Bad Watch by 2035

Displacement Shock

No safety failure; the economy and information systems simply cannot absorb the speed of change.

Probability this is the dominant trajectory by 2035

9–15%

1 revision · 0/2 tripwires crossed

The scenario

The models behave; the systems around them break. White-collar unemployment jumps faster than retraining can follow, an AI investment bust takes credit markets with it, or synthetic media dissolves shared facts. Each sub-branch is a different failure of absorption, and each has a well-known historical analog.

Preconditions

Capability sufficient to replace a large share of cognitive work
Adoption fast enough to outrun adjustment
Weak social insurance and institutional trust

Leading indicators

Unemployment in AI-exposed occupations
AI capex as share of GDP; credit spreads on AI-linked debt
Trust-in-media surveys and deepfake incident rates

Tripwires

Observable thresholds. When one crosses, the scenario's status changes and the weekly re-run is brought forward.

cleards-t1

US unemployment rises above 7% with AI-exposed occupations leading

cleards-t2

A top-5 AI company or its main financier defaults or is bailed out

Playbook

Prevent

Wage insurance and portable benefits legislated before the shock
Capital requirements that reflect AI concentration risk
Provenance standards for media

Detect

Monthly labor and credit tracking against the indicators.

Respond

individuals

12 months of runway; skills that are physical, relational, licensed or ownership-based
Diversify away from single-employer and single-sector exposure

organizations

Plan for demand collapse in customer segments hit by unemployment
Do not become the case study: phased adoption with retraining

governments

Automatic stabilizers that trigger on unemployment, not on votes
Fiscal capacity reserved for an AI-driven downturn

Recover

See sub-branches; the shared lesson from 2008 and 1930 is that speed of response matters more than its exact design.

Probability history

Every change is logged with its reason and the signals that drove it. Moves are bounded per week; a jump beyond the bound is flagged as a shock.

Probability range over time

Your estimate

Disagree with our range? Set yours. Estimates feed a community view that appears once enough people weigh in, and the weekly run reads the gap between our number and yours.

12%

2026-09-16

9–15%

seed

Seed estimate, on watch: Anthropic's own 2030 model spans 4.6% to 12% unemployment, young workers in exposed jobs are already ~19% behind peers, and capex above $750B a year creates a bust risk of its own.

signals: sig-2026-09-10-anthropic-economy, sig-2026-09-12-microsoft-38gw

Signals pushing on this branch

2026-09-10

economy

●●○○○

Anthropic publishes a 2030 economy model: unemployment 4.6% to 12% across scenarios

Labor share of income could fall from 59% to 45%. Stanford data shows 22–25-year-olds in AI-exposed jobs ~19% below peers, with no economy-wide job loss through June 2026.

timelines — concentration — safety —

Economic Insider · ledger

Built on

Every source reviewed for this scenario. The full ledger is public.

Date	Source	Publisher	Type
2026-09-10	Anthropic 2030 economy model: GDP and jobs scenarios Unemployment 4.6% to ~12% across scenarios; labor share 59% → 45%; young workers in AI-exposed jobs ~19% below peers.	Economic Insider	news
2026-09-12	Microsoft targets 38 GW of datacenter capacity by 2032 Big-5 capex >$750B in 2026; Oracle backlog $664B.	Eastern Herald	news
2026-09-15	OpenAI in talks at $1.2T valuation	TECHi / FT	news