From the Information Superhighway to Super Intelligence

In the 1990s, the Clinton administration helped popularize a phrase that captured what was happening in technology: the Information Superhighway.

I was working in the semiconductor industry during that period and watched the internet expand from something relatively few people understood into something that would eventually become part of nearly everyone's daily life.

But what people saw as "the internet" was only the surface.

Behind it was an enormous buildout of telecommunications networks, semiconductors, servers, storage systems and power. Billions were invested in infrastructure before most consumers understood how dependent we would eventually become on it.

More than 30 years later, I see a familiar pattern with artificial intelligence.

AI requires enormous computing power. That means advanced semiconductors, servers, networking equipment and data centers. Those data centers require cooling, electricity, energy infrastructure and increasingly critical minerals.

Yet most of this remains invisible to us.

Recently, while watching a commercial for a new Dell laptop, a friend commented that she didn't think Dell was doing particularly well.

I reminded her that Dell isn't simply a laptop company. It also supplies servers, storage and networking systems used in data centers.

That simple conversation illustrates a much larger disconnect.

We see the laptop. We don't see the servers. We use the cloud. We don't see the data center.

The cloud isn't in the clouds.

And data centers didn't suddenly appear because of ChatGPT or any AI company.

Amazon Web Services, Microsoft and Google have operated massive computing infrastructures for years. Businesses around the world depend upon them. So do hospitals, governments, banks, retailers, universities and manufacturers.

Think about our everyday lives: electronic medical records, online banking, streaming, shopping, navigation, video meetings, cybersecurity, cloud storage and business software. Somewhere, physical computing infrastructure makes all of it possible.

Then came artificial intelligence.

AI didn't create our dependence on computing. It accelerated the amount of computing we are asking our systems to provide.

That distinction matters as communities debate the rapid growth of data centers.

We should absolutely ask difficult questions about electricity, water, land use, transmission capacity, environmental impact and the costs associated with rapid development.

But we should also understand why the demand exists.

Over the past three decades, we have continually asked technology to do more-and to do it faster. Every new service ultimately requires physical computing somewhere.

There is plenty of hype surrounding artificial intelligence. There is also plenty of fear. What we need is more understanding.

We've experienced a version of this before.

The Information Superhighway didn't disappear when the excitement of the 1990s ended. We built on top of it.

Then came smartphones, cloud computing, streaming services and much of today's digital economy.

Now we're building another layer.

Where artificial intelligence ultimately takes us-and whether something we someday call Super Intelligence follows-is still being determined.

But one lesson from the past is clear:

Technology changes. The need to build the systems underneath it doesn't.

Gin Nikoloff

Technology Strategist | AI, Infrastructure & Generational Economics, Northern Nevada SCORE

Author: A Smaller Generation, A Greater Responsibility: America's Strength in the Age of AI