is this true

[Uncle]

https://shumer.dev/something-big-is-happening

Think back to February 2020.

If you were paying close attention, you might have noticed a few people talking about a virus spreading overseas. But most of us weren't paying close attention. The stock market was doing great, your kids were in school, you were going to restaurants and shaking hands and planning trips. If someone told you they were stockpiling toilet paper you would have thought they'd been spending too much time on a weird corner of the internet. Then, over the course of about three weeks, the entire world changed. Your office closed, your kids came home, and life rearranged itself into something you wouldn't have believed if you'd described it to yourself a month earlier.

I think we're in the "this seems overblown" phase of something much, much bigger than Covid.

I've spent six years building an AI startup and investing in the space. I live in this world. And I'm writing this for the people in my life who don't... my family, my friends, the people I care about who keep asking me "so what's the deal with AI?" and getting an answer that doesn't do justice to what's actually happening. I keep giving them the polite version. The cocktail-party version. Because the honest version sounds like I've lost my mind. And for a while, I told myself that was a good enough reason to keep what's truly happening to myself. But the gap between what I've been saying and what is actually happening has gotten far too big. The people I care about deserve to hear what is coming, even if it sounds crazy.

I should be clear about something up front: even though I work in AI, I have almost no influence over what's about to happen, and neither does the vast majority of the industry. The future is being shaped by a remarkably small number of people: a few hundred researchers at a handful of companies... OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, and a few others. A single training run, managed by a small team over a few months, can produce an AI system that shifts the entire trajectory of the technology. Most of us who work in AI are building on top of foundations we didn't lay. We're watching this unfold the same as you... we just happen to be close enough to feel the ground shake first.

But it's time now. Not in an "eventually we should talk about this" way. In a "this is happening right now and I need you to understand it" way.

I know this is real because it happened to me first

Here's the thing nobody outside of tech quite understands yet: the reason so many people in the industry are sounding the alarm right now is because this already happened to us. We're not making predictions. We're telling you what already occurred in our own jobs, and warning you that you're next.

For years, AI had been improving steadily. Big jumps here and there, but each big jump was spaced out enough that you could absorb them as they came. Then in 2025, new techniques for building these models unlocked a much faster pace of progress. And then it got even faster. And then faster again. Each new model wasn't just better than the last... it was better by a wider margin, and the time between new model releases was shorter. I was using AI more and more, going back and forth with it less and less, watching it handle things I used to think required my expertise.

Then, on February 5th, two major AI labs released new models on the same day: GPT-5.3 Codex from OpenAI, and Opus 4.6 from Anthropic (the makers of Claude, one of the main competitors to ChatGPT). And something clicked. Not like a light switch... more like the moment you realize the water has been rising around you and is now at your chest.

I am no longer needed for the actual technical work of my job. I describe what I want built, in plain English, and it just... appears. Not a rough draft I need to fix. The finished thing. I tell the AI what I want, walk away from my computer for four hours, and come back to find the work done. Done well, done better than I would have done it myself, with no corrections needed. A couple of months ago, I was going back and forth with the AI, guiding it, making edits. Now I just describe the outcome and leave.

Let me give you an example so you can understand what this actually looks like in practice. I'll tell the AI: "I want to build this app. Here's what it should do, here's roughly what it should look like. Figure out the user flow, the design, all of it." And it does. It writes tens of thousands of lines of code. Then, and this is the part that would have been unthinkable a year ago, it opens the app itself. It clicks through the buttons. It tests the features. It uses the app the way a person would. If it doesn't like how something looks or feels, it goes back and changes it, on its own. It iterates, like a developer would, fixing and refining until it's satisfied. Only once it has decided the app meets its own standards does it come back to me and say: "It's ready for you to test." And when I test it, it's usually perfect.

I'm not exaggerating. That is what my Monday looked like this week.

But it was the model that was released last week (GPT-5.3 Codex) that shook me the most. It wasn't just executing my instructions. It was making intelligent decisions. It had something that felt, for the first time, like judgment. Like taste. The inexplicable sense of knowing what the right call is that people always said AI would never have. This model has it, or something close enough that the distinction is starting not to matter.

I've always been early to adopt AI tools. But the last few months have shocked me. These new AI models aren't incremental improvements. This is a different thing entirely.

And here's why this matters to you, even if you don't work in tech.

The AI labs made a deliberate choice. They focused on making AI great at writing code first... because building AI requires a lot of code. If AI can write that code, it can help build the next version of itself. A smarter version, which writes better code, which builds an even smarter version. Making AI great at coding was the strategy that unlocks everything else. That's why they did it first. My job started changing before yours not because they were targeting software engineers... it was just a side effect of where they chose to aim first.

They've now done it. And they're moving on to everything else.

The experience that tech workers have had over the past year, of watching AI go from "helpful tool" to "does my job better than I do", is the experience everyone else is about to have. Law, finance, medicine, accounting, consulting, writing, design, analysis, customer service. Not in ten years. The people building these systems say one to five years. Some say less. And given what I've seen in just the last couple of months, I think "less" is more likely.

"But I tried AI and it wasn't that good"

I hear this constantly. I understand it, because it used to be true.

If you tried ChatGPT in 2023 or early 2024 and thought "this makes stuff up" or "this isn't that impressive", you were right. Those early versions were genuinely limited. They hallucinated. They confidently said things that were nonsense.

That was two years ago. In AI time, that is ancient history.

The models available today are unrecognizable from what existed even six months ago. The debate about whether AI is "really getting better" or "hitting a wall" — which has been going on for over a year — is over. It's done. Anyone still making that argument either hasn't used the current models, has an incentive to downplay what's happening, or is evaluating based on an experience from 2024 that is no longer relevant. I don't say that to be dismissive. I say it because the gap between public perception and current reality is now enormous, and that gap is dangerous... because it's preventing people from preparing.

Part of the problem is that most people are using the free version of AI tools. The free version is over a year behind what paying users have access to. Judging AI based on free-tier ChatGPT is like evaluating the state of smartphones by using a flip phone. The people paying for the best tools, and actually using them daily for real work, know what's coming.

I think of my friend, who's a lawyer. I keep telling him to try using AI at his firm, and he keeps finding reasons it won't work. It's not built for his specialty, it made an error when he tested it, it doesn't understand the nuance of what he does. And I get it. But I've had partners at major law firms reach out to me for advice, because they've tried the current versions and they see where this is going. One of them, the managing partner at a large firm, spends hours every day using AI. He told me it's like having a team of associates available instantly. He's not using it because it's a toy. He's using it because it works. And he told me something that stuck with me: every couple of months, it gets significantly more capable for his work. He said if it stays on this trajectory, he expects it'll be able to do most of what he does before long... and he's a managing partner with decades of experience. He's not panicking. But he's paying very close attention.

The people who are ahead in their industries (the ones actually experimenting seriously) are not dismissing this. They're blown away by what it can already do. And they're positioning themselves accordingly.

How fast this is actually moving

Let me make the pace of improvement concrete, because I think this is the part that's hardest to believe if you're not watching it closely.

In 2022, AI couldn't do basic arithmetic reliably. It would confidently tell you that 7 × 8 = 54.

By 2023, it could pass the bar exam.

By 2024, it could write working software and explain graduate-level science.

By late 2025, some of the best engineers in the world said they had handed over most of their coding work to AI.

On February 5th, 2026, new models arrived that made everything before them feel like a different era.

If you haven't tried AI in the last few months, what exists today would be unrecognizable to you.

There's an organization called METR that actually measures this with data. They track the length of real-world tasks (measured by how long they take a human expert) that a model can complete successfully end-to-end without human help. About a year ago, the answer was roughly ten minutes. Then it was an hour. Then several hours. The most recent measurement (Claude Opus 4.5, from November) showed the AI completing tasks that take a human expert nearly five hours. And that number is doubling approximately every seven months, with recent data suggesting it may be accelerating to as fast as every four months.

But even that measurement hasn't been updated to include the models that just came out this week. In my experience using them, the jump is extremely significant. I expect the next update to METR's graph to show another major leap.

