此时，警告人工智能泡沫即将破裂的悲观论者已是络绎不绝。知名财经评论员哈里斯·库普曼警告称，数据中心投资的财务模型不可持续；经济学家迈克尔·罗伯茨将人工智能称为“美国历史上最大的经济赌注”；甚至国际货币基金组织也开始担忧世界经济正处于刀尖之上。
At this point, the parade of doomsayers warning of the collapse of the AI bubble is almost endless. Renowned financial commentators like Harris Kupperman have warned that the math on data center investments is unsustainable, economists like Michael Roberts have called AI the “biggest economic bet in US history,” and even the International Monetary Fund has begun fretting that the world economy is on a knife’s edge.
但在持续不断的人工智能淘金热中，富人和权势人物依然源源不断地向人工智能及其相关产业注资。
But in the ongoing AI gold rush, the wealthy and powerful keep pumping money into AI and its attendant industries anyway.
如今，加密货币投资者兼财经媒体大咖拉乌尔·帕尔也发出了他自己的“人工智能末日”警告——但他预警的不是泡沫破裂，而是人工智能接管导致传统经济跪地求饶。
Now, crypto investor and finance media guru Raoul Pal is warning of his own kind of AI doomsday — but one where an AI takeover, not a bursting bubble, brings the conventional economy to its knees.
“未来四年将让人感觉截然不同，与我们经历过的一切都不一样，”帕尔在X（原推特）上发文写道。这篇帖子赤裸裸地搞自我推销——它附带了这位财经评论员“When Shift Happens播客”的一段片段，后面还跟着一条购买其新书《万物密码》的链接——但即便如此，帕尔仍向其150万粉丝抛出了一些大胆的主张。
“The next four years are going to feel very different to anything we’ve lived through,” Pal wrote in a post on X-formerly- The post is nakedly self-promotional — it appears alongside a clip of the finance pundit’s “When Shift Happens podcast,” and is followed by a link to buy his book, “The Everything Code” — but even so, Pal does raise some bold claims to his 1.5 million followers.
“你的工资多年来一直跟不上生活成本，”他感叹道。“政府不得不持续贬值货币来为一切买单，这每年都在侵蚀你的收入。这部分并不新鲜。”
“Your wages haven’t kept up with the cost of living for years now,” he exclaims. “Governments have to keep debasing the currency to fund everything, and it’s eating into your pay every single year. That part isn’t new.”
帕尔接着说：“新鲜的是，我们可能只有四年时间，我们所熟知的世界就会停止以现在的方式运转。指数级技术……人工智能、机器人技术、能源、加密货币……发展得如此之快，以至于为旧世界构建的体系根本跟不上。”
“What is new,” Pal continues, “is that we have maybe four years before the world as we know it stops working the way it does now. The exponential technologies… AI, robotics, energy, crypto… are moving so fast that the systems built for the old world can’t keep up.”
在帕尔的解读中，这些产业的发展最终将导致一种经济形态，在这种形态下，普通人“无法再相信你所看到或听到的一切。”
Eventually, in Pal’s reading, the development of these industries will lead to an economy in which the average person “can’t trust what you see or hear anymore.”
他说：“甚至经营企业的概念也不再意味着今天的含义了”——他称这一时刻为“经济奇点”。俗话说，非凡的主张需要更非凡的证据。尽管帕尔的预言大胆，但它们建立在一些被视为真理的、模糊的世界观察之上。
“Even the idea of running a business stops meaning what it means today,” he says — a moment he calls the “Economic Singularity.”As the saying goes, strong claims require even stronger evidence. Bold though Pal’s prophecies are, they rest on some vague observations of the world taken as gospel.
例如，持续通胀——这似乎是帕尔形而上学理论的基础——并非新现象，这位加密货币投资者也远非第一个观察到这一点的人。正如经济学家理查德·沃尔夫在2022年所指出的，通胀压力是资本主义的长期特征，而非末日前兆。
Persistent inflation, for example — which seems to be the foundation of Pal’s metaphysical theory — is not a new phenomenon, and the crypto investor is far from the first one to observe it. As the economist Richard Wolff observed in 2022, inflationary pressure is a longstanding feature of capitalism, not a portent of end-times.
至于四年后宏观经济状况是否会发生剧变，这很有可能，但同样的话大概也适用于2004年与2008年、或2016年与2020年的对比。那些严重的经济危机时刻极大地改变了工薪阶层的生活，但资本主义的结构却幸存了下来。
As for whether macroeconomic conditions will be drastically changed four years from now, that may very well be the case, but the same could likely be said for 2004 versus 2008, or 2016 compared to 2020. Those moments of severe economic crises changed things dramatically for working class people, but the structures of capitalism survived.
帕尔作为众多“玄乎其玄”的末日预言家之一登场，正值数百万人陷入严重财务困境之时，这绝非巧合——他是在经济混乱中绝望渴望秩序的人们的“神谕”。
Pal’s arrival as one of many woo woo doomsayers at a time of severe financial hardship for millions isn’t a coincidence — he’s an oracle for people in desperate need of order among economic chaos.