Making AI Accessible To One And All

The democratization of any effective technology happens automatically by virtue of its success, even if the complexity it presents initially overwhelms some of the smartest people who wield it. But after six decades of commercial computing in the datacenter, we have certainly learned a thing or two about helping this process of adoption and integration along. There's nothing intrinsically special about artificial intelligence (AI) in this regard, which is arguably just the latest evolution in a long line of sophisticated data processing tools. Mainframes were kept in glasshouses as a kind of temple of computing during the 1960s and 1970s before being mimicked and copied into minicomputers. Eventually, PCs spawned two seismic shifts: becoming powerful enough to be servers and run mission-critical workloads in a client-server environment.