When you furnish the second room

A data center under construction outside Abilene covers more ground than the town’s own downtown. It will draw enough power for a small city, and once it’s running, a handful of engineers can keep it fed. One build. It will serve millions of queries a day without anyone in the building meeting the people asking them.

Now picture the other end of that transaction. Someone sits with the answer the data center produced and has to decide whether it’s the right one, whether the question was worth asking, and whether to act on it at all. That happens one person at a time, in one sitting, at the pace of an actual mind doing actual work. No one has found a way to build that part at the same scale.

A reader named Matt left a comment on a previous article - “The last expensive thing,” and it’s been sitting with me since.