habitual app loyalty (13. 207)

An ominous think-piece by a research group and consulting firm specialising in insights in “transformative megatrends” has rattled markets and businesses, lurching from anxiety over an AI bubble to foreboding over what they have wrought delivering mass redundancies across industries. The Singularity feared is not a runaway super-intelligence or a rogue system fighting for self-preservation at all costs but rather autonomous agents that make for frictionless exchanges and circumvent the economic inefficiencies that businesses rely on. Like the disruption that came for publishers and legacy outlets with the democratisation of the internet, the new gatekeepers model is based on margins and middlemen with clearinghouses for payments and facilitating connecting consumers with services, ride-sharing, food deliveries, travel arrangements, but agentive AI could potentially bypass and disarticulate all those supply-chains and providers by arranging the logistics—in theory in this scenario—as a downward spiral in the fintech and gig sectors that has disastrous implications for the broader economy. More from the Guardian’s Aisha Down and Dan Milmo at the link up top.