Big AI and the Metacrisis: When Scaling Becomes a Liability
Scale is one of business’s favourite words. A product that scales can serve more customers without proportionally increasing costs. A platform that scales becomes harder to displace. An infrastructure provider that scales can convert technical advantage into market power. The awkward question is what else scales with it. More AI usage can mean more useful outputs, lower unit costs, and wider access. It can also mean more infrastructure demand, more dependence on dominant platforms, more synthetic content competing for attention, and more institutional influence concentrated among the organisations able to build frontier systems. ...