ALT
AI Latency Tax
Latency as a structural, distributive externality in intelligent systems — invisible, cumulative, and unevenly borne.
The AI Latency Tax (ALT) extends waiting from subjective experience to structural inequality. In LLM-era systems, delay is increasingly stratified by tier, context, and ability to pay.
ALT has three defining properties: invisibility, cumulativeness, and asymmetry.
Source The AI Latency Tax: Hidden Costs and Temporal Inequality in Intelligent Systems