As tech giants chase AI trillions, no one is even asking about the broader macro impacts | Forexlive

At the moment, the market is pricing in all the upside impacts of AI and robotics and trying to suss out the winners. The next conversation will be the losers.

• Nvidia is the most-valuable company in the world
• Elon Musk said: “Robotic taxis makes Tesla about a $5 trillion company… The
  Optimus Robot, I think, makes Tesla a $25 trillion company.”
• Microsoft is spending $80 billion on data centers this year alone
• Robotics companies have turned into meme stocks

The multiples of all the tech stocks are sky high on the expectation that they’re going to generate incredible margins due to automation, AI and robotics. I agree completely but those margins will need to come from somewhere and the obvious culprit is human labor.

Now Elon Musk says a lot of nonsense but he talked about 10 billion humanoid robots by 2040, which is more than the entire population of the planet. Jensen Huang this week also talked about how we’re near a ‘ChatGPT’ moment for robotics, which I think is a certainty given that generative AI allows them to see and interact with the world like never before.

The knee-jerk reaction will be the old industrial revolution trope around luddites and people finding different jobs. Maybe they will but even a short period of +8% unemployment in the US would be incredibly disruptive and I expect it will be much higher than that.

“I’m not afraid of that at all,” Sam Altman said regarding job losses. “In
fact, I think that’s good. I think that’s the way of progress, and we’ll
find new and better jobs.”

OK, Sam, what might those jobs be?

To put Musk’s market cap comment into perspective, the entire market cap of the S&P 500 right now is $52 trillion. To get to half of that, the profits would need to be taken from somewhere — other companies or people’s pocket books. If people don’t have jobs, where does that money come from?

Now I don’t have the answers to these questions — though I have some ideas — what disturbs me is that barely anyone is even talking about this with any kind of rationality or honesty.