Really, how could it have all been free? All that computer power, used for all that output? But it seemed that way. AI was sold to us as a miracle – but now it’s finally clear that we might actually have to pay up for it.
Of course, the cost of AI has long been obvious in an abstract way. The psychological cost: what it might be doing to our minds. The environmental cost: what it might be doing to our world. The more obvious financial cost: what resources might actually be required to build all the infrastructure needed to power it.
But none of that quite seemed real. Take the financial cost, for instance: earlier on in the AI hype cycle, OpenAI boss Sam Altman famously undertook a tour in which he suggested that he might need $7 trillion to build the AI he dreamed of. That is a number so impossible to grasp that it feels almost like an illusion, not a number that could possibly equate to anything in the real world.
Or the environmental cost, of which the bill was always footed “somewhere else”. Data centres are largely distant, and so the vast amounts of land and energy required for them felt like a concern for somewhere and someone else.
Or even the more personal costs, on our own selves. We’re constantly fretting that AI might damage our personal and social relationships, perhaps even society at large, but that too feels at once too subtle and too grand to actually grasp. It’s hard to make sense of something that undermines your capacity to make sense.
But now the cost of AI is arriving in our pockets. And all of a sudden, the extra money that you don’t have is painfully real.
Just last week, Apple announced a whole sweep of price increases, making it around 20 per cent more expensive to buy an iPad or a MacBook. Then, Xbox said the same, announcing price rises that mean an Xbox console could be 40 per cent more expensive than it was last year.
Apple announced it would raise the prices of the iPad and MacBook last week (Getty)
And that’s just the beginning. The iPhone, for instance, was safe from the recent price rises, but that might be because Apple has new models coming in September – they already looked as if they were going to be the company’s most expensive ever – given the fact Apple is expected to introduce its first folding phone – but they are going to be even more costly than that.
All because of AI. The rush to give the technology the computing power it needs, and to build the data centres that house that power, has meant a dramatic increase in the amount of demand for random access memory (RAM). That’s required for AI, but it is also required for just about every gadget we use.
All of those grand promises and huge numbers and abstract threats have suddenly landed in our pocket. And it hurts.
We already seem to be entering a period of not just AI scepticism but outright hate
Ever since the 2022 launch of ChatGPT brought about a new fever for AI, it has been discussed as something happening elsewhere. That, perhaps, has been the reason that the conversation around it has rapidly outpaced and even become detached from the actual fact of it: it was an airy abstraction to be argued about, like the World Cup or pop music. But something profound and very real is changing.
We already seem to be entering a period of not just AI scepticism but outright hate. A run of speakers at US college graduations have been booed as they attempted to promote the transformative nature of the technology. And polling shows that they shouldn’t have been surprised: sentiment towards AI is dramatically falling, especially among young people.
That will only get worse as the cost arrives in real and undeniable ways. But it could be a great opportunity to have a conversation that is a little more down-to-Earth. We are going to have to give up important things to bet on an AI future – our money, our devices, maybe even our idea of ourselves. Do we want to?