First, let me say I have been approached by a half-dozen people over the last month commenting on these columns, and humbly, let me say thank you. I sincerely thank you for hearing me out and hope you will see that my aim is not to always have agreement but to bring things up that either inform or make you think — and maybe even both. To that end, I feel an overwhelming need to address a bubble that I think may burst.

To be clear, I am not an economist. I have no formal economics training, and what I know of global markets can fit in a shot glass — however, I know people. I’ve always been savvy about spotting trends and thinking against the grain to ask what is happening, why is it that way and how do we make it better? While I am forthright about my lack of expertise, for what it’s worth, I feel those in a position to say something should do so, and thus, here I go.

I have incredible worries about where we are headed economically because, as I see it, our economy is built not on products but rather speculation, and traditionally, that has not ever served most of us very well. Right now, our stock market is propped up by seven to 10 stocks that are not based on the production of tangible items but rather speculation. These companies are all making a huge bet on AI (artificial intelligence)— gigantic investments actually — and they are singing from the same hymn book that AI will transform work as we know it. For some, that transformation includes the elimination of a significant percentage of white-collar jobs in the next 12-18 months.

That’s scary for a chamber director to hear.

But let’s look at who is saying this. When I Google “Who says AI will replace white collar jobs?”, the top search results are: Mustafa Suleyman, the CEO of Microsoft, and Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic.

Now look at this, the top 5 stocks by market cap right now, in some order, are: NVIDIA (an AI company), Alphabet (Google), Apple, Microsoft and Amazon. The next companies include (depending on the list) many other tech companies and only a few non-tech, such as: META (Facebook), Saudi Aramco (energy/oil), Broadcom (semi-conductors), Netflix, Tesla, Palantir Technologies (big data and AI), SoFi Technologies and Berkshire Hathaway, in some order. That’s a lot of tech bets on AI and big data.

Looking at those two data points, we hear quotes about AI replacing human workers, but we see Microsoft is a top-5 company on the stock market, and Anthropic works primarily with Google (No. 2) and Microsoft (No. 4). Thus, the people who will benefit most financially from these gains are the ones being relied on to tell us if it’s a good thing or not.

In 1990, the top 10 stocks by market cap were: Exxon Mobil, General Electric, IBM, AT&T, Phillip Morris, Merck, Bristol Myers-Squibb, DuPont, Amoco (merged with Bell Pacific), BellSouth (acquired by AT&T). Do you see the difference?

What is happening now with AI feels a lot like the dot-com bubble in the ’90s. I looked it up to refresh myself, and this is what Investopedia gave as key takeaways for the dot-com bubble burst:

“The dotcom bubble was characterized by a rapid rise in U.S. technology stock values in the late 1990s, driven by heavy investments in Internet-based startups with little to no profits.

“Between 1995 and 2000, the Nasdaq index experienced a five-fold increase, peaking in March 2000 before plummeting by nearly 77% by October 2002.

“Many startups went public during this period, raising significant capital despite lacking viable business models, which ultimately led to the market collapse when investment funds dried up.”

This is the point where I tell you that according to some analysts, the AI companies are not expected to make a profit until 2028, and what is propping them up is venture capital. One video I saw from economic analyst Prasen Modi compared the AI model to Uber in 2015 when riders only paid 41% of the ride costs and VC covered the rest of the expenses, until it was a widely accepted practice, at which point rates increased 90% by 2021.

According to Ken Griffin of the Citadel Investment Group who spoke at the World Economic Forum in Davos (you can find the interview on YouTube), “Data center spending in the U.S. for AI this year alone is over half-of-a-trillion dollars,” and he rightly points out “You can’t get people to write $500 billion worth of checks without telling investors you will profoundly change the world.” He admits, as do I, that in certain industries the impact of AI will be profound — particularly, I think, in coding, medical research, etc. However, he also referenced a Harvard Business Review column from January that mentions “AI Workslop” which is essentially AI-generated reports that have three to four worthy opening sentences, but the next paragraphs are gibberish. Apparently, that’s what will replace white-collar workers.

What I am asking is what if AI isn’t the savior for all industries, but rather a key tool for some industries but not all? What if those that benefit the most financially from the success of AI weren’t relied upon for informing us about the viability of it being widely adopted for different industries? I was at a workforce meeting about whether AI is good for workforce and what jobs it will replace, and the speaker spoke from an industry report published by OpenAI. Oh, OpenAI thinks AI is a good thing — what a shocking, unbiased opinion!

This feels a lot like the dot-com bubble when stocks rose on the speculation of tangible gains that never materialized. Or the 2008 housing bubble when rates got lowered on speculation of future returns and then went belly up. Or cryptocurrency, which as far as I can tell is using real money to buy fake money on the hopes that the fake money will have more value one day (you know, like collecting rookie baseball cards).

The people that put their money in early and get their money out early thrive; everyone else gets left holding the bag. The big companies will get through it, but anything short of those with the deepest reserves may not make it— at least that’s how it went for the dot-com and housing bubbles — and what I imagine will happen with crypto.

We need to base our economics on what is real and what is tangible. These social media companies don’t produce products. What they have built is a way to monetize our attention spans. We are the product. What we watch or read or like or fight about online is their digital currency. They are profiting on our most valuable commodity: our time. We take it away from our families and those in the same room, and we give it to them. And if we shy away from it, they push it further. The algorithm pushes things more inflammatory, more divisive to get us scared or mad, because scared and angry people engage more than happy people. They get their clicks, our eyeballs, our time for their speculative profit.

Thus, comes my solution.

Put the phone down. Take a walk. Don’t bring the phone to the dinner table. Call an old friend. Or, most importantly to me, engage in your community. Go to a ribbon-cutting or a business mixer. Press skin with other people. Smell a new space — activate all your senses. Because in those spaces you meet other people, you build relationships and you come to find we are really more alike than what divides us.

Cory King is executive director of the Bath-Brunswick-Topsham Regional Chamber of Commerce.

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