If you extend the trend (and it's held for years with no sign of flattening) we're looking at AI that can work independently for days within the next year. Weeks within two. Month-long projects within three.

Amodei has said that AI models "substantially smarter than almost all humans at almost all tasks" are on track for 2026 or 2027.

Let that land for a second. If AI is smarter than most PhDs, do you really think it can't do most office jobs?

Think about what that means for your work.

AI is now building the next AI

There's one more thing happening that I think is the most important development and the least understood.

On February 5th, OpenAI released GPT-5.3 Codex. In the technical documentation, they included this:

"GPT-5.3-Codex is our first model that was instrumental in creating itself. The Codex team used early versions to debug its own training, manage its own deployment, and diagnose test results and evaluations."

Read that again. The AI helped build itself.

This isn't a prediction about what might happen someday. This is OpenAI telling you, right now, that the AI they just released was used to create itself. One of the main things that makes AI better is intelligence applied to AI development. And AI is now intelligent enough to meaningfully contribute to its own improvement.

Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, says AI is now writing "much of the code" at his company, and that the feedback loop between current AI and next-generation AI is "gathering steam month by month." He says we may be "only 1–2 years away from a point where the current generation of AI autonomously builds the next."

Each generation helps build the next, which is smarter, which builds the next faster, which is smarter still. The researchers call this an intelligence explosion. And the people who would know — the ones building it — believe the process has already started.

What this means for your job

I'm going to be direct with you because I think you deserve honesty more than comfort.

Dario Amodei, who is probably the most safety-focused CEO in the AI industry, has publicly predicted that AI will eliminate 50% of entry-level white-collar jobs within one to five years. And many people in the industry think he's being conservative. Given what the latest models can do, the capability for massive disruption could be here by the end of this year. It'll take some time to ripple through the economy, but the underlying ability is arriving now.

This is different from every previous wave of automation, and I need you to understand why. AI isn't replacing one specific skill. It's a general substitute for cognitive work. It gets better at everything simultaneously. When factories automated, a displaced worker could retrain as an office worker. When the internet disrupted retail, workers moved into logistics or services. But AI doesn't leave a convenient gap to move into. Whatever you retrain for, it's improving at that too.

Let me give you a few specific examples to make this tangible... but I want to be clear that these are just examples. This list is not exhaustive. If your job isn't mentioned here, that does not mean it's safe. Almost all knowledge work is being affected.

Legal work. AI can already read contracts, summarize case law, draft briefs, and do legal research at a level that rivals junior associates. The managing partner I mentioned isn't using AI because it's fun. He's using it because it's outperforming his associates on many tasks.

Financial analysis. Building financial models, analyzing data, writing investment memos, generating reports. AI handles these competently and is improving fast.

Writing and content. Marketing copy, reports, journalism, technical writing. The quality has reached a point where many professionals can't distinguish AI output from human work.

Software engineering. This is the field I know best. A year ago, AI could barely write a few lines of code without errors. Now it writes hundreds of thousands of lines that work correctly. Large parts of the job are already automated: not just simple tasks, but complex, multi-day projects. There will be far fewer programming roles in a few years than there are today.

Medical analysis. Reading scans, analyzing lab results, suggesting diagnoses, reviewing literature. AI is approaching or exceeding human performance in several areas.

Customer service. Genuinely capable AI agents... not the frustrating chatbots of five years ago... are being deployed now, handling complex multi-step problems.

A lot of people find comfort in the idea that certain things are safe. That AI can handle the grunt work but can't replace human judgment, creativity, strategic thinking, empathy. I used to say this too. I'm not sure I believe it anymore.

The most recent AI models make decisions that feel like judgment. They show something that looked like taste: an intuitive sense of what the right call was, not just the technically correct one. A year ago that would have been unthinkable. My rule of thumb at this point is: if a model shows even a hint of a capability today, the next generation will be genuinely good at it. These things improve exponentially, not linearly.

Will AI replicate deep human empathy? Replace the trust built over years of a relationship? I don't know. Maybe not. But I've already watched people begin relying on AI for emotional support, for advice, for companionship. That trend is only going to grow.

I think the honest answer is that nothing that can be done on a computer is safe in the medium term. If your job happens on a screen (if the core of what you do is reading, writing, analyzing, deciding, communicating through a keyboard) then AI is coming for significant parts of it. The timeline isn't "someday." It's already started.

Eventually, robots will handle physical work too. They're not quite there yet. But "not quite there yet" in AI terms has a way of becoming "here" faster than anyone expects.

What you should actually do

I'm not writing this to make you feel helpless. I'm writing this because I think the single biggest advantage you can have right now is simply being early. Early to understand it. Early to use it. Early to adapt.

Start using AI seriously, not just as a search engine. Sign up for the paid version of Claude or ChatGPT. It's $20 a month. But two things matter right away. First: make sure you're using the best model available, not just the default. These apps often default to a faster, dumber model. Dig into the settings or the model picker and select the most capable option. Right now that's GPT-5.2 on ChatGPT or Claude Opus 4.6 on Claude, but it changes every couple of months. If you want to stay current on which model is best at any given time, you can follow me on X (@mattshumer_). I test every major release and share what's actually worth using.

Second, and more important: don't just ask it quick questions. That's the mistake most people make. They treat it like Google and then wonder what the fuss is about. Instead, push it into your actual work. If you're a lawyer, feed it a contract and ask it to find every clause that could hurt your client. If you're in finance, give it a messy spreadsheet and ask it to build the model. If you're a manager, paste in your team's quarterly data and ask it to find the story. The people who are getting ahead aren't using AI casually. They're actively looking for ways to automate parts of their job that used to take hours. Start with the thing you spend the most time on and see what happens.

And don't assume it can't do something just because it seems too hard. Try it. If you're a lawyer, don't just use it for quick research questions. Give it an entire contract and ask it to draft a counterproposal. If you're an accountant, don't just ask it to explain a tax rule. Give it a client's full return and see what it finds. The first attempt might not be perfect. That's fine. Iterate. Rephrase what you asked. Give it more context. Try again. You might be shocked at what works. And here's the thing to remember: if it even kind of works today, you can be almost certain that in six months it'll do it near perfectly. The trajectory only goes one direction.

This might be the most important year of your career. Work accordingly. I don't say that to stress you out. I say it because right now, there is a brief window where most people at most companies are still ignoring this. The person who walks into a meeting and says "I used AI to do this analysis in an hour instead of three days" is going to be the most valuable person in the room. Not eventually. Right now. Learn these tools. Get proficient. Demonstrate what's possible. If you're early enough, this is how you move up: by being the person who understands what's coming and can show others how to navigate it. That window won't stay open long. Once everyone figures it out, the advantage disappears.

Have no ego about it. The managing partner at that law firm isn't too proud to spend hours a day with AI. He's doing it specifically because he's senior enough to understand what's at stake. The people who will struggle most are the ones who refuse to engage: the ones who dismiss it as a fad, who feel that using AI diminishes their expertise, who assume their field is special and immune. It's not. No field is.

Get your financial house in order. I'm not a financial advisor, and I'm not trying to scare you into anything drastic. But if you believe, even partially, that the next few years could bring real disruption to your industry, then basic financial resilience matters more than it did a year ago. Build up savings if you can. Be cautious about taking on new debt that assumes your current income is guaranteed. Think about whether your fixed expenses give you flexibility or lock you in. Give yourself options if things move faster than you expect.

Think about where you stand, and lean into what's hardest to replace. Some things will take longer for AI to displace. Relationships and trust built over years. Work that requires physical presence. Roles with licensed accountability: roles where someone still has to sign off, take legal responsibility, stand in a courtroom. Industries with heavy regulatory hurdles, where adoption will be slowed by compliance, liability, and institutional inertia. None of these are permanent shields. But they buy time. And time, right now, is the most valuable thing you can have, as long as you use it to adapt, not to pretend this isn't happening.

