Citrini Research is a markets research newsletter on macro themes, AI infrastructure, supply chains, and geopolitical field trips.
HN links it in debates about AI and jobs and about the Strait of Hormuz; commenters cite its memo and note its paywall.
You're right, and I think we're slightly at cross purposes. I'm not disagreeing that AI will drive some major societal changes as you outline.
My point is that the current narrative of "AI will take our jobs" is too simplistic, and that it might even be a smokescreen against the rising inequality that is already fueling anger across the world and which is totally unrelated to AI. If you're struggling to pay your bills today, that's not AI's fault - it's years of bad politics and politicians, geopolitics, hyper-capitalism, supply-chain issues, inflation, and so on.
In the future, if/when AI decimates parts of the middle class and they've had a chance to retrain, there will likely be a second-order impact on today's skilled manual workers. But that's years off, and not something I've seen discussed in detail in the mainstream.
You're probably aware, but if not, worth a read: https://www.citriniresearch.com/p/2028gic
Do you really want to live in a world when nobody understand software that manages nuclear power plant? Or medical devices? Or financial software? Or radio transceivers firmware? Even something so boring like databases not understood could lead to disastrous effects if this would be the government database for managing people IDS. Hmm even if this would be working fine for years what would happen if bad actor would influence models to generate code if security issues? If nobody can comprehend the output how anybody would be able to think about the danger? This is even more grim then this
https://www.citriniresearch.com/p/2028gic
> Every single documentation and commentary about this says that it is not a good idea, but it does trigger the inspiration and imagination of people of what the future is going to be. The whole conversation around this comment is that people don't get why people are excited about this.
If you have 10 minutes, here is an example of how LLM tech can trigger inspiration and imagination of people of what the future is going to be:
https://www.citriniresearch.com/p/2028gic
There's other news floating around from Citrini saying similar things - the actual substack post (behind a paywall https://www.citriniresearch.com/p/strait-of-hormuz-a-citrini-field), and some news coverage - https://www.cnbc.com/2026/04/06/wall-street-firm-sends-analyst-to-the-strait-of-hormuz-heres-what-they-found-out.html
Being able to put up toll booths on the Strait is another knife to the body of international law and the good old rules based order.
> Citrini Research on Sunday published a report on Substack laying out hypothetical scenarios for how developments in AI could disrupt certain parts of the economy. Stocks that were mentioned in the report tumbled on Monday.
That report is here https://www.citriniresearch.com/p/2028gic
I don’t think the US signed up to protect Chinese or Indian ships through the Strait. Also, it’s not blocked.
https://www.citriniresearch.com/p/strait-of-hormuz-a-citrini-field