Last night, I tried to plan out my first gaming PC. I pulled up Claude alongside PCPartPicker and started putting together a build.

Everything was going smoothly until I hit RAM and storage. Claude said the prices were way higher than usual. I mentioned that prices have been going up because of AI. Claude double-checked.

It confirmed it: demand from the AI industry is driving prices up.

So that’s where this episode starts:
If AI is already raising the cost of something as ordinary as a PC build… what else are we giving up?

There’s a story we’ve been told about innovation.

People like Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen argue that instability, bubbles, and creative destruction aren’t just inevitable; they’re good. The logic is that every major leap forward comes with a little chaos attached.

But here’s the question I can’t shake:
Is that actually true?

Because there’s a competing idea from people like Elizabeth Warren that the strongest economies aren’t chaotic. They’re stable.

And if you look back at the mid-20th century, it’s hard to ignore the pattern. Strong unions. Reliable wages. Pensions. People could actually plan their lives.

And at the exact same time?
We were inventing everything.

Let’s pull back the curtain a bit.

The internet? Started with ARPANET in 1969, funded by the Department of Defense.

GPS? Military program. 1973.

The mobile phone? Martin Cooper at Motorola, 1973.

Touchscreens? E. A. Johnson, working out of a British research institute in the 1960s.

These aren’t startup stories. They’re not venture capital success stories.
They’re public investment stories: universities, government programs, long-term research.

Which brings us to AI.

AI gets held up as the ultimate proof that disruption works.

But even here, the story doesn’t quite hold.

The foundational ideas date back to Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts in 1943. Then you get Frank Rosenblatt and the perceptron at Cornell in 1958.

Fast forward to modern AI, and the transformer architecture, the thing powering everything right now, comes out of a 2017 research paper from Google, built on decades of academic work.

Venture capital didn’t create AI.
So what are we getting in return for all this disruption?

According to tech journalists like Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, innovation has actually slowed down in a lot of meaningful ways.

This is where it gets personal for me.

In the classroom, I’m watching students struggle more and more with independent thinking. Not because they aren’t capable, but because the systems around them are changing faster than they can adapt.

If innovation is supposed to build the future, we have to ask:
Are we undermining the very conditions that make future breakthroughs possible?

And then there’s disruption as it actually plays out.

Uber and Lyft didn’t invent transportation. Taxis already existed. They had regulated fares and some level of economic stability.

DoorDash didn’t invent food delivery. Restaurants were already doing that.

What venture capital did was subsidize these services. Make them artificially cheap, drive out competition, and then raise prices once the market was captured.

Workers lost stability. Consumers lost transparency.

That’s not innovation. That's price gouging disguised as innovation.

And maybe the most important part:
We didn’t have to destroy those industries to improve them. That was a choice.

The people telling us that disruption is necessary? They’re often the ones with the most to gain from that story going unquestioned.

And if we’re building a world that increasingly depends on AI, on these systems, these tools, these infrastructures, then the bare minimum question we should be asking is this:

Shouldn’t life be getting better?

Not just faster. Not just more efficient.
But more stable. More livable. More sustainable.

This isn’t an anti-technology argument.

It’s a simple demand:
If we’re going to accept the cost, we should at least be honest about whether the payoff is real.