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Published On: Mon, May 25th, 2026

Ed Dowd: AI’s Dystopian Sales Pitch Is “We’re Taking Your Job, Your Water, And Your Electricity — Good Luck”

Ed Dowd: AI’s Sales Pitch Is “We’re Taking Your Jobs, We Need All Your Water And Electricity” Former BlackRock fund manager Ed Dowd commented on why so many graduates aren’t responding well to commencement speakers hyping AI during an interview on Adam Taggart’s “Thoughtful Money” podcast.

ED DOWD: I’ve already seen the AI bulls come out and defend the students booing: This is the same sentiment that occurred around the Internet. No, I was there. It did not. No one was booing anybody talking about the Internet. So that did not happen. They’ve got a marketing sales-pitch problem. I pointed this out on X. Their sales pitch seems to be: White-collar jobs are going to disappear in 18 months. We need your electricity and your water. Good luck. That’s not a good pitch. … But that’s their pitch. These executives actually say this. Part of the reason I don’t think the AI bubble is going to continue is because there actually is a shortage of capacity to run these data centers, and there’s not enough water to do it. So they’re running into opposition. I’m of the opinion that CapEx is going to be scaled back as they realize they can’t plug into anything. There’s somebody on X who’s an analyst who’s running around the country looking at all the data centers, and he said you’d be surprised at how many of them are not completed yet. So there seem to be all these future capex announcements, but the actual going in the ground, getting it up and running, is not as fast as people think. That’s the bottleneck. And that’s how you end up with a ton of inventory of Nvidia chips and everything that you can’t deploy, so it’s sitting in a warehouse. Remember all the dark fiber? Yeah. Well, this is dark compute. You don’t even need to order any more Nvidia chips. I think the constraining factor is electrons, water, and social acceptability of this. And there’s going to be a lot of fights. It’s all coming to a head. The other thing about AI is that there are all sorts of conflicting – is it going to really replace white-collar jobs that quick? I personally believe that’s hype. I don’t believe it’s going to happen because you see these weird announcements where Ernst & Young and other consulting companies are teaming up with OpenAI to help implement the solutions in the corporations. So it’s supposed to get rid of consulting and white-collar, but you need them to install it. That’s kind of-come on? And then Google said they’re hiring engineers to help their clients deploy. So we’re hiring people to deploy something. It sounds like it’s complicated and maybe not as easy as people think to get up and running. Secondly, there are all sorts of reports that people are running through their token budgets so fast that they’re deciding that it’s actually cheaper to keep humans. So there are all sorts of conflicting stories. It’s not as clean as someone might think. I don’t know why the Anthropic CEO keeps saying white-collar jobs are going to be gone in 18 months. I mean, it seems silly to say that if, A, it’s not true, and B, it’s not a good sales pitch. … ADAM TAGGART: Do you have any real worries long-term about what we’re going to do should there be a lot of permanently displaced labor? ED DOWD: Yeah. I’m not worried about that near-term, because I do think the AI hype – just like the Internet hype cycle – and then we’ll have a capital destruction, then the true benefits of AI will come out of the rubble and ashes of this over-investing in infrastructure. That’s the way it always is with these things. The real solutions are going to be on the other side. Given AI’s hallucination rate, there’ll be specialized AI companies that really focus on data silos, like medical AI companies that don’t need to do an LLM for the world. I think the model is so expensive, we need to specialize, and that’s where we’re going. I think it’s not going to be: you get a chatbot, and it takes over your job. There’s a long time between now and then. And then we don’t know yet. Maybe the promise that AI will create more jobs could happen, but they’re certainly not telling you that. Their message seems to be: You will be jobless soon. I think the truth is somewhere between the two.


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