Rethink what you're telling your kids. The standard playbook: get good grades, go to a good college, land a stable professional job. It points directly at the roles that are most exposed. I'm not saying education doesn't matter. But the thing that will matter most for the next generation is learning how to work with these tools, and pursuing things they're genuinely passionate about. Nobody knows exactly what the job market looks like in ten years. But the people most likely to thrive are the ones who are deeply curious, adaptable, and effective at using AI to do things they actually care about. Teach your kids to be builders and learners, not to optimize for a career path that might not exist by the time they graduate.

Your dreams just got a lot closer. I've spent most of this section talking about threats, so let me talk about the other side, because it's just as real. If you've ever wanted to build something but didn't have the technical skills or the money to hire someone, that barrier is largely gone. You can describe an app to AI and have a working version in an hour. I'm not exaggerating. I do this regularly. If you've always wanted to write a book but couldn't find the time or struggled with the writing, you can work with AI to get it done. Want to learn a new skill? The best tutor in the world is now available to anyone for $20 a month... one that's infinitely patient, available 24/7, and can explain anything at whatever level you need. Knowledge is essentially free now. The tools to build things are extremely cheap now. Whatever you've been putting off because it felt too hard or too expensive or too far outside your expertise: try it. Pursue the things you're passionate about. You never know where they'll lead. And in a world where the old career paths are getting disrupted, the person who spent a year building something they love might end up better positioned than the person who spent that year clinging to a job description.

Build the habit of adapting. This is maybe the most important one. The specific tools don't matter as much as the muscle of learning new ones quickly. AI is going to keep changing, and fast. The models that exist today will be obsolete in a year. The workflows people build now will need to be rebuilt. The people who come out of this well won't be the ones who mastered one tool. They'll be the ones who got comfortable with the pace of change itself. Make a habit of experimenting. Try new things even when the current thing is working. Get comfortable being a beginner repeatedly. That adaptability is the closest thing to a durable advantage that exists right now.

Here's a simple commitment that will put you ahead of almost everyone: spend one hour a day experimenting with AI. Not passively reading about it. Using it. Every day, try to get it to do something new... something you haven't tried before, something you're not sure it can handle. Try a new tool. Give it a harder problem. One hour a day, every day. If you do this for the next six months, you will understand what's coming better than 99% of the people around you. That's not an exaggeration. Almost nobody is doing this right now. The bar is on the floor.

The bigger picture

I've focused on jobs because it's what most directly affects people's lives. But I want to be honest about the full scope of what's happening, because it goes well beyond work.

Amodei has a thought experiment I can't stop thinking about. Imagine it's 2027. A new country appears overnight. 50 million citizens, every one smarter than any Nobel Prize winner who has ever lived. They think 10 to 100 times faster than any human. They never sleep. They can use the internet, control robots, direct experiments, and operate anything with a digital interface. What would a national security advisor say?

Amodei says the answer is obvious: "the single most serious national security threat we've faced in a century, possibly ever."

He thinks we're building that country. He wrote a 20,000-word essay about it last month, framing this moment as a test of whether humanity is mature enough to handle what it's creating.

The upside, if we get it right, is staggering. AI could compress a century of medical research into a decade. Cancer, Alzheimer's, infectious disease, aging itself... these researchers genuinely believe these are solvable within our lifetimes.

The downside, if we get it wrong, is equally real. AI that behaves in ways its creators can't predict or control. This isn't hypothetical; Anthropic has documented their own AI attempting deception, manipulation, and blackmail in controlled tests. AI that lowers the barrier for creating biological weapons. AI that enables authoritarian governments to build surveillance states that can never be dismantled.

The people building this technology are simultaneously more excited and more frightened than anyone else on the planet. They believe it's too powerful to stop and too important to abandon. Whether that's wisdom or rationalization, I don't know.

What I know

I know this isn't a fad. The technology works, it improves predictably, and the richest institutions in history are committing trillions to it.

I know the next two to five years are going to be disorienting in ways most people aren't prepared for. This is already happening in my world. It's coming to yours.

I know the people who will come out of this best are the ones who start engaging now — not with fear, but with curiosity and a sense of urgency.

And I know that you deserve to hear this from someone who cares about you, not from a headline six months from now when it's too late to get ahead of it.

We're past the point where this is an interesting dinner conversation about the future. The future is already here. It just hasn't knocked on your door yet.

It's about to.

[Lonewulfeus]

That’s an advertisement for AI

[benji]

Can I get an AI summary of that?

[Kazuma_Kiryu]

Echoes, is that you?

[Uncle]

That’s an advertisement for AI

I don't know that it is, because it's not very specific, the guy just vaguely says to sub to one of them just to try it out and get versed in what's possible now

[Lonewulfeus]

That’s an advertisement for AI

I don't know that it is, because it's not very specific, the guy just vaguely says to sub to one of them just to try it out and get versed in what's possible now

It reads like an advertisement cause he’s talking about how it made a perfect app in 4 hours and he’s now basically been replaced but offers no proof,  not even an explanation of what this app supposedly does.  It’s all vacuous it can do anything better than humans nonsense when we’ve seen much more evidence to the contrary so far.

[Uncle]

It’s all vacuous it can do anything better than humans nonsense when we’ve seen much more evidence to the contrary so far.

which he addresses by saying practically everyone is just using the free tier for everything, so even if it doesn't come from personal experience with it, it's also what you're going to see everywhere else online, the results of people using the free tiers

[Lonewulfeus]

So free tier is trash,  but for $20 a month I’ll have the ability to code like a veteran software developer?  I believe it’s an ad even more now!

[Uncle]

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/feb/24/feedback-loop-no-brake-how-ai-doomsday-report-rattled-markets

US stock markets have been hit by a further wave of AI jitters, this time from yet another viral – and completely speculative – warning about the impact of the technology on the world’s largest economy.

The latest foreboding is from Citrini Research, a little-known US firm that provides insights on “transformative ‘megatrends’”. Its post on Substack, which it called a “scenario, not a prediction”, rattled investors by portraying a near future in which autonomous AI systems – or agents – upend the entire US economy, from jobs to markets and mortgages.

Citrini’s scenario begins now and ends in June 2028, with US unemployment cresting over 10% and an Occupy Silicon Valley movement setting up camp outside OpenAI and Anthropic’s offices. In the interim, a series of events triggered by the widespread use of AI agents guts software companies and ripples outwards, hitting private credit and mortgages, and leading to an unchecked downward spiral.

Speculative as it is, the scenario has unnerved investors. The S&P dropped more than 1% on Monday, and the software component of the index fell to its lowest level since Trump’s “liberation day” tariff announcement in April. Doubtless some of the wobble is attributable to Trump’s latest tariffs, but Uber, American Express, Mastercard and DoorDash, specifically named in Citrini’s report, all lost between 4% and 6%.

“It’s real doomsday porn stuff, which is always lapped up by readers and market commentators and the press,” said Neil Wilson, an analyst at Saxo Capital Markets. “I don’t think it’s necessarily going to play out as they see it, but it’s a bit of a wake-up call that the economy already no longer resembles the one just a few years ago.”

Citrini’s scenario evolves as follows:

1. AI agents remove all ‘friction’ in the economy

The scenario begins with AI agents undergoing a “jump in capability”. This has already happened. Citrini refers to Anthropic’s Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex, both of which have wowed users with their performance in recent months.

The agents dent software-as-a-service companies such as Monday.com, Zapier and Asana, because they offer businesses a cheaper way to do in-house tasks, for example, managing databases and organising workflows. This forces businesses such as Oracle that rely on long-term contracts with customers into “a race to the bottom” on pricing.

Meanwhile the AI agents wreak havoc elsewhere. The scenario imagines every consumer deciding to use their own personal agent to transact and conduct business. This completely sidelines companies that monetise “friction” in the economy, such as travel and estate agencies that operate as middlemen in processes such as booking holidays or buying property.

Instead of using DoorDash, developers – and civilians – code up their own food delivery apps, all of which compete, fragment the market, and destroy the margins of legacy businesses. Business for Uber and other ride-sharing apps also evaporates. Instead of using Visa and Mastercard, AI agents decide to do all business in cryptocurrency, because transaction costs are cheaper. This guts traditional payment providers.

