CONCEPT
AI as Electricity
Ikhlaq Sidhu’s foundational reframe: AI is not a product to be evaluated by its demonstrations but a general-purpose infrastructure substrate—electricity for the cognitive economy—whose value accrues not to the grid builders but to whoever figures out what to plug in.
The dominant metaphor for AI in popular discourse treats it as a product: a system with capabilities that can be demonstrated, evaluated, purchased, and deployed.
Ikhlaq Sidhu’s reframe is foundational because it changes every question that follows. If AI is a product, you ask what it can do. If AI is electricity, you ask what it allows everything else to do—once the grid is built. The history of electrification is instructive: the economic value created by electricity did not accrue primarily to electricity companies but to the industries that used electricity as an input to do something they could not previously do at scale. Manufacturing, lighting, communication, transport, and medicine were all rewritten in the terms of the new substrate. No single company monopolised the value; it diffused across every sector that could find a productive use for the new input. Sidhu argues that AI is now doing exactly this—becoming a substrate beneath every