These are outrageous statements. They try to exaggerate the power of the underlying technology to get us to focus our attention on science fictional scenarios over the real harms of how AI is being deployed. But few of them shook me as deeply as a statement from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman at Blackrock’s US Infrastructure Summit in March.

“We see a future where intelligence is a utility, like electricity or water, and people buy it from us on a meter,” said Altman, laying out an intensely dystopian future as just another business development. “One of the most important things in the future is that we make intelligence, to borrow an old phrase from the energy industry that didn’t quite work, ‘Too cheap to meter.’”