In this essay, Citrini and Alap Shah construct a fictional macro memo written from the perspective of June 2028, using the format of financial retrospective analysis to explore a single underexamined scenario: what happens when AI adoption succeeds beyond all expectations, and that success becomes the source of catastrophic economic disruption. The piece traces how accelerating AI capability interacts with the structures of the white-collar labour market, corporate spending, consumer demand, credit markets, and government fiscal policy — identifying the feedback loops that connect each layer into a single, self-reinforcing system. The authors are explicit that this is a thought exercise rather than a forecast, and the essay closes by returning the reader to February 2026, framing the scenario as a risk to model and prepare for rather than a fate already in motion.
00:00 - Introduction
00:56 - Macro Memo
00:57 - The Consequences of Abundant Intelligence
05:33 - How It Started
10:18 - When Friction Went to Zero
19:17 - From Sector Risk to Systemic Risk
27:47 - The Intelligence Displacement Spiral
32:45 - The Daisy Chain of Correlated Bets
47:34 - The Battle Against Time
54:12 - The Intelligence Premium Unwind
56:43 - Acknowledgements
https://open.substack.com/pub/citrini/p/2028gic?utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web