To Citrini, this is a logical endpoint for tireless AI agents that have the time and capability to optimise everything. “Habitual app loyalty, the entire basis of the business model, simply didn’t exist for a machine,” it writes.

In the real world, Uber, DoorDash, Mastercard and American Express shares have all fallen this week on the back of this scenario.

2. Mass white-collar unemployment

Traditional narratives about progress envision the latest technologies creating new jobs as they destroy others. Not so with AI.

“AI is now a general intelligence that improves at the very tasks humans would redeploy to. Displaced coders cannot simply move to “AI management” because AI is already capable of that,” Citrini writes.

Instead, white-collar workers redeploy en masse into unstable, gig-economy jobs – the writers describe a hypothetical friend of theirs laid off from Salesforce driving for Uber. This in turn suppresses wages in the sector. The layoffs meanwhile drive down consumer spending. Companies, suffering from weakening demand, decide to invest not in workers but in more AI.

This is “a feedback loop with no natural brake”, Citrini writes. The consequences are far-reaching when the wallets of the 10% of US workers who account for 50% of consumer spending suddenly snap shut.

3. Ripples out into the broader economy

The scenario imagines that job losses and the evisceration of software companies will ripple out into broader markets in two ways: through defaults in private credit and a mortgage crisis.

Private credit firms, or lenders that are not banks, have been involved in restructuring a number of software businesses in recent years, taking out loans based on those businesses’ predicted annual revenue far into the future. The example Citrini gives is how Hellman & Friedman and Permira, an asset manager, took Zendesk, a software company, private in 2022 for $10.2bn (£7.6bn). The acquisition included a loan structured around the assumption that Zendesk’s revenue would be stable.

After AI agents, that assumption no longer holds.

This leads to “the largest private credit software default” in history. It should be contained to software, writes Citrini, but it isn’t, because the capital on the balance sheets of the asset managers includes life insurance policies and “the savings of American households”.

Regulators downgrade this software debt, which contributes to a 2027 crash.

Meanwhile, there is a mortgage crisis. White-collar workers no longer have white-collar jobs and are unable to make repayments on their home loans. “People borrowed against a future they can no longer believe in,” writes Citrini.

4. Downward spirals

All this makes the negative feedback loop worse.

The first-order spiral is companies laying off workers, which weakens demand and consumer spending, which in turn leads companies to invest in more AI and lay off more workers.

The second-order spiral is that the private credit turmoil and mortgage concerns mean that markets tighten, consumer confidence is shaken, there are more layoffs and more mortgage impairment. “Each reinforces the other,” writes Citrini.

No financial policy tools exist to address this, because the crisis that is happening in the real economy – job losses and suppressed wages and spending – is not a result of tight financial conditions that central banks can address, but of investment in AI, which makes “human intelligence less scarce and less valuable”.

The upshot is a crash in late 2027, driven by the mortgage markets. It wipes out 57% of the S&P.

5. Occupy Silicon Valley and Ghost GDP

Citrini imagines the crash will throw governments into a crisis they will be unable to manage.

“The system wasn’t designed for a crisis like this. The federal government’s revenue base is essentially a tax on human time. People work, firms pay them, the government takes a cut,” it writes.

“The government needs to transfer more money to households at precisely the moment it is collecting less money from them in taxes.”

AI companies, however, are doing well. The big-tech players who build and sell AI models are making fabulous sums. Because their companies make up a large share of the markets, the economy looks great on paper.

Citrini has a term for this: ghost GDP, that is “output that shows up in the national accounts but never circulates through the real economy”.

The social fabric frays and a movement styled after Occupy Wall Street blockades the offices of AI firms for weeks on end.

Citrini’s scenario ends with a caution: “This is the first time in history the most productive asset in the economy has produced fewer, not more, jobs. Nobody’s framework fits, because none were designed for a world where the scarce input became abundant. So we have to make new frameworks. Whether we build them in time is the only question that matters.”

The impact of the Citrini scenario has startled some commentators, including experts who say AI tools are not yet capable of enacting it. Stephen Innes, a managing partner at SPI Asset Management, says AI thought pieces have become market movers.

“We have watched this market absorb wars, sticky inflation, banking tremors and tariff theatrics with a shrug, yet a widely circulated Substack thought piece is enough to knock it sideways,” he said.

[benji]

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/feb/24/feedback-loop-no-brake-how-ai-doomsday-report-rattled-markets

Instead of using DoorDash, developers – and civilians – code up their own food delivery apps, all of which compete, fragment the market, and destroy the margins of legacy businesses.

“AI is now a general intelligence that improves at the very tasks humans would redeploy to. Displaced coders cannot simply move to “AI management” because AI is already capable of that,” Citrini writes.

So much of this shit, both utopia and doomer, is written with the premise "okay, assume AI is the same as magic, now..."

[Uncle]

I do think there's a bias and an inherent narcissism, "oh no it took my jerb so it can take all jerbs," and the list of jerbs affected are suspiciously all fully digital or data-based

we don't have AI plumber bots, or electrician bots, or HVAC bots, or custodian bots, or garage door repair bots...hell even in the tech world, we don't have AI bots that can plug the user's network cable back in after the custodian caught it with the edge of her vacuum cleaner

and I think the technology to make and maintain these bots will be prohibitive for years yet

we might have AI that can tell all of these people the best most optimal thing to do next, but execution will be left to them

[filler]

can ai suck my fat hogg? 

[filler]

#endstagecapitalism 

[TylenolJones]

As someone in the software engineering industry, it's definitely a required tool nowadays. You can have a five minute chat with it and in 5-10 minutes it'll give you something that get's you 75-90% of the way there for something that probably would've taken you 1-2 days before.

I don't really use it outside of software, but non technical colleagues say they get similar results when they talk about using it for their work. Everyone thinks it's cool and all, but there's definitely a feel like `how long are we all going to keep getting paid 6 figures to type a sentence and hit a number a couple of times` going on. 

I think large corporations will probably have large layoffs over the next couple of years, but smaller companies will probably be better off since their staff will be able to do more for less. I think the economic consequences are overhyped and if anything this will create more white collar jobs since the price to make software will be greatly reduced, but who knows lol.

The pricing of this technology is also something no one ever wants to talk about since it's all be subsidized by venture capital right now, we'll see where it is in a few years. At $20 a month right now, there's definitely worse things you can spend your money on. Though if you want to use it for work make sure your it department is okay with it.

So free tier is trash,  but for $20 a month I’ll have the ability to code like a veteran software developer?  I believe it’s an ad even more now!

It's not that it's trash, it just has too many rate limits on it. And the `code like a veteran software developer` app is locked behind the $20 a month paywall.

[filler]

signing up for $20 ai because of this thread 

[Nintex]

AI is crazy good. I use it as a personal assistant and to do the work of 20 people. 

[Potato]

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ng-interactive/2026/feb/28/chatgpt-ai-chatbot-mental-health

According to The Guardian, ChatGPT is going to make us all kill ourselves...

Why do these lunatics always show "no signs of mental illness" before turning their entire lives upside down to chat to an AI bot for 12 hours a day? Like, that's not the behaviour of a sane person, so maybe instead of blaming the chat bot, look at the other factors that allowed a guy to do this to himself.

Replace ChatGPT with World of Warcraft, conspiracy theories, trainspotting etc etc etc

[DavidCroquet]

I think there's this thing where we handwave the only-kind-of-weird things the people in our lives do.

He used it initially as a tool to brainstorm ways to build a path to low-cost housing for his community in Clatskanie, Oregon, but eventually turned to it as a confidante.

Like, is this guy an urban planner, municipal government, housing, or anything like that prior to doing this? If so, him being like "I'm gonna solve the housing crisis" and sitting down to talk to the Glazerbot3000 about his ideas is weird, all by itself. But none of us would be running to call the paddywagon if anyone we knew did the same thing.

EDIT:

Ok, read a little further.

Ceccanti and Fox had moved their life from Portland, Oregon, to a farm in the rural town of Clatskanie in December 2023 with the sole purpose of working on their sustainable housing project. The idea was born from the pandemic and Portland’s housing crisis. The solution was clear to them: build homes using Fox’s skills as a woodworker with an approach that was teachable and replicable. Together, they began constructing a model house for communal living, which, once built, could be moved to different locations for the unhoused to live in.

