The problem, stated honestly
1 min read · 174 words
Artificial intelligence made the most intimate things about a person — memory, taste, the private shape of a life — into data. And data, as we have built the world, flows to computers we do not own.
Every serious answer so far has been a variation on one move: keep the cloud, but make the cloud polite. Encrypt at rest. Add a compliance layer. Shrink a datacenter into a pod and put it in a cupboard, while the model's questions still go up and the answers still come back down. The topology never changes. The client reaches up; the cloud reaches back; and somewhere in between, someone else's computer holds the middle of the conversation.
The cloud is the wrong shape for a life. A house does not become yours because the landlord promised to be careful with the keys.
[FIGURE 1 — "Client to cloud": the conventional topology, drawn as a single tree reaching upward into a shared sky. Every leaf's data passes through the same trunk. Caption: The shape everyone keeps building.]