“Please don’t use AI to write.”
I answered:
Don’t use a calculator. Learn your multiplication tables.
Don’t use a typewriter. Learn to write longhand.
Forget about computing and the phone. Try a can and two strings.
I wasn’t arguing that a calculator and artificial intelligence are the same thing.
They aren’t.
Something else interested me.
The person reading my answer was probably holding a phone.
Somewhere during that little sequence, the reader could look down.
The calculator is already there.
So is the typewriter.
So is the telephone.
And the computer.
None of those functions feels particularly like technology anymore. They have become capabilities available through the thing in the hand.
The phone itself does some of the work. Much of the rest happens elsewhere.
A photograph is stored somewhere. A message travels through a network. A golf app retrieves and processes information on distant machines. Credit-card transactions are checked, airline schedules updated, searches answered, videos delivered.
Some of those places are data centers.
AI is certainly changing data centers. Some new facilities are being built around the extraordinary computational and electrical demands of large models. But data centers are also part of the infrastructure underneath much of the ordinary digital life that was already in our hands.
That makes the name difficult.
The same broad computational world can support communications, banking, logistics, airline reservations, streaming, photographs, business software, a golf app and artificial intelligence.
We usually encounter none of that as infrastructure.
We encounter the golf app.
We encounter the photograph.
We encounter Instagram.
We encounter the answer.
The warehouse remains somewhere else.
WE&P by: EZorrillaMc&Co.
Travel in Life 