One of the first things they teach you in business school is just don’t go into the restaurant business. It’s terrible. Seriously.
One of the next things they teach you is how to conduct a cost/benefit analysis. Or maybe that’s in the second semester. The Macalope doesn’t remember; he slept through a lot of business school. But he’s been thinking about cost/benefit analysis a lot lately with regard to AI.
For most use cases, AI is really a substitute for search. The web has consistently been a struggle between free and open and a bunch of would-be gatekeepers from AOL to Meta who want to keep you on their pages instead of having you go to some pesky website created by some yahoo who probably doesn’t even know any venture capitalists. Gross. Even Google, whose whole raison d’être was finding web pages for you, would now rather you stay on its site and read an answer its AI scraped off the page of the person who actually did the work to come up with the answer in the first place and, oh, here, look at some ads, since we have you. In playing with Siri AI in the iOS 27 public beta, the Macalope has experienced some real benefits. One example: after fruitlessly searching in his Mail inbox for a gift card he received a year and a half ago, he was able to just ask Siri AI to “find the gift card so-and-so sent me” (he used a real name rather than “so-and-so” — it’s not that amazing) and it found it almost immediately.
That does, however, seems a bit more like an indictment of search in Mail (and, sure, the “living out of your inbox” lifestyle) than anything else. Couldn’t Apple just fixed search in Mail?
To be sure, there are a number of other neat features of Siri AI that are not simply better search capabilities, but while it’s all neat, the Horny One found himself thinking: is it all worth the cost?
You may be saying, but Mr. Macalope, sir, iOS 27 is a free upgrade! There is no cost! THE MACALOPE KNOWS THAT, TODD!
Sheesh.
Freakin’ Todd.
There may be no cost to get iOS 27, but there sure is a cost to AI in general. Apple has yet to raise prices on iPhones as it has done to other products because of the difficulty in getting RAM and storage thanks to AI, but it will be soon (possibly even this week). Moreover, Tim Cook, a guy who’s apparently happy to deliver bad news since he’s on the way out the door of the CEO’s office, has suggested that heavy use of Siri AI could mean additional charges for users.
As ridiculous as it might seem after Apple just substantially raised prices on a slew of products thanks to AI, we’re actually not paying the full cost of AI yet. AI companies have artificially kept prices low in order to get people hooked on it. It is unfair to describe it as the drug dealer model, as many other lines of business have long used the same tactic in order to gain adherents.
But also drug dealers do it.
Foundry
As AI companies start inching prices up and businesses that made big, stupid bets on AI start realizing they’re only going to go up further, this is leading to a bit of a squeeze. Don’t worry, they’ve got it all figured out.
“Software Giant SAP Stops Most Travel and Hiring Because of AI’s Soaring Cost” Cool, cool, oh, so very cool. Maybe, much like counties with data centers have asked schools to turn off lights and residents not to use air conditioning in the middle of summer and in the middle of global warming, perhaps companies can ask employees to bring their own toilet paper to work or forgo other benefits they previously enjoyed, like 401Ks and healthcare.
These are the costs we’re paying for AI as a whole. Many are paying for AI whether they use it or not. The question the Macalope is asking himself, as a user of Apple products, is the utility we’re getting from AI features worth the increase in price on those products?
[long mockumentary-style zoom in on the Macalope’s face from across the room as he shakes his head and mouths, “Nope!”]
And, hey, the Macalope isn’t even talking about the environmental or societal costs of AI in general (like the very scary consequences of weirdos like Sam Altman getting even richer than they already are because look how that worked out before). Those are hard and, frankly, depressing to quantify.
Rest assured that the Macalope could quantify them if he wanted to; he simply does not want to.
There are just so many good shows these days.
Personally, the Macalope simply does not want to spend more on tech products in order to pay for a feature that’s, yeah, kinda good but just not worth the cost. Since he can’t change the prices of things, he’s going to be buying fewer tech products and buying cheaper models.
He’s just morally opposed to being asked to pay for a meal some guy across the room ordered. It’s as simple as that.