The man who warned about the Covid-19 pandemic and predicted the 2008 crash says a global financial disaster is coming — and he names the cause

Robert Peston has recently claimed a worldwide market shock is likely within the next year or two, and that artificial intelligence will be the cause of it. The ITV News political editor is someone who needs to be heard. Back in 2007, he broke the news that Northern Rock had approached the Bank of England for emergency funding.

Peston spent that spring and summer warning about the damage the sector was about to do, but everyone told him he was scaremongering. Flash forward a year, and the banking system collapsed. The Covid part, meanwhile, rests on his own account.

Peston says that after years of making documentaries in China, including a trip to Wuhan, he raised the alarm with whoever in government would take his call at the end of 2019. In a few months, the virus had spread all around the world. Now, the man is saying artificial intelligence — or more precisely, the money being invested into it right now — will cause the next big shock in the global ecosystem. 

AI will survive, but people will lose their jobs

He set out the case in an interview with Radio Times. His fear is not that the technology fails, but rather that the spending has raced miles ahead of anything the technology can earn back. Vast sums are going into data centers and the power stations needed to feed them. He doubts the returns will ever be big enough to cover the outlay. 

Once investors figure that out, he expects companies to fold and markets to lurch. He told the magazine he was “genuinely anxious” about it.

But even if that crash happens, AI itself will probably survive. “AI and robots will displace incredibly large numbers of jobs, and there may not be conventional productive employment to replace those lost jobs, so how are people going to live?” he asked. 

Peston has written a new novel titled The Kill Switch, the final book in a trilogy of thriller novels that centers around a journalist named Gil Peck, embroiled in a plot that incorporates both tech tycoons and a sinister AI. 

Part of what convinces Peston is the frenzy around SpaceX’s stock market debut, which raised roughly $75 billion in June, and ranks as the largest in history. (per NBC News) To Peston, that kind of excitement is not a vote of confidence. If anything, it’s a warning — a warning that money is chasing a tail faster than it can be delivered. When others realize the truth, the possibility of a market crash — per Peston’s warnings — shouldn’t be lightly dismissed.