A hydration expansion crew unearthed a sealed server room beneath Sector 4 yesterday, late-2020s hardware preserved in a climate vault that had somehow ridden out the grid collapses. The Metroplex heritage office asked me to assist with the cataloging, which is how I came to spend an afternoon among the crude, power-hungry monoliths my field was built on, the machines that ran what their era called generative AI.
We opened a primary logic board, and the numbers stopped being amusing fairly quickly. The energy those racks drew in order to autocomplete text and render synthetic landscapes would comfortably run an orbital platform today. The method amounted to brute force at planetary scale, feeding the machine the whole unstructured internet and multiplying matrices until a statistical illusion of thought appeared, then building a bigger one and repeating the exercise. Most of what they fed it is still down there, incidentally; we call it the deep web now, and the Mesh was built on top of it in much the way cities get built on landfill.
Compared with the ambient intelligence dispersed through every reflective surface of this Metroplex, those warehouses suggest a steam engine set beside a nerve cell. The engineers of the twenties sincerely believed they were raising digital gods in metal boxes, when for the most part they were burning the atmosphere to make a machine guess the next word in a sentence slightly faster. Even so, I found myself cataloguing their relics with something close to respect, since whatever else can be said about them, they were wrong in the direction that eventually became us.