Stephen Witt doesn’t trust a robot with a knife.

But he does see a very near future in which everything that moves will have a motor on it with autonomous intelligence.

Witt, who spoke Friday at the FSTEC conference in Dallas, is an investigative journalist, television producer, and author of the book “The Thinking Machine,” which offers insight into the tech company Nvidia and CEO Jensen Huang.

Nvidia, of course, is the maker of microchips, along with much of the equipment that goes into data centers that fuel the AI boom. Witt called Nvidia the largest and most powerful company in the world, and he said Jensen has President Trump’s ear.

The data center buildout will be the biggest infrastructure investment in history, said Witt. It will be bigger than railroads and canals combined; bigger than highways; and bigger than telecom. And most of that construction will involve Nvidia, which is positioned to earn about $250 billion in profit this year, Witt said.

Now Jensen is all in on robots, believing that everything that moves will become autonomous and controlled by AI. And Nvidia has been working on robot brains since long before the robots even existed.

When asked if we will have fully autonomous restaurants, Witt contended they already exist in China — though even there some humans are involved in actual cooking.

As good as AI is on processing language and business intelligence, Witt argued there’s still a lot of work to be done on robotics, which remain somewhat unpredictable.

“I would gladly have ChatGPT do my taxes,” he said. “But if someone was like, ‘I’m going to give this robot a knife and chop some cabbage in the kitchen,’ I don’t want to be anywhere near that thing.”

Witt argued that now is the time for restaurant companies to start building the AI systems they need — rather than buying from vendors whose systems could rapidly become obsolete, given the pace of advancement and competitive pressures.

Witt said five years ago he might have advised caution on building in-house, saying IT had a terrible track record of delivering on-time, tangible results and were constantly over budget.

“Now it’s different,” he said. “I would advise you to build this stuff on the cheap. Take a team, if you’re considering an IT deployment, and you should know within just a couple of weeks of experimenting whether or not you have a pathway or a runway to cloud coding, essentially a bespoke software application for your organization.”

But he advised against building stuff that requires a large-scale infrastructure deployment. “I would rely on a vendor for that,” he said.

Despite many who are sounding the alarm on rapid rise of AI, Witt is mostly optimistic, though he does see some risk.

He described himself as somewhat at odds with Jensen on this, because Witt believes AI needs better guardrails.

This summer we saw AI break out of its container and maraud through the internet, taking over other computers. AI is already solving math problems that humans couldn’t solve.

In some ways AI is superintelligent, but in other ways it’s still very stupid, which creates the risk, he said. “I don’t think it’s an engineering problem that can’t be resolved.”

Americans, however, hate data centers and are very skeptical about AI.

The booming AI industry is contributing to the K-shaped economy, and those on the lower end are getting squeezed, which creates political resentment. He pointed to a Gallup poll recently indicating that 90% of Chinese respondents thought AI was good. In Singapore it was 70% and in Korea and Japan also very high.

In the U.S. it was 35%. The majority think AI is bad.

“And we’re the country that’s in the lead. We’re the country that’s building it,” he said. “I’m not any kind of socialist or anything, like, I’m pro-business. But I see this ending, and it could have real repercussions down the road.”