gic.
I have, however, just a few problems with it:
- Are the current chatbots and LLMs true intelligence?
- If it’s unable to tell whether I should walk or drive to a carwash just down the road, simply because it was not trained on the scenario, I’d say it’s not really more intelligent than a parrot.
- Why assume entities will fix to the same output and just cut costs? Why won’t they use the higher productivity to do more- things that were too difficult or too cost ineffective?
- It’s like saying that with the invention of automobiles, a trip that used to take 2 days now takes 2 hours, therefore the transportation industry is doomed.
- Why assume white collar workers will just roll over and downshift to work in lowly paid jobs?
- If AI models are that effective and reasonably priced, why won’t they use it to start their own businesses and become solo entrepreneurs? Or they could use AI for help to transition to blue collar works or other venues that are still profitable.
- Where did the benefit of all the increase in productivity (and reduction in costs) go?
- If corporations reduced costs and have a higher profit margin, won’t that at least trickle into the other aspects of the economy, for example in the form of investment appreciation? How did stock market tank?
- Think about the intermediation, rent-seeking, friction-benefiting SaaS or whatever industries hit hardest by AGI, because friction was taken away, isn’t this a great thing for the economy, for the friction to be taken away?
- One could argue that these friction intermediation companies produce in fact ghost GDPs, consuming resources otherwise would be spent on real outputs like figuring out how to put the human race on Mars.
To conclude, I won’t be too worried about it. The logic argued by the article is sound but I think a few important assumptions are not so much.
I would even say that I’m looking forward to such a day when all unnecessary frictions and those rent-seeking intermediaries are all bankrupt from AGI.
I mean it’s 2026 already and as a garden variety W2 earner I still have to do taxes myself manually or hire some CPA to do it and pay him $400 when the rules are so well defined it should be just a simple set of if-else switches. Come on now.
The Ephemeral Tourist
February 24th. 2026 @ 9:51pm CST
The Ephemeral Tourist 