If AI's abundance arrives as a higher power bill first, who should pay for the gap?
The AI buildout is adding real electricity demand today while the promised productivity payoff sits somewhere in the future — and households are covering the difference through their utility bills and possibly their borrowing costs. Should the cost of building the machines be borne by the ratepayers who happen to live near the grid, by the companies constructing them, or is a temporary price shock simply what any infrastructure transition looks like?
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In today’s episode of Minds, Bodies, and Terawatts (August 15, 2026), we dug into CPI data showing household electricity prices up 10% over two years against 6.2% for prices overall — and into Neel Kashkari’s written dissent at the July FOMC meeting, which named data-center investment as a new demand element in American inflation. What struck us is that of all the inflation drivers on Kashkari’s list, this is the only one somebody chose on purpose. That makes it a distribution question rather than a weather event: the bootstrap problem of funding an abundance transition using the scarce resources of the world it replaces. Give the episode a listen, then tell us where you land — is this the unavoidable J-curve of every infrastructure boom, or a cost quietly shifted onto people who were never asked?
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Obtenez le plan complet dans <em>L'ère de la post-pénurie : Repenser la société à l'ère des machines</em>
