In today's post, we'll be talking about the rising cost of electricity in the United States, the ominous AI takeover, and how cryptocurrencies could counteract these problems in a decentralized economy.

Skyrocketing Electricity Costs

In addition to rent, food, and health insurance, the cost of electricity has been surging across the US in recent years.

Americans have turned to social media platforms like TikTok to vent their frustration over skyrocketing electrical bills and stagnant wages.

One woman claims her last two electric bills were $830 and $1130, whereas previously they were normally $400-$700 per month (video linked below).

What's causing the price of electricity to rise?

While not the sole cause, newly constructed AI data centers throughout the US have been sucking up large amounts of power from the grid, reducing supply, and increasing the price of electricity.

AI Takeover: Resistance Is Futile?

As AI becomes more efficient at writing code, diagnosing health issues, and designing marketing material, the fear is that AI will soon replace most white-collar jobs. Also, as AI-powered robots continue to make advancements, the takeover of blue-collar jobs is in the cards as well.

Reading through comments on social media, the overall sentiment seems to be that people are opposed to the AI takeover, no matter how the powers that be try to sell it. In fact, a lot of users are saying they want to go back to the 80s and 90s, when the world was "more human".

Usually, however, technology advances despite human resistance. We have seen this happen time and time again throughout history with things like the automobile, electricity, and the Internet.

The question is, are we going to use new technology to our advantage, or let the powers that be use it to have more control over us?

Preparation For CBDCs And UBI?

Consider that, if the people continue to be squeezed financially, they may soon be forced to accept some kind of Universal Basic Income in the form of CBDCs or centralized stablecoins, which could potentially be the foundation for an AI-powered social credit score system.

Unless enough people choose to opt-out in favor of a decentralized economy, this could end up being our totalitarian future.

Decentralizing Energy And AI

But what if we could decentralize the energy grid, and the AI it powers?

By harnessing the power of blockchain and token incentives, we can incentivize individuals and businesses to hook up their own solar panels, wind turbines, etc, to the electric grid in order to distribute energy more efficiently, lowering costs.

Projects such as Power Ledger, Energy Web Token, Combinator, and others have been working on these decentralized energy solutions for years.

In addition to the energy grid, the compute power used to build and inference AI models could also be decentralized, shifting power away from the elite, and placing it back into the hands of the people.

Money In An Agentic World

We are quickly moving into a world where autonomous AI Agents will be able to do most of our work for us.

For example, imagine an AI agent managing a solar panel that could sell excess energy for tokens on a blockchain like Solana or Peaq.

Or imagine that you want to build a house. Each of the following tasks could be assigned to a different AI Agent, rather than to a human professional:

• Find the ideal lot in your local area
• Determine the rules regarding how you can build there
• Architect the house based on given specifications

These agents could then interact with one another to accomplish the overall objective.

In such a world, what type of currency would be used?

The friction involved with the traditional banking system would be a non-starter. More than likely, AI agents would use frictionless cryptocurrencies to transfer value between one another.

Until next time...

Electricity costs, along with other essentials, have been surging across the US. This inflation crisis may be part of what is needed to roll-out universal basic income and an AI-based social credit score system.

However, decentralized energy and compute power could supersede centralized AI if the people are willing to make the shift voluntarily, and start contributing to a decentralized economy.

Only time will tell which system becomes our reality.

If you learned something new from this article, be sure to check out my other posts on crypto and finance here on the Hive blockchain. You can also follow me on InLeo for more frequent updates.

Sources

Eric Schmidt on The Future Of AI [1]
Americans Talking About Increasing Energy Costs on TikTok [2]
Terminator Image [3]
AI Agent Image [4]