All the ways AI is making life more expensive for you

For all its potential benefits, artificial intelligence isn’t cheap. In fact, even if you don’t use AI, it is probably costing you money without you realizing it—by contributing to the nation’s current affordability crisis and high cost of living, which is due in part to higher inflation, stalled wage growth, and higher prices, CNN reported. “Higher inflation means that households must spend just over $375 more to purchase the same goods and services as they did this time last year due to AI’s inflationary impact,” Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, told CNN. Some of those higher costs include a spike in electricity bills, computer prices, and construction costs, not to mention overall job loss. Higher electricity prices AI is creating higher electric bills in the United States, as energy-intensive AI data centers strain local power grids and utility companies pass on that cost to consumers. Unlike previous technologies, artificial intelligence requires a massive amount of computing power. Data centers consumed an estimated 4.4% of all the electricity in the U.S in 2023, and that percentage could more than double by 2030, according to a study from MIT Energy Initiat…

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