Eduardo Porter writes:

Americans are growing worried about what artificial intelligence portends for their futures. Eight in 10 Americans report concern over AI, compared with a third who report being excited, according to a recent Quinnipiac poll. More than half think it will do more harm than good in their daily lives. Seven out of 10 think it will reduce the number of available jobs.

Skeptical though they may be, they are about to get more AI rammed down their throats and stuck into their pension plans and their investment portfolios, whether they want it or not – binding their futures ever more tightly to the frenzied, risky, multibillion-dollar dash by technology moguls to develop machines capable of mimicking human thought processes to take over cognitive tasks.

First up is this week’s massive $75bn initial public offering (IPO) for Elon Musk’s SpaceX, the largest ever, which at $135 a share will value the company at a cool $1.77tn, among the 10 largest companies in the world by market capitalization. While the company makes most of its money these days selling internet access, it largely needs the money to finance Musk’s vast AI ambitions, which include blasting datacenters into orbit.

The offering is just the first in a series: both Anthropic and OpenAI have already filed paperwork for their own IPOs later in the year, which will add two multitrillion-dollar artificial intelligence behemoths to the US’s main stock indices.

Even investors who don’t care to buy their stock will end up owning a bunch, either in their 401(k) retirement plans or among their holdings of market index funds – supposedly safer investments for non-professional investors, built to reflect the entire market – which are forced to buy AI shares in proportion to their weighting in stock indices like the Nasdaq and the S&P.

This may not happen right away, but it will happen. [Continue reading…]