AI isn’t just spying on us. It’s tricking us into spending more.

Photo above - not photoshopped. An actual California gas station. imagine what AI pricing will try and pull if you have this gas station's ap installed on your smartphone . . .

In yesterday’s press conference, Microsoft warned shareholders that it needs to spend “hundreds of billions” more to have a competitive AI system. Their CEO did not explain how the company would generate profits from this. The master plan is to build as many large data centers as quickly as possible, and hope that "scale" wins the race?

If Microsoft Copilot was going to make money, it would already be doing that. But it’s mostly free. Copilot writes 8th graders' homework, fixes typos, and gets the date of the Brandenburg concerto wrong by 700 years.

Microsoft has a solution for this problem – the money losing part, not the Brandenburg concerto hallucination. CEO Mustafa Suleyman says Microsoft’s advertising division will carry most of the water. It will guide our shopping decisions.

Wait . . . it turns out that’s not how it works at all. According to the link below, AI’s main advertising weapon is to trick us into paying more than we would have. It will do this by gathering vast amounts of our personal data, correlating it, and deciding what each of our personal shopping vulnerabilities are. Stores using this AI will charge us more for the stuff we are most likely to buy.

Think of demand-based pricing. This is already how some soda machines work. When the temperature rises above 85 degrees, the cost of a coke goes up by a buck on newer machines. It goes back down in cooler weather. AI is going to pull the same $hit, but by examining all our past retail purchases, subscriptions, uber eats deliveries, and the GPS coordinates on your phone as you drive around all day. It will probably know if you prefer cheese fries or old bay seasoning. And price each accordingly.

Someone will point out that “opting out” of cookies can stop all this. According to the link below, it won't. We surrender our privacy when we download free aps for our phones. The reason you download the store ap is that a discount or freebie is included. If your phone is already full of grocery store aps, amazon, McDonalds, pharmacies, gas stations, doordash, Bank of America, Spotify, even Planet Fitness, you’ve already signed up for more cookies and tracking than you can possibly conceive.

Now imagine the next part – the pump price at the Swell Gas Station goes up the moment you pull in. Because your phone told the station’s AI that the Swell gas ap is installed. You’re a regular Swell customer, and will pay more right now instead of driving on for a possible 10 cents per gallon savings.

If you’re okay with this, then Microsoft is indeed going to make billions.

I’m just sayin’ . . .

AI isn’t just spying on you. It’s tricking you into spending more.