A family member has recently bought a house and is now interested in getting Home Assistant installed there. No problem, I thought; I've still got a repurposed mini PC available; I'll just get a new hard drive. The only problem is that exactly the same hard drive (a 512Gb NVMe module) from exactly the same vendor now has a price tag of £74.99; almost 3 times the price. The last time I remember seeing something like this was after the 2011 earthquake in Japan when a key semiconductor factory was damaged. I'm also well aware there was another global shortage of semiconductors in 2020 as a result of the Covid pandemic. Both of those instances could reasonably have been called "acts of God" and therefore not reasonable to foresee.

Not so this time, though. There is indeed a global chip shortage but the reasons are more prosaic. It's AI. The rapid expansion of AI services offered to us all has triggered a huge need for more data centres and more servers to go in them, meaning a voracious appetite for chips. At the same time, the demand for electronics in other consumer goods hasn't dropped off so the AI industry - where the money seems to be at the moment - is paying top dollar for the pick of the manufacturers' production. As a result, the cost of computers and computer components has rocketed, some products (for example the Sony Playstation 6) have had their launch date delayed by months or even years because of supply issues and several tech manufacturers have suffered a hit on their profitability with consequent dips in their share prices.

I'm not going to argue that AI doesn't have benefits. However, I find it hard to believe the majority of AI processing isn't expended on document summarising that we could do ourselves, photo editing to make absurd pictures of friends and family, manipulating videos to create compellingly believable "fake news" and even creating posts on forums to sidestep the author having to do it themselves. And the cost of this benefit? We've already got another thread or two looking at the ecological effect of all the heat produced by these data centres, but now we all have to pay dramatically more to buy the electronic kit we need to access the AI that's pushing the prices up.

Can we PLEASE all step back from AI for a moment and make a conscious decision to use it only when it actually adds real value, not just when it's convenient?

**Steps back down off soapbox, takes a big deep breath.**