Entrepreneur and former presidential candidate Andrew Yang thinks artificial intelligence could make companies vastly more productive and create enormous wealth. But he doesn’t believe the market will automatically make sure ordinary workers share in those gains.

During a recent debate with AI optimists on YouTube channel Jubilee, Yang compared the coming disruption to what happened when Walmart (NASDAQ:WMT) expanded across America. People might have valued their neighborhood hardware stores and mom-and-pop businesses, he said, but when cheaper and more convenient options arrived, those loyalties quickly disappeared.

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Walmart Showed What Consumers Really Prioritize

One of the claims Yang defended during the debate was that “the market will optimize for productivity and profit, not human dignity.” When one debater argued that companies have an incentive to respect people’s values because consumers can vote with their wallets, Yang pointed to Walmart as evidence that he doesn’t think it works that way.

Yang recalled a time when people believed shoppers would stick with local businesses because “they love those shopkeepers and they’re going to want to shop local.”

“And then that lasted for about 10 seconds,” he said. “Everyone went to Walmart. And the local mom-and-pops disappeared.”

“The marketplace, in my opinion, does not reward the folks who say like, ‘Hey, you should support me even though I’m going to be a little more expensive,'” he said. “Americans are just like, ‘Hard pass.'”

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Yang sees the same economic incentive emerging with AI. Companies can use the technology to accomplish work faster and more cheaply, regardless of what happens to the workers who previously did it.

“The market, in my opinion, is not designed to optimize for human dignity. It’s just not,” he said.

Yang used Uber Technologies (NYSE:UBER) as another example. If autonomous vehicles can eventually replace human drivers, Uber has little economic reason to preserve those jobs simply because people depend on them for income. As Yang put it, Uber’s purpose isn’t to employ millions of people. It’s to get customers from one place to another.

AI Can Be Useful Without Sharing The Wealth

Despite his concerns about AI’s impact on workers, Yang isn’t calling for the technology to be stopped. He agreed that AI can give more people access to information, help workers become more productive and potentially result in major advances in areas such as drug discovery and health care.

“The question to me is where does the value go?” he said. An AI tool might help an individual do their job more effectively, but he expects some of the biggest financial gains to flow to the companies developing the technology and the corporations using it to cut costs.

See Also: The Next AI Winner Might Not Be A Chip Company. It Could Be The Companies Powering The Data Centers.

Yang pointed to Anthropic, along with Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOG, GOOGL)) and Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN), as potential winners. He argued that corporations will increasingly pay AI companies while using their technology to replace work previously done by coders, marketers, call center workers, researchers and data analysts.

“The average person is going to be like, ‘Wait a minute, what happened to my job? Wait a minute, why is my kid at home on the sofa instead of having a job?'” he added.

As companies pour money into the technology, investors are also looking beyond the companies building AI models to the infrastructure needed to keep them running.

One example is SK Hynix Inc. (NASDAQ:SKHY), the South Korea-based memory chipmaker that recently made its U.S. stock market debut and received strong investor interest. These industries can be thought of as the picks and shovels behind the AI boom. Qnetic is taking a similar approach to energy, developing kinetic battery systems designed to help meet growing power demand from AI and data centers.

Investors who believe AI’s enormous appetite for power is here to stay can invest in Qnetic today and get exposure to the infrastructure behind that growth.

Image: Shutterstock

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