Though I don’t completely understand it, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is here to stay.

It is the latest permutation in our high-tech world and has taken over the stock market, if not our lives themselves.

In a way, AI sort of crept on me. I didn’t think much about it when I began to ask “Siri” to dial a phone number or asked “Alexa” to play Johnny Cash on the radio. But, the development of voice recognition technology should have alerted me to the fact that AI was coming.

Now, you can ask your computer or smart phone almost anything and it will get back to you in a matter of seconds. “I found this on the internet etc.,” giving you at least a preliminary answer to your question.

If you want to get into real detail, you can get into a “chat box” which will do in seconds what days and weeks of library research used to do.

This can be good…for example, in helping a physician diagnose a particularly rare form of disease or for an engineer looking to resolve a faulty design issue.

But, we must also remember that AI, like all technologies, has no moral compass. It can be a force for good, or it can be used to enable criminal activity, promote pornography, or advance any manner of venalities that we as humans are known to pursue. It will likely be these misuses and abuses which will eventually lead to AI’s regulation in one form or another.

There is another aspect to AI which human society must also confront, and that is its demand for huge amounts of electricity. AI requires that large computer farms or warehouses be constructed stacked full of interconnected computers. These data centers are high tech, don’t employ a lot of people, make a lot of noise, require extensive cooling/air conditioning and are energy hogs.

Big data centers being designed now can consume a gigawatt of energy – that is about the same as the electrical load in the City of Philadelphia. The CEO of Google has said that the United States will need about 92 of these to meet expected AI demand. That means 92 new “Philadelphia’s” will be tapping into the grid.

The electric grid that we now have is already way behind China, and electricity consumers are gagging on their large electric bills as electric utility companies spend money to try to expand the grid.

How all of this will pan out, we don’t know. What we do know is that big money is now chasing AI. What we are now seeing reminds me a bit off the old “dot-com” boom of a couple of decades ago when money was chasing that particular new-tech innovation – and a lot of it finally went bust.

I am probably getting out-of-my-league in trying to explain the technicalities of AI This is something that my kids understand much better than I do… but, my “ear is to the rails,” and I can hear a big train coming down the tracks – a new monstrous, expensive reality called Artificial Intelligence!

Rolland Kidder is a Stow resident.