In the area where I live (physically, not emotionally), the data center debate has been raging. People are concerned about the amount of space and resources that they use and that they are proposed to use. I even overheard one of my frogs talk about a conversation that they heard. That conversation was based on a new conspiracy theory that they were discussing. A few people were discussing the new data center in northern Utah that was proposed and the rash of "human-caused" fires we have recently had. They had concluded that the fires were started by the anti-data center protestors to prove that with the data centers and the use of their water, the state would burn with the inability to stop the recent fires. I will save pointing out the idiocy of that argument or assertion for another date.

All I can say to those who are protesting the data centers. Don't get mad when companies give you what you have been building up to and demanding for decades. (My frogs keep reminding me of this. "You get what you ask for," and "Everything has a consequence, either good or bad.")

AI is here to stay and will do nothing but become more integrated with society. We may never hit the level of Wayland-Yutani, Tyrell, or Cyberdyne, but they are here to stay. We have evolved as a society that now uses tech to correct our spelling (yes, I had a lot of red lines while writing this) to a society that uses tech for everything. If you use Siri, Alexa, ChatGPT, Google, or any other LLM (large language model) or AI product, then you can thank yourself for the data centers. With the demand for easy tech interfaces, we have asked tech companies to develop ways to handle our requests. Just remember, every time you say Hey Siri, Google, or Alexa, you are using those data centers. And the more you use them to play your songs, tell you the weather, check the time, set reminders, the more you are increasing the demand. Companies will build data centers and keep building them as long as you are willing to use and pay for the services they provide.

Let me explain... it all started back in the 1960's.

• 1961 - Les Earnest (MIT) created a program to read cursive handwriting that included a real spelling checker; it used a small 10,000-word dictionary of the most common English words. This is the earliest documented spell-checking system that used a dictionary.

• 1967 - At Stanford, a PhD student took Earnest work and wrote it in a programming language called Lisp for the PDP-6, this was the first spell checker for typed text.

• 1971 - SPELL - Ralph Gorin wrote SPELL, the first program specifically for checking spelling in text documents. This was verified in 1980 by Springer-Verlag as the first computer program written for checking spelling in text documents.

• 1980 - WordCheck for the Commodore system becomes the first consumer spell checker.

• 1983-1989 - Microsoft Word and WordPerfect start adding spell checking to their word processors, and it then becomes mainstream, and users start to expect computers to catch mistakes automatically.

• 1990s - Smart Writing - Early autocorrect systems matched typed words against dictionaries and replaced obvious typos.

• 2000 - Predictive Text & Mobile Typing - phones introduced dictionary-based autocorrect to compensate for tiny keypads.

• 2007 - iPhone Predictive Text - systems that learn from users' typing patterns - moving from reactive to proactive work prediction.

• 2010 - Grammar Checking - this moves us from the era of "spell check" to "language understanding."

• 2011 - Siri (Apple) - voice assistant - pattern-matching - "spell check for speech."

• 2012 - Google Now - Proactive information cards based on user context, introducing a major step to contextual AI.

• 2014 - Alexa - Amazon Echo and Alexa move AI into the home.