We Must Switch OFF (Free) AI
Somewhere in the last eighteen months, the media started calling AI critical infrastructure. Satya Nadella went to Davos and argued data centres should be publicly funded assets, like electricity and water.
So let's test it. At midnight tomorrow, every free public AI chatbot is switched off. Not the paid tools. Not the enterprise deployments. Just the free consumer layer.
What breaks?
Nothing.
But two things change, and both change for the better. Communities stop absorbing the cost of the marginal data centre. Institutions stop absorbing the cost of verifying hallucinated work. Both are unpriced externalities, where the producer captures the benefit and somebody else carries the cost.
I'm not anti-AI. I've spent the last few years building it. What I'm against is releasing something this powerful onto a population that was never asked to enrol, never briefed on the risks, and given no way to opt out.