Heavy industry employment will be crushed by AI

Shares of Nvidia are down 2.1% today after trading higher earlier. It’s been volatile in the past week after rising to briefly become the world’s most-valuable company.

Nvidia Chief Executive Jensen Huang spoke at the company’s annual meeting today and one of his comments stood out on the macro front. He said the next frontier of AI will be automating the $50 trillion heavy industry.

“A new industrial revolution has begun,” he said.

He’s talking about things like:

• Manufacturing
• Construction
• Energy
• Mining
• Transportation

I wouldn’t be against him and I believe that AI will unlock robotics. Globally, around 1 billion people work in those industries, with about half of that in manufacturing. In the US, manufacturing employs 12.8 million workers, construction 8.2 million, mining 560,000 and around 200,000 in fossil fuels extraction and refinement.

Now all those jobs aren’t on the chopping block but that’s 21.76 million jobs at risk, or about 13.2% of the US labor force. Even if half of those jobs are lost, unemployment would rise to 11% and there would be major knock-on effects in related industries.

Notably, the US is a service-sector driven country. There are many places in the world where these industries represent +50% of employment.