The Cost of Intelligence?
CIO, Thursday, September 24th, 2026
AI's real constraint isn't intelligence but the inability to measure the economic value it creates versus its cost.
Howard Rubin argues AI's fundamental limit may be economic rather than technological: it requires massive physical infrastructure like data centers, chips, and electricity, making intelligence a costly industrial product.
Organizations track AI usage well but struggle to measure real economic value, since "activity is not value."
Infrastructure costs are ultimately absorbed by consumers, enterprises, or governments even as per-unit computing gets cheaper, producing an "IT inflation" effect as total spending rises.
Rubin calls for a measurement revolution, including technology balance sheets and gross domestic intelligence metrics, to turn intelligence into measurable value.