In 2021, video game fans could no longer find graphics cards. The shelves were empty, prices had doubled. Some of those cards were being bought up in bulk to mine cryptocurrencies.
No one had decided to deprive gamers. Crypto miners simply paid more.
Today, the same story is repeating itself on a different scale. Smartphones under 100 dollars are disappearing, because the memory is going to AI data centres. And those who lose out are no longer gamers, but families for whom it was the only access to the internet.
A loser nobody chose
What makes these situations so difficult is that there is no culprit.
The chipmaker sells to whoever pays the most: that is its job. The AI company buys what it needs: that is its job. The phone manufacturer drops a model that no longer turns a profit: that is logical. Every decision is reasonable. Their sum deprives hundreds of millions of people of an essential tool.
No one feels responsible, because no one decided anything against them. That is exactly what makes the problem invisible.
In 1920, the British economist Arthur Cecil Pigou gave a name to this phenomenon: external effects, which we now call externalities. It is a cost that is imposed on others, without asking their opinion and without compensating them. The classic example is the factory that pollutes the river: it makes money, the fishermen downstream lose out. Pigou proposed a simple solution: make whoever causes the harm pay the cost they impose on others. We still talk today about a Pigouvian tax.
The other hidden bills of AI
Phones are not an isolated case. Everywhere AI draws on a shared resource, someone else pays part of the bill.
Electricity, when building networks for data centres drives up household bills. Water, when facilities consume it in regions that are already dry. Quiet, when residents live next to machines running day and night, as in the American county with 250 data centres.
Each time, the same pattern: a benefit concentrated on one side, a cost dispersed on the other, borne by people who asked for nothing.
The argument on the other side
Let us be fair. AI can also benefit the poorest. Increasingly powerful models are becoming almost free. They translate, teach, help make sense of a medical diagnosis or an administrative document. For many, it will be real progress.
But on one condition: being able to access it. Progress paid for by the loss of the device that lets you benefit from it is not quite progress for everyone.
What could be done
First, make these costs visible. A harm that nobody measures does not exist in decisions.
Then, make those who profit from it pay, as Pigou proposed. In the United States, the House of Representatives voted in September on a text that would require data centres to fund the grid reinforcements they cause, instead of passing them on to households. The same principle could apply elsewhere.
Finally, ask, before celebrating an advance, who is paying the price. The question does not stop us moving forward. It merely forces us to look where we are stepping.
What we take away
Progress is never free. It always has a cost, and that cost is rarely paid by those who benefit from it most.
The real question, then, is not whether to move forward. It is knowing who received the bill, and whether anyone thought to ask their opinion.