Hannah Aaron Lang

This week, however, there was a new anxiety dragging down stock prices.

The fear that AI will disrupt key industries across the economy and eventually make some companies obsolete.

Those concerns have affected a really wide range of stocks.

Last week, it was software companies that got hit.

This past Tuesday, it was wealth management and brokerage shares like Charles Schwab and Raymond James, which tumbled after news of a new AI tool for tax advice.

For the week, the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite dropped 2.1%, while the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 1.2%.

The broad-based S&P 500 ended the week 1.4% lower.

One of the strangest examples of this new wave of AI fears was Thursday's slide in transportation stocks.

The apparent trigger was a news release from a Florida firm called Algorithm Holdings that said it could use AI to improve efficiency in the trucking business.

Algorithm's main business was once selling karaoke machines, as my colleague Ryan December reported this week.

Still, in the wake of that release, investors dumped stocks across the transportation sector.

Shares of the logistics company Expeditors International of Washington fell 13%, suffering their worst day since 1998, which, for some context, is the year that I was born.

Investors have been rotating out of tech, crypto and other speculative plays for some time now.

Instead, they're betting on a broader array of companies that could benefit if economic growth continues.

Data released this past week indicated that the economy is still in a relatively good spot.

Reports from the Labor Department showed the U.S.

economy added more jobs than expected and that inflation is cooling.

This rotation is benefiting companies like Walmart, which is set to report earnings this upcoming week.

The company recently hit a market cap of $1 trillion for the first time, and the stock climbed more than 2% over the last week.

Investors are moving money into companies whose business models have a low chance of being disrupted by AI.