Somewhere Is a Real Place

The word cloud is doing damage, and it has been doing it since before this class started. Every student in this room has been told for years that files go to the cloud, that photos are backed up to the cloud, that an app runs in the cloud. The word has been used so many times that it has stopped meaning anything, and a word that means nothing is worse than no word at all, because it stops the question before the question gets asked.

Here is the question it stops. Where is it?

Not a philosophical where. A street address. Every file anyone has ever described as being in the cloud is written on a physical drive, in a physical machine, in a rack, in a room, in a building, in a city. The drive is real. It has a size. It wears out after a few years and gets replaced. Somebody screwed it into the rack. The building it sits in has a roof and a parking lot and an electricity bill that runs into the millions of dollars a year, and it is cooled constantly, because thousands of machines doing arithmetic produce enough heat to make a room unusable in minutes.

None of that is hidden on purpose. It is just not interesting to say, so nobody says it, and the word cloud fills the gap with a picture of vapor.

Now take the next step, which is where the day earns its keep. If the building is in a place, then it is in a country, and countries have laws. The rules about what a company may do with what sits on its drives are not the same everywhere. What may be read, what may be kept, how long it may be kept, and who may demand a copy of it are decided by where the machine is, not by where you are.

That last part surprises people. A student in New Orleans using an American app may have their writing stored on a drive in Ireland, or in Singapore, or in Virginia. A company chooses where to put a building for reasons that have nothing to do with any individual using it: cheap electricity, cool weather, tax terms, distance to a large population. The choice gets made once, in a meeting, and after that everything typed into that app lands wherever that meeting decided it would land.

You are generally not told which building. It is not usually a secret in the sense of being hidden. It is written down somewhere in a document almost nobody reads. But the practical experience of using the service is that your writing goes into a box labeled cloud and an answer comes back, and nothing on the screen mentions a country.

This has a plain consequence, and it is worth stating carefully rather than dramatically. When you use somebody else’s machine, what protects your writing is whatever applies to that machine. Not what you assumed. Not what you would have picked. What comes with the building.

Which is exactly why the rig matters next week.

The machines that will answer this class’s prompts are a few miles from this room. They are not in Ireland and they are not in Virginia. They are in a house in New Orleans, and the person who owns it is standing at the front of the room. When this class says that nothing is kept, that is not a promise inside a document written by a company nobody can inspect, about a building whose location nobody knows, under rules nobody read. It is a claim about two specific machines, in one specific place, that a student could in principle walk over and look at.

That difference is the entire reason for running a model in a house instead of renting one in a building, and it is a difference that only makes sense once the cloud has stopped being a shape in the sky and become what it actually is. Somebody’s computers. In somebody’s building. Somewhere. And somewhere is a real place with its own rules.

Every question on this half of the classwork asks about that in a different way. If a student can answer them by thinking about a building instead of a cloud, the day landed.

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The first item is your name. Answer it — that is what puts you on the work now that email collection is off.

Exit ticket · on your own
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Could This Class Run Its Own AI? · Day 4 of 7