> At this point I'm convinced that the endless AI hype and all the investment is purely due to hopes that it will soon put vast amounts of employees out of work
That's certainly part of it.
However, at this point I think a lot of it is a kind of emotional sunk-cost. To stop now would require a lot of very wealthy and powerful people to admit they had personally made a very serious mistake.
It is also possible that we're just in the realm of pure speculation now - if you look at Tesla and NVidia both their valuations are completely imaginary and with the latter standing to benefit a lot by being shovel sellers (but not that much) and the former seeing an active decline in profitability while still watching the numbers go up.
It may be less that people are unaware of the speculative bubble but are just hoping to get in and out before it pops.
That's certainly part of it.
However, at this point I think a lot of it is a kind of emotional sunk-cost. To stop now would require a lot of very wealthy and powerful people to admit they had personally made a very serious mistake.