More from the OpEd...

... It was the best of trends, it was the worst of trends. It was the epoch of artificial intelligence, it was the epoch of artificial inflation.

I'm truly excited to be alive at a time when AI, formerly the stuff of science fiction, is now an everyday reality and promising so many benefits to humankind.

AI is accelerating drug discovery, slashing the cost of protein folding research, diagnosing cancers earlier than human radiologists can, automating the drudgery out of nearly every white-collar job, translating speech across hundreds of languages in real time, and giving the blind a way to see the world through a camera.

AI is giving us all this and so much more. But no amount of techno-optimism can hide the fact that AI is making just about everything more expensive.

While the AI trend is making a tiny number of rich people even richer, the public at large is paying the price through rapidly rising prices; it represents a transfer of wealth from the have-nots to the haves.

AI is a machine that eats resources. It eats chips. It eats electricity. It eats water, land, labor, and building materials. AI's gluttony creates scarcity, and scarcity creates inflation.

Here are all the ways AI is driving up costs for you and me. ...