Nicholas Pardini

This is a talk about the economic, financial, social, and geopolitical implications of AI technology becoming mainstream. The winners will not be the big tech companies as expected.

The Era of Hard Choices is the point where lost productivity and wealth of the lower and middle classes of developed economies can no longer be papered over by debt since the turn of the century. The mechanism was mortgages from 2000-2008 and non-housing consumer credit from 2008-2016 (student loans, auto loans, etc.). When rates reached cyclical trough in 2016, the game ran out. Now future consumption and investment choices by governments, individuals, and businesses will have to make hard choices with defined tradeoffs. This will result in more binary possible outcomes, more clear end points in securities affected by these choices, and overall more realized volatility.

My story is being of one of the first people to truly go from non-verbal autism as a young child, to becoming a high functioning member of society. I will also talk about how society can better utilize the potential of highly functioning autistic people