New newsletter: WHY AMERICANS HATE AI AI might be the most instantly unpopular emerging technology in modern history. Off the top of my head, I blame the rise of tech pessimism, the emergence of anti-billionaire politics, the fallout from disappointments of the social media age, the demonization (sometimes fair, sometimes unfair) of data centers, growing distrust of corporations in general, or the fact that people don’t appreciate being told that a new product is going to disemploy their children and destroy the world, while its architects become billionaires. But there’s another reason that these explanations overlook: AI's prophets promised a world of cheap abundance. But the AI buildout has created the exact opposite reality, in which basically everything AI touches is getting more expensive. We're seeing higher prices for everything in the AI buildout—electronics, electricity, construction labor, even credit. The Fed now believes that the growth from AI is pushing up overall inflation, which means AI is also a contributor to higher interest rates. We get so wrapped up in talking about what AI will do in the near future that we sometimes forget to look closely at what it's doing right now: a project broadly predicted to reduce prices and create post-material abundance is instead raising prices and showing everybody just how materially finite some parts of the economy are.