Silicon Valley is still riding high on what seems like an unending wave of Wall Street enthusiasm. Investments in artificial intelligence continue to eclipse expectations, with Bloomberg reporting that financiers plan to plow some $700 billion into the industry this year alone. AI stocks now account for roughly a third of the entire stock market and 45 percent of the S&P 500’s total market capitalization.

Of course, the extraordinary investments in AI are driven by the technology’s promise to make large swaths of workers redundant. Tech leaders aren’t shy about saying as much. “It is not clear,” says Dario Amodei, chief of Anthropic, “where these people will go or what they will do, and I am concerned that they could form an unemployed or very-low-wage ‘underclass.’”

If that’s not anxiety inducing enough, the explosive growth of AI investment is suggestive of a speculative bubble, perhaps the biggest of all time. If it bursts — a very real possibility — it would take down the entire global economy. Anyway you slice it, the AI boom-and-bubble represents a tremendous social and economic liability, and one that the government must eventually reckon with. But how?