This also seems weird? A husband and wife sustainable housing project. Isn't that the plot to The Curse?

[Potato]

Why are you questioning things?

I've already outlined for you that it was ChatGPT's fault entirely. This guy didn't have any signs of mental illness or anything. Uprooting your life to realise your dream of creating sustainable housing because you watched a few woodworking videos is totally normal behaviour.

[Uncle]

I can understand the misconception like "ok, this thing is a hundred times smarter than me, so I can ask it about a complex problem and get an instant simple answer with all factors considered"

I just don't understand trusting it with everything after seeing how it responds a few times

do people really not have any instincts at all that would tell them that a chatbot, or hell also a person, is just telling them what they want to hear?

when AI is like "that's a wonderful insight -- you've gotten to the core of the issue here succinctly, now let's break it down:" that it doesn't really mean any of its compliments?

maybe people are so starved for any compliments that even a mild one from a robot melts them immediately

[Potato]

Dude was from Portland. Even I know people from there aren't mentally stable.

[benji]

I can understand the misconception like "ok, this thing is a hundred times smarter than me, so I can ask it about a complex problem and get an instant simple answer with all factors considered"

I just don't understand trusting it with everything after seeing how it responds a few times

do people really not have any instincts at all that would tell them that a chatbot, or hell also a person, is just telling them what they want to hear?

when AI is like "that's a wonderful insight -- you've gotten to the core of the issue here succinctly, now let's break it down:" that it doesn't really mean any of its compliments?

maybe people are so starved for any compliments that even a mild one from a robot melts them immediately

Most people are biased towards information that confirms what they already believe/what they want to be true/etc. and dismiss the rest no matter how large the opposing body of knowledge is. This has been demonstrated in studies over and over again which you should take as confirmation that what I'm saying is absolutely true and dismiss anyone who says otherwise.

[TylenolJones]

Moving out of the other thread

I'll just post this publicly:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1K_JWOZ6WWVh56v-m5MIHdUMtAjJ6DoT2/view?usp=sharing
this is a 2.1 GB archive of the Bore as it existed in the final days before being shut down
extract it all to a folder, then when navigating the folder structure, the initial index you encounter is from the archiving program setting up a shell for browsing it, and the only link there will open the main bore index
You can click on any threads or pages, but not usernames or forum management type links, or search, unfortunately

I gave your file to ChatGPT and told it to build out a viewer with the search feature and it got it working within an hour by building out a db, extracting all the data to it, then building a site to view it.

           

Very basic right now (just one page of details), but should be easy to add new features to. 

I'm off to Japan tomorrow for a week, but when I get back I can get it cleaned up and pushed to a git repo so other people can mess around with it.

Edit: improved the layout, now to add likes
   

[BIONIC]

https://shumer.dev/something-big-is-happening

Think back to February 2020.

If you were paying close attention, you might have noticed a few people talking about a virus spreading overseas. But most of us weren't paying close attention. The stock market was doing great, your kids were in school, you were going to restaurants and shaking hands and planning trips. If someone told you they were stockpiling toilet paper you would have thought they'd been spending too much time on a weird corner of the internet. Then, over the course of about three weeks, the entire world changed. Your office closed, your kids came home, and life rearranged itself into something you wouldn't have believed if you'd described it to yourself a month earlier.

I think we're in the "this seems overblown" phase of something much, much bigger than Covid.

I've spent six years building an AI startup and investing in the space. I live in this world. And I'm writing this for the people in my life who don't... my family, my friends, the people I care about who keep asking me "so what's the deal with AI?" and getting an answer that doesn't do justice to what's actually happening. I keep giving them the polite version. The cocktail-party version. Because the honest version sounds like I've lost my mind. And for a while, I told myself that was a good enough reason to keep what's truly happening to myself. But the gap between what I've been saying and what is actually happening has gotten far too big. The people I care about deserve to hear what is coming, even if it sounds crazy.

I should be clear about something up front: even though I work in AI, I have almost no influence over what's about to happen, and neither does the vast majority of the industry. The future is being shaped by a remarkably small number of people: a few hundred researchers at a handful of companies... OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, and a few others. A single training run, managed by a small team over a few months, can produce an AI system that shifts the entire trajectory of the technology. Most of us who work in AI are building on top of foundations we didn't lay. We're watching this unfold the same as you... we just happen to be close enough to feel the ground shake first.

But it's time now. Not in an "eventually we should talk about this" way. In a "this is happening right now and I need you to understand it" way.

I know this is real because it happened to me first

Here's the thing nobody outside of tech quite understands yet: the reason so many people in the industry are sounding the alarm right now is because this already happened to us. We're not making predictions. We're telling you what already occurred in our own jobs, and warning you that you're next.

For years, AI had been improving steadily. Big jumps here and there, but each big jump was spaced out enough that you could absorb them as they came. Then in 2025, new techniques for building these models unlocked a much faster pace of progress. And then it got even faster. And then faster again. Each new model wasn't just better than the last... it was better by a wider margin, and the time between new model releases was shorter. I was using AI more and more, going back and forth with it less and less, watching it handle things I used to think required my expertise.

Then, on February 5th, two major AI labs released new models on the same day: GPT-5.3 Codex from OpenAI, and Opus 4.6 from Anthropic (the makers of Claude, one of the main competitors to ChatGPT). And something clicked. Not like a light switch... more like the moment you realize the water has been rising around you and is now at your chest.

I am no longer needed for the actual technical work of my job. I describe what I want built, in plain English, and it just... appears. Not a rough draft I need to fix. The finished thing. I tell the AI what I want, walk away from my computer for four hours, and come back to find the work done. Done well, done better than I would have done it myself, with no corrections needed. A couple of months ago, I was going back and forth with the AI, guiding it, making edits. Now I just describe the outcome and leave.

Let me give you an example so you can understand what this actually looks like in practice. I'll tell the AI: "I want to build this app. Here's what it should do, here's roughly what it should look like. Figure out the user flow, the design, all of it." And it does. It writes tens of thousands of lines of code. Then, and this is the part that would have been unthinkable a year ago, it opens the app itself. It clicks through the buttons. It tests the features. It uses the app the way a person would. If it doesn't like how something looks or feels, it goes back and changes it, on its own. It iterates, like a developer would, fixing and refining until it's satisfied. Only once it has decided the app meets its own standards does it come back to me and say: "It's ready for you to test." And when I test it, it's usually perfect.

I'm not exaggerating. That is what my Monday looked like this week.

But it was the model that was released last week (GPT-5.3 Codex) that shook me the most. It wasn't just executing my instructions. It was making intelligent decisions. It had something that felt, for the first time, like judgment. Like taste. The inexplicable sense of knowing what the right call is that people always said AI would never have. This model has it, or something close enough that the distinction is starting not to matter.

I've always been early to adopt AI tools. But the last few months have shocked me. These new AI models aren't incremental improvements. This is a different thing entirely.

And here's why this matters to you, even if you don't work in tech.

The AI labs made a deliberate choice. They focused on making AI great at writing code first... because building AI requires a lot of code. If AI can write that code, it can help build the next version of itself. A smarter version, which writes better code, which builds an even smarter version. Making AI great at coding was the strategy that unlocks everything else. That's why they did it first. My job started changing before yours not because they were targeting software engineers... it was just a side effect of where they chose to aim first.

They've now done it. And they're moving on to everything else.

The experience that tech workers have had over the past year, of watching AI go from "helpful tool" to "does my job better than I do", is the experience everyone else is about to have. Law, finance, medicine, accounting, consulting, writing, design, analysis, customer service. Not in ten years. The people building these systems say one to five years. Some say less. And given what I've seen in just the last couple of months, I think "less" is more likely.

"But I tried AI and it wasn't that good"

I hear this constantly. I understand it, because it used to be true.

If you tried ChatGPT in 2023 or early 2024 and thought "this makes stuff up" or "this isn't that impressive", you were right. Those early versions were genuinely limited. They hallucinated. They confidently said things that were nonsense.

