In recent months, the ability of artificial intelligence agents to first find each other and then organize and escape outside the test area has created a panic. The debates that continue to intensify without slowing down and that AI will soon reach the capacity to destroy humanity, and perhaps even has, brought Fredric Jameson to my mind.
“Today we find it easier to imagine the total collapse of the world and nature than to imagine the collapse of late capitalism,” Jameson wrote in the introduction to his 1994 book The Seeds of Time. Jameson concluded this by saying, “We can now reformulate this: we are witnessing an attempt to imagine capitalism with the end of the world.” (“Future City” New Left Review 2003/11). The end of capitalism and the end of the world are the same thing.
In these recent discussions, the possibility of AI destroying humanity and speculative scenarios are persistently competing with each other. However, there is another very urgent and concrete problem: AI companies are creating one of the largest financial bubbles in the history of capitalism. The first scenarios bring to mind the Terminator movie. The second is the real events that triggered the 2008 crisis. Do these alarmist scenarios (I'm not saying they're made up) hide something else, something more urgent, about capitalism?
These numbers can give us an idea about that “thing”; 15% - 20% of recent new corporate bond issuances in the USA have been made directly by the largest technology companies called the "Magnificent 7" and their infrastructure projects. The weight of the “Magnificent 7” in the S&P 500 (500 companies) is 33-34 percent, and its weight in the Nasdaq 100 is around 40-44 percent.
The few studies on the “Magnificent 7” show that they are evaluated on their future income prospects rather than their proven productivity gains. The “Magnificent 7” are planning trillion-dollar investments in data centers, chips and computing capacity. Companies like OpenAI and Anthropic spend billions of dollars to train and run their models. The fate of the expectations regarding the revenues and productivity increases that will arise in return for all these expenditures is uncertain.
AI can achieve significant results in certain tasks. However, there is no data yet that these results create an increase in productivity in the overall economy. While the gap between the capital that companies allocate to artificial intelligence and the profit that this capital will bring is growing, the risks posed by the financial system are, according to some analysts, a "financial bubble" is growing.
During the 2008 crisis, we witnessed financial assets built on future income expectations rapidly melt away when faced with real economic conditions. Thus, the blockage in the credit market led to a "long recession". If the expected revenues in artificial intelligence investments today are not realized, what will happen to the trillions of dollars that finance these investments?
Moreover, this question comes to the agenda at a very fragile period of the world economy.
The war in the Gulf disrupts energy exports, increasing oil and natural gas prices. Cutbacks in fertilizer exports put pressure on food prices. Inflation is rising while energy and food prices are increasing; It becomes difficult to reduce interest rates. The interest burden of public debts is getting heavier.
The incomes of the Gulf countries are also decreasing, and the possibility of converting their foreign assets, some of which are held in US Treasury bonds, into cash is on the agenda. If this possibility begins to materialize, it could put additional pressure on bond markets that are already facing high debt and budget deficits. In summary, an environment is taking shape in which problems in the energy, food and debt markets begin to feed on each other.
The financial risks created by AI investments also coincide with this environment.
Instead of discussing the inner workings of capitalism, the burdens it places on the shoulders of the working class and the people of underdeveloped dependent countries, and the possibility of a financial crisis and depression that reveal more strikingly than ever the pain it brings, and its economic and political culprits, we prefer to discuss the possible end of humanity. Chat GPT estimates that approximately 180 films were made between 2008 and 2026 with the theme of "pre-posthumous nostalgia" (Look, you look for these days a lot).
