I suspect this has much less to do with AI than the consolidation of industries, especially tech. There’s almost zero antitrust enforcement left in this country, and it shows in these numbers and in the lack of meaningful technological advancement.
That’s one issue, but is it even the most important thing? A lot of it is just regulatory capture, legalized political corruption (“lobbying”) and the total disfigurement of antitrust law by Bork decades ago.
I think the competition/antitrust law community is beginning to develop some effective antibodies against some of these. Bork's ideas are pretty well and truly debunked these days, and issues with regulatory capture, lobbying etc. are getting lots of attention (e.g. see this excellent paper: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4979205).
Most voters don’t understand this issue and thus don’t care about it, so the IOUs don’t have to spend that much to sway things. There’s also a lot of corruption and incompetence at the CPUC, including a revolving door to/from industry.
“solar is so bad for prices which affect poor people”
One of the main points of the article is that this premise is completely false, and that the opposite is in fact the case.
