The Simple Confusion Driving Every AI Doomsayer’s Headline

There is no end to predictions about how AI will transform the economy. (Michael Nagle/Bloomberg)

Key Points

• Existential fear of artificial intelligence has been rocking the stock market.
• Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and Dario Amodei have called for a slowdown in the pace of AI development.
• President Donald Trump and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang have pushed back against the narrative of slowing down AI development.

The existential fear of artificial intelligence has rocked the stock market. But if one thing can be learned from history it’s that predictions about technology rarely turn out to be completely correct.

Will AI create a utopia where all diseases can be cured and no one will have to work if they don’t desire to? Or will AI bring about a doomsday scenario in which agents go rogue and turn on humans, bringing about an extinction-level event?

The debate is playing out in real time and stocks have been caught in the middle with Tesla and SpaceX’s Elon Musk, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei calling for a slowdown in the pace at which AI is developing.

On the other side, President Donald Trump and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang have pushed back against that narrative.

What seems clear, however, is that the only sure thing that can be said about AI technology and what effect it will have on the economy is that we really don’t know.

“A glance through history would give any investor indigestion. Most predictions are wrong,” wrote Deutsche Bank Research analyst Adrian Cox.

The analyst added that questions around AI aren’t only about “what it will be able to do but also when it will be able to do it.”

What makes it tough for investors is that they’re trying to game out whether the more than $5 trillion in investment by hyperscalers over the next five years will pay off before the advanced chips that are currently being purchased become redundant.

“For the time being, your predictions about the impact of AI are no less valid than an AI expert based in the very particular world of Silicon Valley,” the analyst wrote.

“The future of AI will be made not in Silicon Valley but in Main Street,” Cox added.

Write to Kit Norton at kit.norton@barrons.com

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