The Non-Financial Costs of AI

The author argues that AI is the costliest new technology ever created, with WSJ reporting it is the biggest economic bet in US history as a share of GDP, and that beyond financial costs it rapidly exacerbates climate change, economic precarity for the middle class, and institutional instability. They contend LLMs are a genuinely useful new computing interface but that the speed of the buildout denies society time to identify and regulate emergent harms, and that deskilling knowledge work makes workers more replaceable.