Fear & Loathing Over AI vs Our AI-Driven Economy

 

Fear & Loathing Over AI vs Our AI-Driven Economy

There is a massive disconnect between what most Americans feel about the rise of AI in everyday life – a mixture of fear, distrust and resignation – and how corporate America views this exploding technology – invest, invest, invest. Even though the richest Americans own 90% of US publicly traded stocks… and 80%-90% of the massive rise in the major stock markets is directly attributable to AI-related investments… no one really knows where this will lead. China is focused on embedding its patented AI systems into virtually everything it manufactures, from massive ships to its cars to ordinary appliances to every manufacturing process it can find. American AI is focused on the home run, big picture, creating the unstoppable AI mega-technology growth model. Oh, so is China.

And one company, Nvidia, stands above the rest. Makers of the most valuable AI processing chips in the industry, that company is now valued at over four trillion dollars. The company has changed dramatically from what it was in the 1990s when this Silicon Valley company was founded: “Originally focused on GPUs [graphic user interface] for video gaming, Nvidia broadened their use into other markets, including artificial intelligence (AI), professional visualization, and supercomputing. The company's product lines include GeForce GPUs for gaming and creative workloads, and professional GPUs for edge computing, scientific research, and industrial applications. As of the first quarter of 2025, Nvidia held a 92% share of the discrete desktop and laptop GPU market.” Wikipedia. Over time, with massive outside investment and a series of strategic acquisitions, Nvidia became the tip of the AI spear, with super-advanced AI chips, strategic alliances and a market cap that made it the leader in global tech.

But even for recent Stanford comp sci engineering graduates, old tech skills were fading fast. Layoffs and closed doors, except for those with cutting edge knowledge, terrified an already disappointed set of Gen Z graduates. But AI is everywhere, and job cuts are already rocking the marketplace. Writing for the January 2nd The Morning (a NY Times feed), Evan Gorelick highlights our fears, even as Donald Trump has issued an executive order to keep state regulators out of the AI universe: “[A]rtificial intelligence has brought a whole new level of fear and loathing.

“It’s easy to have an opinion when the tech is everywhere. Chatbots are in kids’ classrooms. Autonomous agents rank résumés and conduct job interviews. Software companies use A.I. to write code. Lawyers use it to draft legal briefs. Experts say we’re adopting it faster than any other technology in history... As these tools spread, the ranks of skeptics are growing. Haters, too. Most Americans are concerned about A.I., polling shows. Fewer are excited. And four out of five of those optimists still say they’re alarmed… The freakout shows up everywhere… Here’s how to understand the animosity. A.I. is broad… A breakthrough in manufacturing may affect only manufacturing, but an A.I. breakthrough could transform manufacturing, physics, finance, music and dozens of other fields. So the backlash is just as sprawling, and there are various reasons for it:

• Jobs. Nearly three-quarters of Americans expect A.I. to slash jobs. At some companies, that’s already happening. Salesforce, a business software company, laid off 4,000 customer-support employees, citing A.I. automation. Amazon told employees the new efficiencies would shrink its work force.

• Trust. The inner workings of A.I. are a black box — even to the engineers who make it. People worry about its biases, its readiness to fabricate information and its ability to meaningfully shift public opinion and influence elections. And don’t forget all the A.I. slop flooding social media.

• Agency. People who never wanted A.I. are stuck with it. The fortunes of public pensions, retirement accounts and individual investments now depend on it. The companies that make it are responsible for most of the recent stock-market gains. (And if A.I. turns out to be a bubble, it could trigger a recession.)”

A world governed by self-teaching, hyper-accelerating exploding technology, one where many of those fears are absolutely justified, will undoubtedly provide many useful advances, even as our economic and political reality is disrupted beyond recognition. Our existing obsession with digital communications is bad enough, but with AI capable, near-human communications, with high risks of fakery, our individual problems loom large.

Our existing digital obsession is not exactly good for us as health reporter, Sumathi Reddy, writing for the January 1st Wall Street Journal, can attest: “A recent study in JAMA Network Open found that when young adults did a social-media detox for a week they had a reduction in anxiety and depression symptoms, as well as less insomnia… Dr. John Torous, senior author of the study and director of the division of digital psychiatry at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, says previous research often relies on people self-reporting their screen time or social-media use, which can be unreliable. He wanted to do it differently.

“Here’s what his study did: About 400 people between the ages of 18 and 24 were instructed to use their phones normally for two weeks to get a baseline of screen time and other metrics. The third week they were asked to reduce their social-media use… About 80% of people were successful in reducing their social-media time. Average use went down from about two hours a day to 30 minutes… The participants were asked questions about their mood, activity and sleep daily. After a week of their social-media detox, participants on average had: a 25% reduction in depression symptoms, a 16% decline in anxiety and a 14% decrease in insomnia. There was no significant change in exercise or number of steps.” It seems highly likely that our lack of building appropriate guardrails and understanding the social impact of these changes augur badly for the physical, economic and mental health of us all.

I’m Peter Dekom, and those benefitting from a massive profits (potential and actual) generated by this acceleration of AI seem to have little or no concern for the 90% of us who will pay the price to make them so much richer.