How do we make a mutual sense of our co-existence in the natural and digital worlds? To see how hard that is, consider this: There is also no “on” in “online.” No “in.”
Think about the prepositions we use to make sense of the natural world: in, on, under, around, through, beside, within, beneath, above, into, near, toward, with, outside, amid, beyond. All are made for our embodied selves. In the natural world up truly is up, and down is down, because we have distance and gravity here. We don’t have distance or gravity in the digital world. We are not embodied there. However, the digital world is no less real for the absence of distance, gravity, substance, shape, and the very real whatevers that we see, smell, hear, weigh, touch, and feel in the natural world.
Cyberspace is beyond ironic. It is oxymoronic, self-contradictory. It’s a spaceless non-place except in an abstract way. When people in Sydney, Lucerne, New York, and Tokyo meet on (or through, or with—pick your preposition) Zoom, they are not in a physical where. They are co-present in a non-space that Craig Burton called a giant zero: a hollow virtual sphere across which any two points can see each other, connect, communicate, and work.
But we treat this zero as a real place, because metaphors are how we make sense of the world. And all metaphors are wrong. They are like what they represent, but are far from the same. Time is not money, but we save, waste, spend, invest, and lose it. Life is not travel, yet we arrive, depart, get lost, jump on board, and fall off the wagon. This is why we make sense of cyberspace with real estate metaphors: domains with locations on sites where we construct or build the non-things we call homes. Or with publishing ones, by writing, authoring, posting, and syndicating or work. Or with transportation ones, for example with packets that we upload, download, transport, trace, and so on.
All these thinkings came to mind this morning when I read two pieces:
- Peter Thiel Just Accidentally Made a Chilling Admission. Five Decades Ago, One Man Saw It Coming. By Nick Ripatrazone in Yahoo News
- What’ll happen if we spend nearly $3tn on data centres no one needs? by somebody behind the FT paywall. But I could read it here, so I did, and maybe you can too.
The first speaks to living disembodied lives along with our embodied ones.
The second speaks to the mania for Big AI spend:
It’s also worth breaking down where the money would be spent. Morgan Stanley estimates that $1.3tn of data centre capex will pay for land, buildings and fit-out expenses. The remaining $1.6tn is to buy GPUs from Nvidia and others. Smarter people than us can work out how to securitise an asset that loses 30 per cent of its value every year, and good luck to them.
Where the trillions won’t be spent is on power infrastructure. Morgan Stanley estimates that more than half of the new data centres will be in the US, where there’s no obvious way yet to switch them on.
I now think at least some of that money will be far better spent on personal AI.
That’s AI for you and me, to get better control of our lives in the natural world where we pay bills, go to school, talk to friends, get sick and well, entertain ourselves and others, and live lives thick with data over which we have limited control at most. Do you have any record of all your subscriptions, your health and financial doings and holdings, what you’ve watched on TV, where you’ve been, and with whom? Wouldn’t it be nice to have all that data handy, and some AI help to organize and make sense of it? I’m talking here about AI that’s yours and works for you. Not a remote service from some giant that can do whatever it pleases with your life.
It’s as if we are back in 1975, but instead of starting to work on the personal computer, all the money spent on computing goes into making IBM and the BUNCH more gigantic than anything else ever, with spendings that dwarf what might be spent on simple necessities, such as the electric grid and roads without holes. Back then, we at least had the good fortune of Steves Jobs and Wozniac, Adam Osborne, and other mammals starting a personal computing revolution underneath the bellies of digital dinosaurs. Do we have the same kind of pioneers working on personal AI today? Name them. Tell us what they’re doing. We need them.
Note that I’m not talking about people working on better ways to buy stuff, or to navigate the digital world with the help of smart agents. I’m talking about people working on personal (not personalized) AI that will give us ways to get control of our everyday lives, without the help of giants.
Like we started doing with personal computers fifty years ago.
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