Bridgewater's CIO just compared where we are with AI risk to February 2020.
That's the month before everything went sideways with COVID. Markets still partying. Nobody taking it seriously yet. Then March happened.
His actual concern? Human extinction. Not market volatility. Not job losses. Extinction.
Now, I've sat through enough institutional risk meetings to know when smart people start talking about tail risks, it's worth listening. But I've also learned that the biggest risks are usually the ones nobody's pricing in because they sound too crazy to be real.
February 2020 is a good analogy though. We had all the information we needed. We just didn't act on it. The question with AI isn't whether the risk exists — it's whether we're capable of responding rationally before it's too late.
Markets hate uncertainty. They really hate existential uncertainty. But they're historically terrible at pricing low-probability, high-impact events until they're no longer low-probability.
So what do you do as an investor? Same thing you always do: stay diversified, don't over-leverage, and remember that the world has ended many times before in someone's forecast — and yet here we are, still checking exchange rates and arguing about the best euro rate today.
That's the month before everything went sideways with COVID. Markets still partying. Nobody taking it seriously yet. Then March happened.
His actual concern? Human extinction. Not market volatility. Not job losses. Extinction.
Now, I've sat through enough institutional risk meetings to know when smart people start talking about tail risks, it's worth listening. But I've also learned that the biggest risks are usually the ones nobody's pricing in because they sound too crazy to be real.
February 2020 is a good analogy though. We had all the information we needed. We just didn't act on it. The question with AI isn't whether the risk exists — it's whether we're capable of responding rationally before it's too late.
Markets hate uncertainty. They really hate existential uncertainty. But they're historically terrible at pricing low-probability, high-impact events until they're no longer low-probability.
So what do you do as an investor? Same thing you always do: stay diversified, don't over-leverage, and remember that the world has ended many times before in someone's forecast — and yet here we are, still checking exchange rates and arguing about the best euro rate today.