AI driven market crash and robots will take over when ‘society collapses’ predicts ITV’s Robert Peston
Stock up on beans and powdered milk because ITV’s Robert Peston is predicting a global crash thanks to AI and the robots will displace incredibly large numbers of jobs afterwards
AI will survive a crash and then the robots are coming for our jobs says Peston(Image: ITV)
ITV News’ Robert Peston believes an AI driven market crash is looming and robots will take over when “society collapses”.
The political commentator, who predicted both Covid and the 2008 financial crash, writes about tech-bro megalomaniacs in his new thriller, The Kill Switch.
And life could imitate art with a real global crash a possibility due to the tech sector he fears: “I am genuinely anxious that we’re going to get a serious financial crash, globally, in the next year or two, because there is the most astonishing amount of money going into building the data centres and power plants for AI, and as we saw when SpaceX floated on the stock exchange, a late-1920s degree of breathless excitement on the markets
.
Robert Peston has form having warned about past crashes and even the pandemic(Image: Jonathan Hordle/REX/Shutterstock)
“And I worry that the profits aren’t going to be delivered on a scale to justify all this, so businesses will go bust, investors will take fright and we will have a significant market shock.”
Peston says the AI industrial revolution is the most important since the Steam Age but predicts robots will emerge the winners.
He told the Radio Times : “Even if there is a financial crash, the AI infrastructure will survive it, much like we had a railway boom and bust [in the 1840s], but the railways themselves were still there after.
“AI and robots will displace incredibly large numbers of jobs, and there may not be conventional productive employment to replace those lost jobs, so how are people going to live? And if vast numbers lose their jobs, nobody pays income tax, so the government can’t pay for public services, and society collapses.”
Peston has become a modern day Nostradamus in recent times, and he hopes people will take his latest warnings seriously.
Peston was talking to the Radio Times(Image: Radio Times)
“I do have a feeling of, ‘Why don’t people listen to me when I say things are about to go awfully badly wrong?’” he admits.
“In the spring and summer of 2007 I was warning that what was happening in the banking sector was going to cause enormous harm to us all, and lots of politicians and people in the City wrote to the BBC [where he was business editor] to say I was scaremongering and needed to be closed down.
“A few years later, I’d made a ton of documentaries about China, and knew it well, and had been to Wuhan, so when this mysterious new virus turned up at the end of 2019 I said to anyone in government who would listen to me, ‘This looks serious.’”
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