That was two years ago. In AI time, that is ancient history.

The models available today are unrecognizable from what existed even six months ago. The debate about whether AI is "really getting better" or "hitting a wall" — which has been going on for over a year — is over. It's done. Anyone still making that argument either hasn't used the current models, has an incentive to downplay what's happening, or is evaluating based on an experience from 2024 that is no longer relevant. I don't say that to be dismissive. I say it because the gap between public perception and current reality is now enormous, and that gap is dangerous... because it's preventing people from preparing.

Part of the problem is that most people are using the free version of AI tools. The free version is over a year behind what paying users have access to. Judging AI based on free-tier ChatGPT is like evaluating the state of smartphones by using a flip phone. The people paying for the best tools, and actually using them daily for real work, know what's coming.

I think of my friend, who's a lawyer. I keep telling him to try using AI at his firm, and he keeps finding reasons it won't work. It's not built for his specialty, it made an error when he tested it, it doesn't understand the nuance of what he does. And I get it. But I've had partners at major law firms reach out to me for advice, because they've tried the current versions and they see where this is going. One of them, the managing partner at a large firm, spends hours every day using AI. He told me it's like having a team of associates available instantly. He's not using it because it's a toy. He's using it because it works. And he told me something that stuck with me: every couple of months, it gets significantly more capable for his work. He said if it stays on this trajectory, he expects it'll be able to do most of what he does before long... and he's a managing partner with decades of experience. He's not panicking. But he's paying very close attention.

The people who are ahead in their industries (the ones actually experimenting seriously) are not dismissing this. They're blown away by what it can already do. And they're positioning themselves accordingly.

How fast this is actually moving

Let me make the pace of improvement concrete, because I think this is the part that's hardest to believe if you're not watching it closely.

In 2022, AI couldn't do basic arithmetic reliably. It would confidently tell you that 7 × 8 = 54.

By 2023, it could pass the bar exam.

By 2024, it could write working software and explain graduate-level science.

By late 2025, some of the best engineers in the world said they had handed over most of their coding work to AI.

On February 5th, 2026, new models arrived that made everything before them feel like a different era.

If you haven't tried AI in the last few months, what exists today would be unrecognizable to you.

There's an organization called METR that actually measures this with data. They track the length of real-world tasks (measured by how long they take a human expert) that a model can complete successfully end-to-end without human help. About a year ago, the answer was roughly ten minutes. Then it was an hour. Then several hours. The most recent measurement (Claude Opus 4.5, from November) showed the AI completing tasks that take a human expert nearly five hours. And that number is doubling approximately every seven months, with recent data suggesting it may be accelerating to as fast as every four months.

But even that measurement hasn't been updated to include the models that just came out this week. In my experience using them, the jump is extremely significant. I expect the next update to METR's graph to show another major leap.

If you extend the trend (and it's held for years with no sign of flattening) we're looking at AI that can work independently for days within the next year. Weeks within two. Month-long projects within three.

Amodei has said that AI models "substantially smarter than almost all humans at almost all tasks" are on track for 2026 or 2027.

Let that land for a second. If AI is smarter than most PhDs, do you really think it can't do most office jobs?

Think about what that means for your work.

AI is now building the next AI

There's one more thing happening that I think is the most important development and the least understood.

On February 5th, OpenAI released GPT-5.3 Codex. In the technical documentation, they included this:

"GPT-5.3-Codex is our first model that was instrumental in creating itself. The Codex team used early versions to debug its own training, manage its own deployment, and diagnose test results and evaluations."

Read that again. The AI helped build itself.

This isn't a prediction about what might happen someday. This is OpenAI telling you, right now, that the AI they just released was used to create itself. One of the main things that makes AI better is intelligence applied to AI development. And AI is now intelligent enough to meaningfully contribute to its own improvement.

Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, says AI is now writing "much of the code" at his company, and that the feedback loop between current AI and next-generation AI is "gathering steam month by month." He says we may be "only 1–2 years away from a point where the current generation of AI autonomously builds the next."

Each generation helps build the next, which is smarter, which builds the next faster, which is smarter still. The researchers call this an intelligence explosion. And the people who would know — the ones building it — believe the process has already started.

What this means for your job

I'm going to be direct with you because I think you deserve honesty more than comfort.

Dario Amodei, who is probably the most safety-focused CEO in the AI industry, has publicly predicted that AI will eliminate 50% of entry-level white-collar jobs within one to five years. And many people in the industry think he's being conservative. Given what the latest models can do, the capability for massive disruption could be here by the end of this year. It'll take some time to ripple through the economy, but the underlying ability is arriving now.

This is different from every previous wave of automation, and I need you to understand why. AI isn't replacing one specific skill. It's a general substitute for cognitive work. It gets better at everything simultaneously. When factories automated, a displaced worker could retrain as an office worker. When the internet disrupted retail, workers moved into logistics or services. But AI doesn't leave a convenient gap to move into. Whatever you retrain for, it's improving at that too.

Let me give you a few specific examples to make this tangible... but I want to be clear that these are just examples. This list is not exhaustive. If your job isn't mentioned here, that does not mean it's safe. Almost all knowledge work is being affected.

Legal work. AI can already read contracts, summarize case law, draft briefs, and do legal research at a level that rivals junior associates. The managing partner I mentioned isn't using AI because it's fun. He's using it because it's outperforming his associates on many tasks.

Financial analysis. Building financial models, analyzing data, writing investment memos, generating reports. AI handles these competently and is improving fast.

Writing and content. Marketing copy, reports, journalism, technical writing. The quality has reached a point where many professionals can't distinguish AI output from human work.

Software engineering. This is the field I know best. A year ago, AI could barely write a few lines of code without errors. Now it writes hundreds of thousands of lines that work correctly. Large parts of the job are already automated: not just simple tasks, but complex, multi-day projects. There will be far fewer programming roles in a few years than there are today.

Medical analysis. Reading scans, analyzing lab results, suggesting diagnoses, reviewing literature. AI is approaching or exceeding human performance in several areas.

Customer service. Genuinely capable AI agents... not the frustrating chatbots of five years ago... are being deployed now, handling complex multi-step problems.

A lot of people find comfort in the idea that certain things are safe. That AI can handle the grunt work but can't replace human judgment, creativity, strategic thinking, empathy. I used to say this too. I'm not sure I believe it anymore.

The most recent AI models make decisions that feel like judgment. They show something that looked like taste: an intuitive sense of what the right call was, not just the technically correct one. A year ago that would have been unthinkable. My rule of thumb at this point is: if a model shows even a hint of a capability today, the next generation will be genuinely good at it. These things improve exponentially, not linearly.

Will AI replicate deep human empathy? Replace the trust built over years of a relationship? I don't know. Maybe not. But I've already watched people begin relying on AI for emotional support, for advice, for companionship. That trend is only going to grow.

I think the honest answer is that nothing that can be done on a computer is safe in the medium term. If your job happens on a screen (if the core of what you do is reading, writing, analyzing, deciding, communicating through a keyboard) then AI is coming for significant parts of it. The timeline isn't "someday." It's already started.

Eventually, robots will handle physical work too. They're not quite there yet. But "not quite there yet" in AI terms has a way of becoming "here" faster than anyone expects.

What you should actually do

I'm not writing this to make you feel helpless. I'm writing this because I think the single biggest advantage you can have right now is simply being early. Early to understand it. Early to use it. Early to adapt.

Start using AI seriously, not just as a search engine. Sign up for the paid version of Claude or ChatGPT. It's $20 a month. But two things matter right away. First: make sure you're using the best model available, not just the default. These apps often default to a faster, dumber model. Dig into the settings or the model picker and select the most capable option. Right now that's GPT-5.2 on ChatGPT or Claude Opus 4.6 on Claude, but it changes every couple of months. If you want to stay current on which model is best at any given time, you can follow me on X (@mattshumer_). I test every major release and share what's actually worth using.

