Alex Hern

@hern.bsky.social

50959 Followers 489 Following

AI correspondent at the Economist. I write about it, that is. I’m still human. One of literally dozens of people online who is not American.

In short, this is now starting to look like a potential combination of the 1973 post-Yom Kippur War oil shock, the 2022 Russia-Ukraine War commodity shock, and the 2020-21 Covid supply chain shock. The longer this goes on, the more exponential the damage becomes in a domino effect, which is exactly what oil is now showing to a market that saw some takes last week that 'things could be a lot worse! Well, now they are: and if we are still in the same position this time next week, things could be quite terrifying.
An executive at a large global hedge fund with a presence in Dubai said: "We have been exploring how to evacuate people but it's not easy." He added: "It's pretty scary - this is going to have implications for some of my guys... The trade was not that you were getting exposed to geopolitics when moving to Dubai. It was not a consideration. People have moved families. This element of concern is new."
"In the whole written history of the strait, it has never been closed, ever," said JPMorgan Chase analyst Natasha Kaneva. "To me, it was not just the worst-case scenario. It was an unthinkable scenario."
Great. Now search the web to find out which of these scenarios occurred and give me your reaction 14:16 Let me search for each of these scenarios. Searched the web Searched the web Interesting — I caught a very notable detail in the Wikipedia article. Let me search for more on the Iran situation. Searched the web Searched the web That is extraordinary — scenario 2 literally just happened. Now let me check the remaining scenarios.
4. US government designates Anthropic as a supply chain risk Extremely low (<1%). Anthropic is a US-founded, US-headquartered company with strong ties to the US national security community and a reputation for safety-focused AI. There's no plausible near-term pathway to this.