Citrini Apocalypse; Any Escape?

Points to Ponder, May 2026

Although the Citrini report makes a timely and cogent case of how the advent of AI agentic tools would destroy jobs and cause the death of intermediation, a deeper analysis of the same reveals some flaws.

An important issue that Citrini seems to have glossed over is the crucial fact that while AI capabilities advance every 6-10 months, university curricula update every 5 years or so. This creates an irreconcilable skill gap. While this temporal asymmetry is real, it overlooks a critical nuance: enterprise adoption lags significantly behind model release. Gartner’s 2024 Hype Cycle for AI notes that only 12 to 18% organizations have moved beyond pilot stages to full workflow integration, due to compliance, data security, change management and legacy system dependencies. So, the Citrini timeline for the arrival of the AI apocalypse seems unduly alarmist and likely to be more gradual.

Citadel Securities, points out that if the marginal cost of compute rises above the marginal cost of human labour for certain tasks, substitution will occur, creating a natural economic boundary. This point is worth noting, as Citrini’s basic premise is based on a scenario where compute costs keep sliding down significantly from current levels. But as of now, it is clear that the ensemble comprising AI infrastructure, such as data centers, is an energy guzzler and poses major threat to environmental sustainability. As the ‘Big Tech’ league seeks to establish what may well emerge as “AI Colonization of the Globe” and as demand for AI applications surges, the likes of Google, Meta, Amazon, et al, are putting their heft behind next gen (modular) nuclear power. But the cost of such energy often ignores (presumably conveniently), end of life decommissioning costs of such nuclear plants, which could be prohibitively high. There have also been efforts to harvest “stranded” renewable energy, particularly from the less developed global south. But storing this power and wheeling it in a grid compliant manner will not be cheap. Clearly then, assuming progressive and significant reduction in cost of energy so as to keep it always and in al situations, lower than the cost of labour is unrealistic.

Well known economists, whose ideas have been tested time and again and have prevailed, provide some contrarian clues to Citrini report.

The remarkable insight by Joseph Schumpeter which is called Creative Destruction, while acknowledging the disruption as predicted by Citrini report, does not, unlike in the report ignore the unpredictable and unexpected creative possibilities that AI disruption may throw up. Citrini’s assumption of “human intelligence displacement spiral” where no new jobs emerge, because AI is superior at every task, does not take into account Schumpeter’s entrepreneurial innovation, which invariably finds new combinations of knowledge giving rise to entirely new industries and jobs. The unravelling of the Citrini report essentially hinges on whether AI is a Schumpeterian tool that augments/complements human agency (leading to higher productivity and wages) or a pure substitute that renders human labour redundant.

Much depends on how AI develops. Will countries adopt common protocols or guardrails as in the case of genetic engineering which has almost resulted in mankind loosing its adolescence. Tools like CRISPR – Cas9 that allow scientists to edit DNA by acting as molecular scissors to cut, delete, or correct genetic sequences, can compress to days or months what evolution would have achieved over millions of years. Before genetic labs could produce unpredictable “monsters”, countries (regulators) have imposed certain restrictions on such research. Similarly, for instance, until now when software vulnerabilities were discovered, attackers often required days or weeks to weaponize them. That window allowed defenders to patch systems, issue advisories and contain damage. Anthropic’s latest AI model Claude Mythos which possesses the ability to autonomously discover and exploit previously unknown software vulnerabilities, now threatens to collapse this protective lag from weeks to hours. This has forced the finance ministries, banking and other regulators globally to begin assessing whether financial institutions and systems can withstand AI-accelerated cyberattacks. The challenge is not the technology per se, but who controls these capabilities, under what safeguards and with what international coordination. It is developments like these that are prompting more and more countries to consider putting in place commonly agreed upon guardrails before AI takes over human agency.

Another well-known economist, F. A. Hayek argued that economic data is never “given” to a single central entity, but is dispersed, localized and tacit. AI cannot centralize this “knowledge of the particular circumstances of time and place” in real time. Therefore, AI cannot fully replace the localized, human-driven decision-making necessary for economic activity. The “bottleneck” is not just intelligence, but the inability to fully digitize the real-world tacit knowledge. This “Knowledge Problem” coupled with Hayek’s theory of superiority of Spontaneous Order over central planning, refutes the dystopian outcomes suggested by Citrini report. A la Schumpeter’s “Creative Destruction”, Spontaneous Order theory implies that as AI makes goods and services cheaper (more efficient), it releases resources (capital and labour) for new unpredicted and unexpected uses rather than causing a permanent collapse in demand. The “Ghost GDP” may be just that, a ghost, as the market through price signals spontaneously reorganizes, rather than falling into a no-brake doom loop.

A plausible scenario is where highly empowered workers co-exist with AI, becoming 10 or 20 times more productive than before. The Citrini report does not also account for likely widespread pushback by stakeholders and even governments, when a crisis of such a large scale unravels. For instance, Citrini blithely assumes Stable Coins to become legal tender, when most central banks, including RBI, have vehemently voiced their opposition to their adoption.

Eventually communities may even come to regard that the Citrini apocalypse, if at all it comes about, as a blessing in disguise. To those who are blinded by the GDP calculus, the collapse of growth as conceived by them, namely, ever increasing demand leading to ever increasing production, might truly be an apocalypse. But growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell! As far back as in the 1970’s, The Club of Rome came out with its prescient report: The Limits to Growth, which questioned the sustainability of the development model that had taken hold of humanity. In this context, Citrini provides an opportunity to communities to pause and examine if the kind of development model that is being pursued is ultimately destroying us and our habitat, even before AI leads to the loss of human agency.         

A plausible scenario is where highly empowered workers co-exist with AI, becoming 10 or 20 times more productive than before. The Citrini report does not also account for likely widespread pushback by stakeholders and even governments, when a crisis of such a large scale unravels. For instance, Citrini blithely assumes Stable Coins to become legal tender, when most central banks, including RBI, have vehemently voiced their opposition to their adoption.

Eventually communities may even come to regard that the Citrini apocalypse, if at all it comes about, as a blessing in disguise. To those who are blinded by the GDP calculus, the collapse of growth as conceived by them, namely, ever increasing demand leading to ever increasing production, might truly be an apocalypse. But growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell! As far back as in the 1970’s, The Club of Rome came out with its prescient report: The Limits to Growth, which questioned the sustainability of the development model that had taken hold of humanity. In this context, Citrini provides an opportunity to communities to pause and examine if the kind of development model that is being pursued is ultimately destroying us and our habitat, even before AI leads to the loss of human agency.