AI goes apocalyptic
AI’s reality check has arrived
AI goes apocalyptic
A feast for the ages
AI’s reality check has arrived
APPOINTIBLE: THE BOOKING SYSTEM BUILT FOR SERVICE BUSINESS OWNERS
Every service business owner deserves scheduling software that works for them, not the other way around.
The use case: Appointible is booking software built for owners who run their business on appointments. You get online booking, automated SMS reminders, team calendars, and a real person on the phone to help you move your data over, so you can get your evenings back. No setup fees. No credit card to start. Just bookings that fit how you work.
Step-by-step:
1. Appointible is free to start today, with up to 4 users and 200 appointments a month, forever. When you’re ready for more, upgrade to Pro at $5 per user a month billed yearly, and use code ALLEY20 for 20% off your order, which brings it down to just $4 per user a month.
1. Everything runs from one place: online booking, automated reminders, room scheduling, a simple CRM, and automatic review requests after every visit.
2. Open Appointible and add your services, hours, and team. Your booking page, calendar, and automated reminders go live in minutes.
3. Share your booking link. Clients book themselves online any time, day or night, while you get back to the work you do best.
Pro tip: Use code ALLEY20 at checkout to take 20% off Pro, so your first year runs $4 per user a month instead of $5. Most switches stall during migration, so we move yours for free with a real person, and you don’t pay until your last appointment is moved.
AI goes apocalyptic
Apocalyptic thinking is the strongest impulse in American capitalism today. Elon Musk, a character who could be straight from Mackay’s pages, will soon float SpaceX, a rocket company whose professed mission is to avert existential threats to humanity by establishing a colony on Mars. Mr Musk is America’s richest capitalist in part because he is its loudest Cassandra.
Mr Musk is rushing to list before two other prophets with similarly millenarian worldviews. Anthropic filed paperwork for a public offering this week. Dario Amodei, its boss, has made much of the destructive potential of his firm’s Mythos model, which has thus far been kept from the public. OpenAI, run by Sam Altman, will probably file its paperwork soon. The lab recently published a utopian plan for the social contract after (or, rather, under) AI.
Debates about regulating AI have taken an evangelical turn. Peter Thiel, a tech investor, says AI will summon the Antichrist in the form of authoritarian rules. “Merely regulating it is insufficient,” wrote Pope Leo XIV in a 40,000-word essay on AI last month. “It must be disarmed.” A new tune by Charli XCX, a pop star, captures both the papal and the popular mood: “Spring, Summer ’26/When the world is gonna end, no hope for any of it/Yeah, we’re walkin’ on a runway that goes straight to hell.”
Much of Wall Street is in a fatalistic mood. The list of financial innovations central bankers say pose “systemic” risks to the economy is so long it’s hard to believe the system hasn’t collapsed under the weight of its own anxiety. Predictions of total and irreversible change certainly have their uses: there is no stronger pitch to investors than claiming your business will end the world as we know it....
A feast for the ages
They promise to be the biggest stockmarket debuts in history. On June 11th SpaceX reportedly hopes to raise $75bn from investors, by issuing shares that will begin trading on the Nasdaq exchange the next day. Elon Musk’s rocketry firm will probably soon be followed by two other mammoth listings. Anthropic, an artificial-intelligence lab, filed draft paperwork for its initial public offering on June 1st; OpenAI, a competitor, is expected to do so soon. The two are rumoured to be seeking as much as $60bn apiece.
A broader worry still is that the giga-IPOs herald more capital-raising, both by the newly listed tech giants and their older peers. For years, notes Victor Haghani of Elm Wealth, an investment firm, capital has been abundant and shares increasingly scarce. Tech giants have generated so much cash that they have been buying back shares rather than issuing new ones at the same time as white-collar workers have ploughed retirement savings into the market. This has driven up share prices.
Now the tech behemoths are slowing share buy-backs or halting them altogether, instead reinvesting their profits to develop AI. Several have turned to the bond market for more capital. This month Alphabet, Google’s corporate parent, said it would issue $85bn in new shares. And the club’s newest members are tapping the stockmarket.
The answer is: lots of investors in an extraordinarily deep and liquid market. Unprecedented as the serving of supersized IPOs is, America’s extraordinary stockmarket will gulp it down. In the years to follow, though, expect some indigestion....
AI’s reality check has arrived
The past few days have been full of bad news for the AI industry. The headlines paint a picture of an industry confronting growing pushback on multiple fronts, from political and regulatory headwinds to disappointing financial returns.
In a notable shift in tone, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman acknowledged that artificial intelligence is unlikely to trigger the “jobs apocalypse” he had previously warned about. Speaking virtually at a Commonwealth Bank event in Sydney, Altman downplayed earlier predictions of widespread job displacement, admitting his early economic intuitions were “pretty wrong” regarding immediate white-collar layoffs. Altman said the hit to entry-level office work has been significantly smaller than he expected.
AI company executives have sometimes dramatized the potential negative effects of AI as a way of hyping the power of their models. But now that popular resistance to the technology, born partly of job-loss fears, is threatening the construction of new data centers, AI companies may be trying to tone down the rhetoric….