The bull market just celebrated its third anniversary, and top analysts on Wall Street are beginning to voice the previously unthinkable: Is artificial intelligence, the dynamo powering the great rally, actually kind of bad for economic growth? The consensus holds that AI will inevitably deliver large productivity gains, and that’s powered deals worth hundreds of billions of dollars into a throwback, 19th-century-style (or late-1990s-style) infrastructure boom. This has led to fears of bubble formation, with even Jeff Bezos saying recently, “[It’s] kind of an infrastructure bubble,” not one purely driven by financial speculation, and it will pay off for years, even generations.
“It seems you can’t go anywhere without talking about AI,” according to Aditya Bhave, senior U.S. economist at Bank of America Global Research, whose team tackled the subject on Friday. “AI: It’s what everyone is talking about,” they said.
