ITV's Robert Peston has new chilling warning after 'predicting Covid' and 2008 financial crisis
Robert Peston says he is 'genuinely anxious' that a major market crash is en route - and he reckons artificial intelligence will be to blame.
Considering he's correctly predicted the global financial crisis in 2008 and the coronavirus pandemic, he's a bloke who we might want to take notice of.
The political editor of ITV News believes the writing is on the wall for another economic catastrophe and has warned that funnelling money into advancing AI could cause society as we know it to 'collapse'.
Peston's predictions are usually on the nose and even he doesn't understand why 'people don't listen' to him when he says 'say things are about to go awfully, badly wrong'.
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He previously raised the alarm about the banking collapse which took place nearly two decades ago while he was working at the BBC.
Reflecting on the reception his earlier warning received, the 66-year-old told the Walking the Dog podcast in 2024: "Broadly, what happened was, I broke a series of important stories, did some investigations, got some scoops.
"From the middle of 2007 onwards, I was giving people information that was directly relevant to their lives, which they weren’t getting from anywhere else.
"I think at that point people concentrated more on what I was saying rather than on how I was saying it. It is interesting for me looking back on it: I must have a very thick skin because, even though there was a lot of criticism, I didn’t feel particularly anxious. I just kept doing what I was doing and fortunately I then had this breakthrough."
In a new interview, the London-born broadcaster explained he is currently being overwhelmed by similar feelings of dread due to AI - and given his track record, we ought to pay attention.
Peston's correct predictions
Pointing out how his previous forecasts were dismissed at the time, Peston told the Radio Times: "In the spring and summer of 2007 I was warning that what was happening in the banking sector was going to cause enormous harm to us all, and lots of politicians and people in the city wrote to the BBC to say I was scaremongering and needed to be closed down.
"A few years later, I’d made a ton of documentaries about China, and knew it well, and had been to Wuhan.
"So when this mysterious new virus turned up at the end of 2019, I said to anyone in government who would listen to me, ‘This looks serious'."
He suspects another dire situation could soon be on the horizon, as he doesn't believe AI will deliver the returns that people have been promised.
Peston said: "I am genuinely anxious that we’re going to get a serious financial crash, globally, in the next year or two, because there is the most astonishing amount of money going into building the data centres and power plants for AI, and as we saw when SpaceX floated on the stock exchange, a late-1920s degree of breathless excitement on the markets.
"And I worry that the profits aren’t going to be delivered on a scale to justify all this, so businesses will go bust, investors will take fright and we will have a significant market shock."
His latest book, The Kill Switch, is a thriller which explores the idea of a world where 'megalomaniac technocrats, malevolent AI super-intelligence and cutting-edge brain implants' are commonplace.
Chillingly, the plot doesn't sound that far-fetched in this day and age.
AI threatens to wipe out human workforce
Peston is of the opinion that the AI industrial revolution will be of similar importance to the Steam Age, and he suspects 'AI infrastructure will survive' even if there is a financial crash looming.
But this brings about further problems, as he reckons 'AI and robots will displace incredibly large numbers of jobs'.
Peston went on: "There may not be conventional productive employment to replace those lost jobs, so how are people going to live?
"And if vast numbers lose their jobs, nobody pays income tax, so the government can’t pay for public services, and society collapses."
Despite his bleak forecast, Peston says he is actually a 'great optimist' - who just thinks that weighing up 'possible dystopias' is the best course of action to 'prevent them happening'.
His warnings come hot on the heels of former OpenAI researcher Daniel Kokotajlo declaring that AI will become a 'superintelligence' - and this will leave humans without employment, as it will be 'better, faster and cheaper' than us.
Topics: Artificial Intelligence, ITV, Money, World News
Olivia Burke