The BBC's attempt to add a location-based personalization feature to its homepage inadvertently broke the site's Content Delivery Network (CDN), taking the entire page offline. This reveals how seemingly minor feature additions can cause catastrophic, cascading failures in complex, large-scale systems.

The AI boom is fueled by 'club deals' where large companies invest in startups with the expectation that the funds will be spent on the investor's own products. This creates a circular, self-reinforcing valuation bubble that is highly vulnerable to collapse, as the failure of one company can trigger a cascading failure across the entire interconnected system.

Today's market is more fragile than during the dot-com bubble because value is even more concentrated in a few tech giants. Ten companies now represent 40% of the S&P 500. This hyper-concentration means the failure of a single company or trend (like AI) doesn't just impact a sector; it threatens the entire global economy, removing all robustness from the system.

The SVB crisis wasn't a traditional bank run caused by bad loans. It was the first instance where the speed of the internet and digital fund transfers outpaced regulatory reaction, turning a manageable asset-liability mismatch into a systemic crisis. This highlights a new type of technological 'tail risk' for modern banking.

Silicon Valley Bank was already a member of deposit networks that could have prevented its collapse. However, 94% of its deposits remained uninsured because the bank failed to actually use the tools at its disposal. This reveals that the mere existence of a solution is worthless without proper implementation, integration, and incentives for adoption within an organization.

OpenAI's CFO hinted at needing government guarantees for its massive data center build-out, sparking fears of an AI bubble and a "too big to fail" scenario. This reveals the immense financial risk and growing economic dependence the U.S. is developing on a few key AI labs.

New technologies perceived as job-destroying, like AI, face significant public and regulatory risk. A powerful defense is to make the general public owners of the technology. When people have a financial stake in a technology's success, they are far more likely to defend it than fight against it.

The global economy's dependence on AI has created a massive concentration of risk in NVIDIA. Its valuation, exceeding the entire German stock market, makes it a single point of failure. A significant drop in its stock—which could still leave it overvalued—would have catastrophic ripple effects with nowhere for capital to hide.

The global economy's reliance on a few dominant tech companies creates systemic risk. Unlike a robust, diversified economy, a downturn in a single key player like NVIDIA could trigger a disproportionately severe global recession, described as 'stage four walking pneumonia.' This concentration makes the entire system fragile.