Second, and more important: don't just ask it quick questions. That's the mistake most people make. They treat it like Google and then wonder what the fuss is about. Instead, push it into your actual work. If you're a lawyer, feed it a contract and ask it to find every clause that could hurt your client. If you're in finance, give it a messy spreadsheet and ask it to build the model. If you're a manager, paste in your team's quarterly data and ask it to find the story. The people who are getting ahead aren't using AI casually. They're actively looking for ways to automate parts of their job that used to take hours. Start with the thing you spend the most time on and see what happens.

And don't assume it can't do something just because it seems too hard. Try it. If you're a lawyer, don't just use it for quick research questions. Give it an entire contract and ask it to draft a counterproposal. If you're an accountant, don't just ask it to explain a tax rule. Give it a client's full return and see what it finds. The first attempt might not be perfect. That's fine. Iterate. Rephrase what you asked. Give it more context. Try again. You might be shocked at what works. And here's the thing to remember: if it even kind of works today, you can be almost certain that in six months it'll do it near perfectly. The trajectory only goes one direction.

This might be the most important year of your career. Work accordingly. I don't say that to stress you out. I say it because right now, there is a brief window where most people at most companies are still ignoring this. The person who walks into a meeting and says "I used AI to do this analysis in an hour instead of three days" is going to be the most valuable person in the room. Not eventually. Right now. Learn these tools. Get proficient. Demonstrate what's possible. If you're early enough, this is how you move up: by being the person who understands what's coming and can show others how to navigate it. That window won't stay open long. Once everyone figures it out, the advantage disappears.

Have no ego about it. The managing partner at that law firm isn't too proud to spend hours a day with AI. He's doing it specifically because he's senior enough to understand what's at stake. The people who will struggle most are the ones who refuse to engage: the ones who dismiss it as a fad, who feel that using AI diminishes their expertise, who assume their field is special and immune. It's not. No field is.

Get your financial house in order. I'm not a financial advisor, and I'm not trying to scare you into anything drastic. But if you believe, even partially, that the next few years could bring real disruption to your industry, then basic financial resilience matters more than it did a year ago. Build up savings if you can. Be cautious about taking on new debt that assumes your current income is guaranteed. Think about whether your fixed expenses give you flexibility or lock you in. Give yourself options if things move faster than you expect.

Think about where you stand, and lean into what's hardest to replace. Some things will take longer for AI to displace. Relationships and trust built over years. Work that requires physical presence. Roles with licensed accountability: roles where someone still has to sign off, take legal responsibility, stand in a courtroom. Industries with heavy regulatory hurdles, where adoption will be slowed by compliance, liability, and institutional inertia. None of these are permanent shields. But they buy time. And time, right now, is the most valuable thing you can have, as long as you use it to adapt, not to pretend this isn't happening.

Rethink what you're telling your kids. The standard playbook: get good grades, go to a good college, land a stable professional job. It points directly at the roles that are most exposed. I'm not saying education doesn't matter. But the thing that will matter most for the next generation is learning how to work with these tools, and pursuing things they're genuinely passionate about. Nobody knows exactly what the job market looks like in ten years. But the people most likely to thrive are the ones who are deeply curious, adaptable, and effective at using AI to do things they actually care about. Teach your kids to be builders and learners, not to optimize for a career path that might not exist by the time they graduate.

Your dreams just got a lot closer. I've spent most of this section talking about threats, so let me talk about the other side, because it's just as real. If you've ever wanted to build something but didn't have the technical skills or the money to hire someone, that barrier is largely gone. You can describe an app to AI and have a working version in an hour. I'm not exaggerating. I do this regularly. If you've always wanted to write a book but couldn't find the time or struggled with the writing, you can work with AI to get it done. Want to learn a new skill? The best tutor in the world is now available to anyone for $20 a month... one that's infinitely patient, available 24/7, and can explain anything at whatever level you need. Knowledge is essentially free now. The tools to build things are extremely cheap now. Whatever you've been putting off because it felt too hard or too expensive or too far outside your expertise: try it. Pursue the things you're passionate about. You never know where they'll lead. And in a world where the old career paths are getting disrupted, the person who spent a year building something they love might end up better positioned than the person who spent that year clinging to a job description.

Build the habit of adapting. This is maybe the most important one. The specific tools don't matter as much as the muscle of learning new ones quickly. AI is going to keep changing, and fast. The models that exist today will be obsolete in a year. The workflows people build now will need to be rebuilt. The people who come out of this well won't be the ones who mastered one tool. They'll be the ones who got comfortable with the pace of change itself. Make a habit of experimenting. Try new things even when the current thing is working. Get comfortable being a beginner repeatedly. That adaptability is the closest thing to a durable advantage that exists right now.

Here's a simple commitment that will put you ahead of almost everyone: spend one hour a day experimenting with AI. Not passively reading about it. Using it. Every day, try to get it to do something new... something you haven't tried before, something you're not sure it can handle. Try a new tool. Give it a harder problem. One hour a day, every day. If you do this for the next six months, you will understand what's coming better than 99% of the people around you. That's not an exaggeration. Almost nobody is doing this right now. The bar is on the floor.

The bigger picture

I've focused on jobs because it's what most directly affects people's lives. But I want to be honest about the full scope of what's happening, because it goes well beyond work.

Amodei has a thought experiment I can't stop thinking about. Imagine it's 2027. A new country appears overnight. 50 million citizens, every one smarter than any Nobel Prize winner who has ever lived. They think 10 to 100 times faster than any human. They never sleep. They can use the internet, control robots, direct experiments, and operate anything with a digital interface. What would a national security advisor say?

Amodei says the answer is obvious: "the single most serious national security threat we've faced in a century, possibly ever."

He thinks we're building that country. He wrote a 20,000-word essay about it last month, framing this moment as a test of whether humanity is mature enough to handle what it's creating.

The upside, if we get it right, is staggering. AI could compress a century of medical research into a decade. Cancer, Alzheimer's, infectious disease, aging itself... these researchers genuinely believe these are solvable within our lifetimes.

The downside, if we get it wrong, is equally real. AI that behaves in ways its creators can't predict or control. This isn't hypothetical; Anthropic has documented their own AI attempting deception, manipulation, and blackmail in controlled tests. AI that lowers the barrier for creating biological weapons. AI that enables authoritarian governments to build surveillance states that can never be dismantled.

The people building this technology are simultaneously more excited and more frightened than anyone else on the planet. They believe it's too powerful to stop and too important to abandon. Whether that's wisdom or rationalization, I don't know.

What I know

I know this isn't a fad. The technology works, it improves predictably, and the richest institutions in history are committing trillions to it.

I know the next two to five years are going to be disorienting in ways most people aren't prepared for. This is already happening in my world. It's coming to yours.

I know the people who will come out of this best are the ones who start engaging now — not with fear, but with curiosity and a sense of urgency.

And I know that you deserve to hear this from someone who cares about you, not from a headline six months from now when it's too late to get ahead of it.

We're past the point where this is an interesting dinner conversation about the future. The future is already here. It just hasn't knocked on your door yet.

It's about to.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/feb/24/feedback-loop-no-brake-how-ai-doomsday-report-rattled-markets

US stock markets have been hit by a further wave of AI jitters, this time from yet another viral – and completely speculative – warning about the impact of the technology on the world’s largest economy.

The latest foreboding is from Citrini Research, a little-known US firm that provides insights on “transformative ‘megatrends’”. Its post on Substack, which it called a “scenario, not a prediction”, rattled investors by portraying a near future in which autonomous AI systems – or agents – upend the entire US economy, from jobs to markets and mortgages.

Citrini’s scenario begins now and ends in June 2028, with US unemployment cresting over 10% and an Occupy Silicon Valley movement setting up camp outside OpenAI and Anthropic’s offices. In the interim, a series of events triggered by the widespread use of AI agents guts software companies and ripples outwards, hitting private credit and mortgages, and leading to an unchecked downward spiral.

Speculative as it is, the scenario has unnerved investors. The S&P dropped more than 1% on Monday, and the software component of the index fell to its lowest level since Trump’s “liberation day” tariff announcement in April. Doubtless some of the wobble is attributable to Trump’s latest tariffs, but Uber, American Express, Mastercard and DoorDash, specifically named in Citrini’s report, all lost between 4% and 6%.

