The amount of money being spent on artificial intelligence is astronomical. Investors have lavished the top tech companies and startups alike with hundreds of billions of dollars — so much so, in fact, that an estimated 92 percent of US GDP growth now comes from AI. If trends continue in 2026, conservative estimates peg the spending from just the “largest technology firms” at $550 billion.
With that kind of cash riding on AI, it’s safe to say investors are expecting something big — like, say, a totally new era of human development.
Many economists, journalists, and venture capitalists have argued that the gold at the end of the rainbow is less a pot of riches than the complete automation of all jobs. Basically, the idea goes that whoever’s left holding the bag when the new AI era comes to pass will be god emperor, for better or worse.
That idea isn’t lost on publishing magnate Keith Riegert, the CEO of Ulysses Press, who recently told a crowded room of book industry leaders that there are only two AI futures: a hellscape of mass unemployment, or a “scaling plateau triggering economic collapse.”
“I don’t know which ones going to happen,” he said, commenting that a financial catastrophe “is the version of the future that I would prefer.”
Riegert’s brutal assessment came at the Sharjah’s Publishers Conference in the United Arab Emirates, a massive annual meeting which brings over 1,200 representatives from for-profit publishing houses together to discuss the industry. His talk, evidently, was on the gnawing issue of AI.
“It’s time to use it or get left behind,” the CEO told attendees at his panel. According to industry publication Publishers Weekly, Reigert described AI as both “transformative” and “unsettling,” adding that he’s “not very happy that AI is here.”
Still, Reigert decided to stuff his doubts deep down and go after what really matters in life: profits. He continued to describe the partnership his company made with OpenAI, which includes a mandate that all employees use ChatGPT for “at least an hour daily.”
The publishing CEO even demonstrated the transformative power of AI live on stage by — we’re not kidding — creating a book ready to be listed on Amazon in just five minutes. He admitted the book was “terrible,” but listed it on Kindle’s Direct Publishing platform anyway before deleting it, Publishers reported.
“As soon as Kara Swisher’s biography was announced, there were half a dozen AI-generated clones that came to market well before publication,” he told conference attendees, seemingly as a positive example of AI’s abilities.
Sure enough, Amazon has become a nightmare of AI-generated books and bot farming — a degraded ecosystem this CEO seems happy to roll around in, damn the consequences.
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