Superstructure
Labels such as the "Information Age," the "Space Age," or the "Age of Artificial Intelligence" carry the implication of a rupture, a form of superiority, or a "transcendence." In reality, these terms constitute nothing more than a superstructure built upon a material foundation—a foundation that remains, at its core, stone and metal.
"Super Stone Age": Concrete is the most ubiquitous "artificial stone" of modernity. The volume of concrete produced globally each year dwarfs the scale at which stone was processed throughout most of human history. Furthermore, silicon is essentially quartz that is, stone purified, crystallized, and transformed through massive expenditures of energy and complex chemical processes. The consumption of water, energy, and chemicals by chip fabrication plants ("foundries") serves as one of the clearest demonstrations of just how physical the "digital" realm truly is. The electricity expended to train a model flows directly through silicon that has been extracted from the earth and refined.
"Hyper-Bronze, Metal Age": Just as the trade and conflicts surrounding copper and tin shaped the geopolitical systems of the Bronze Age, today's rare earth elements along with copper, lithium, cobalt, and uranium serve a similar function. The difference lies in the expanded scale and velocity, as well as the globalization of the geographical reach. The objects of war and competition remain unchanged; only the specific types of minerals and the technological complexity required to process them have evolved. AI is both a product of this competition and a factor that intensifies it: it drives a demand for greater computing power, more silicon, more copper (for data centers and network infrastructure), and more energy much of which is still derived from fossil fuels and uranium.
From a philosophical perspective, this reveals that an era often claimed to be "immaterial" or "post-material" is, in fact, profoundly materialist. The abstraction of software is an illusion; for it to function, it requires an infrastructure that constantly transforms the physical world generating heat, consuming water, and producing waste. The volume of water used to cool data centers and the carbon footprint generated by training a single large-scale model make this dependency starkly visible in numerical terms. In short, the machines that produce "thought" are sustained by the ongoing exploitation of mountains, rivers, and mines.
Throughout history, humanity has learned to use raw materials more efficiently achieving more functionality with less copper, or greater computing power with thinner layers of silicon. Yet total demand is growing so rapidly that these gains in efficiency fail to reduce absolute consumption; in fact, they drive it even higher. This suggests that the "transformation" of our era is, simultaneously, an intensification.
It is said that the dust cloud present at the birth of our planet was a cosmic coincidence. The dust cloud we face today, however, is something we have intensified with our own hands. We are mobilizing silicon, copper, lithium, and concrete at such a rapid pace and on such a vast scale that it is as if we have created an entirely new "dust cycle" across the surface of the planet. We grind down mountains to build cities and transform those cities into data centers. The waste from this transformation returns to us as dust: microplastics, cement dust, mining tailings, and electronic scrap.
Every single parameter of an AI model which may appear to be "thinking" is derived from the dust of a mountain, a river, or a mine somewhere. In other words, "knowledge" itself ultimately circulates within that very same dust.