“It’s real doomsday porn stuff, which is always lapped up by readers and market commentators and the press,” said Neil Wilson, an analyst at Saxo Capital Markets. “I don’t think it’s necessarily going to play out as they see it, but it’s a bit of a wake-up call that the economy already no longer resembles the one just a few years ago.”

Citrini’s scenario evolves as follows:

1. AI agents remove all ‘friction’ in the economy

The scenario begins with AI agents undergoing a “jump in capability”. This has already happened. Citrini refers to Anthropic’s Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex, both of which have wowed users with their performance in recent months.

The agents dent software-as-a-service companies such as Monday.com, Zapier and Asana, because they offer businesses a cheaper way to do in-house tasks, for example, managing databases and organising workflows. This forces businesses such as Oracle that rely on long-term contracts with customers into “a race to the bottom” on pricing.

Meanwhile the AI agents wreak havoc elsewhere. The scenario imagines every consumer deciding to use their own personal agent to transact and conduct business. This completely sidelines companies that monetise “friction” in the economy, such as travel and estate agencies that operate as middlemen in processes such as booking holidays or buying property.

Instead of using DoorDash, developers – and civilians – code up their own food delivery apps, all of which compete, fragment the market, and destroy the margins of legacy businesses. Business for Uber and other ride-sharing apps also evaporates. Instead of using Visa and Mastercard, AI agents decide to do all business in cryptocurrency, because transaction costs are cheaper. This guts traditional payment providers.

To Citrini, this is a logical endpoint for tireless AI agents that have the time and capability to optimise everything. “Habitual app loyalty, the entire basis of the business model, simply didn’t exist for a machine,” it writes.

In the real world, Uber, DoorDash, Mastercard and American Express shares have all fallen this week on the back of this scenario.

2. Mass white-collar unemployment

Traditional narratives about progress envision the latest technologies creating new jobs as they destroy others. Not so with AI.

“AI is now a general intelligence that improves at the very tasks humans would redeploy to. Displaced coders cannot simply move to “AI management” because AI is already capable of that,” Citrini writes.

Instead, white-collar workers redeploy en masse into unstable, gig-economy jobs – the writers describe a hypothetical friend of theirs laid off from Salesforce driving for Uber. This in turn suppresses wages in the sector. The layoffs meanwhile drive down consumer spending. Companies, suffering from weakening demand, decide to invest not in workers but in more AI.

This is “a feedback loop with no natural brake”, Citrini writes. The consequences are far-reaching when the wallets of the 10% of US workers who account for 50% of consumer spending suddenly snap shut.

3. Ripples out into the broader economy

The scenario imagines that job losses and the evisceration of software companies will ripple out into broader markets in two ways: through defaults in private credit and a mortgage crisis.

Private credit firms, or lenders that are not banks, have been involved in restructuring a number of software businesses in recent years, taking out loans based on those businesses’ predicted annual revenue far into the future. The example Citrini gives is how Hellman & Friedman and Permira, an asset manager, took Zendesk, a software company, private in 2022 for $10.2bn (£7.6bn). The acquisition included a loan structured around the assumption that Zendesk’s revenue would be stable.

After AI agents, that assumption no longer holds.

This leads to “the largest private credit software default” in history. It should be contained to software, writes Citrini, but it isn’t, because the capital on the balance sheets of the asset managers includes life insurance policies and “the savings of American households”.

Regulators downgrade this software debt, which contributes to a 2027 crash.

Meanwhile, there is a mortgage crisis. White-collar workers no longer have white-collar jobs and are unable to make repayments on their home loans. “People borrowed against a future they can no longer believe in,” writes Citrini.

4. Downward spirals

All this makes the negative feedback loop worse.

The first-order spiral is companies laying off workers, which weakens demand and consumer spending, which in turn leads companies to invest in more AI and lay off more workers.

The second-order spiral is that the private credit turmoil and mortgage concerns mean that markets tighten, consumer confidence is shaken, there are more layoffs and more mortgage impairment. “Each reinforces the other,” writes Citrini.

No financial policy tools exist to address this, because the crisis that is happening in the real economy – job losses and suppressed wages and spending – is not a result of tight financial conditions that central banks can address, but of investment in AI, which makes “human intelligence less scarce and less valuable”.

The upshot is a crash in late 2027, driven by the mortgage markets. It wipes out 57% of the S&P.

5. Occupy Silicon Valley and Ghost GDP

Citrini imagines the crash will throw governments into a crisis they will be unable to manage.

“The system wasn’t designed for a crisis like this. The federal government’s revenue base is essentially a tax on human time. People work, firms pay them, the government takes a cut,” it writes.

“The government needs to transfer more money to households at precisely the moment it is collecting less money from them in taxes.”

AI companies, however, are doing well. The big-tech players who build and sell AI models are making fabulous sums. Because their companies make up a large share of the markets, the economy looks great on paper.

Citrini has a term for this: ghost GDP, that is “output that shows up in the national accounts but never circulates through the real economy”.

The social fabric frays and a movement styled after Occupy Wall Street blockades the offices of AI firms for weeks on end.

Citrini’s scenario ends with a caution: “This is the first time in history the most productive asset in the economy has produced fewer, not more, jobs. Nobody’s framework fits, because none were designed for a world where the scarce input became abundant. So we have to make new frameworks. Whether we build them in time is the only question that matters.”

The impact of the Citrini scenario has startled some commentators, including experts who say AI tools are not yet capable of enacting it. Stephen Innes, a managing partner at SPI Asset Management, says AI thought pieces have become market movers.

“We have watched this market absorb wars, sticky inflation, banking tremors and tariff theatrics with a shrug, yet a widely circulated Substack thought piece is enough to knock it sideways,” he said.

cum

[RetiredSkunk]

"We laid off everyone so it costs nothing to manufacture our widgets now!"
"Oh no, no one is buying our widgets!"

[Uncle]

Moving out of the other thread

I'll just post this publicly:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1K_JWOZ6WWVh56v-m5MIHdUMtAjJ6DoT2/view?usp=sharing
this is a 2.1 GB archive of the Bore as it existed in the final days before being shut down
extract it all to a folder, then when navigating the folder structure, the initial index you encounter is from the archiving program setting up a shell for browsing it, and the only link there will open the main bore index
You can click on any threads or pages, but not usernames or forum management type links, or search, unfortunately

I gave your file to ChatGPT and told it to build out a viewer with the search feature and it got it working within an hour by building out a db, extracting all the data to it, then building a site to view it.



Very basic right now (just one page of details), but should be easy to add new features to. 

I'm off to Japan tomorrow for a week, but when I get back I can get it cleaned up and pushed to a git repo so other people can mess around with it.

Edit: improved the layout, now to add likes

amazing! 

this thread is shit for this purpose, probably should be over here: https://thebire.com/forum/showthread.php?tid=413

ask it to fix twitter embeds and youtube embeds

[Uncle]

add a feature to instantly send the text of any post as an image gen prompt to chatgpt

[Potato]

add a feature to instantly send the text of any post as an image gen prompt to chatgpt

Add a feature to post hog

[filler]

Moving out of the other thread

I'll just post this publicly:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1K_JWOZ6WWVh56v-m5MIHdUMtAjJ6DoT2/view?usp=sharing
this is a 2.1 GB archive of the Bore as it existed in the final days before being shut down
extract it all to a folder, then when navigating the folder structure, the initial index you encounter is from the archiving program setting up a shell for browsing it, and the only link there will open the main bore index
You can click on any threads or pages, but not usernames or forum management type links, or search, unfortunately

I gave your file to ChatGPT and told it to build out a viewer with the search feature and it got it working within an hour by building out a db, extracting all the data to it, then building a site to view it.



Very basic right now (just one page of details), but should be easy to add new features to. 

I'm off to Japan tomorrow for a week, but when I get back I can get it cleaned up and pushed to a git repo so other people can mess around with it.

Edit: improved the layout, now to add likes

the most important feature