We are living in the dial-up era of AI · xydac

Do you remember the sound?

The shriek and hiss of a modem talking its way onto the network. I used to dial in late at night, after everyone was asleep, so I wouldn’t tie up the phone. I’d sit there in the dark and listen to that handshake like it was two machines whispering a password to each other, and I’d hold my breath through the part where it could still fail. Then it would catch. You were online. To anyone walking past it was just noise. To me it was a door opening.

If you lived through it, you already feel where this is going. If you didn’t, stay with me, because I think you’re feeling a version of it right now and you just haven’t noticed yet.

When slow felt like magic

Dial-up was painfully slow. A photo loaded one strip at a time, top to bottom, and you’d sit there building the picture in your head, guessing what it was before it finished. A single song took most of a TV episode to come down. You waited for things the way you wait for a kettle.

And it was fragile in a way that’s hard to explain to anyone who came later. The internet and the phone shared one line, so being online meant the phone was busy, and anyone who picked up a receiver in another room walked straight into your connection. You’d be ninety percent through a download and hear a click, then that ugly burst of static screeching out of the earpiece, and you knew before they did: the line was gone, the file was dead, start over from zero. Half the arguments in my house were about somebody needing to “make a quick call.” I learned to shout I’m online! down the hallway like it was a thing worth defending. Sometimes it worked. Sometimes the modem dropped mid-handshake anyway and I just sat there, staring at the broken progress bar, starting again.

And here’s the part I can’t get across to people who weren’t there: it still didn’t feel slow. It felt impossible. We were pulling things out of the air, out of machines on the other side of the planet, and the fact that any of it arrived at all was the whole miracle. The waiting wasn’t a flaw in the experience. The waiting was the part where you leaned in close and paid attention with your whole body. You watched it come.

None of us had any idea we were standing at the very beginning of something.

Watch what you do now

Type a question into an AI. Hit enter. The answer streams back, word by word, left to right, painting itself down the screen. You lean in. You watch it land. Sometimes you can feel where the sentence is going a half-second before it gets there, and something in you leans forward to meet it.

Same posture. Same held breath. Same quiet, slightly disbelieving sense that a machine on the other side of the glass is doing something it has no business being able to do.

Here’s what I keep turning over at night: this is dial-up. Not like dial-up. Actually dial-up. The 56k modem of intelligence. We are watching the image paint itself one strip at a time and calling it fast, because we have nothing faster to hold it up against yet.

I have proof of how slippery the word “fast” really is. I went digging and found a screenshot I took in 2012: a Windows ISO coming down at 3.8 megabytes a second, the whole 2.4 gigabytes due in about fourteen minutes. I remember the feeling exactly: pure, uncomplicated pride. After all those years of dial-up, watching a multi-gigabyte file land faster than I could make a sandwich felt like the future had finally walked through the door and sat down next to me.

2012. I was so proud of this I saved the screenshot. 3.8 MB/s felt like flying. Today it would feel broken.

Look at me. I was thrilled. And I had no idea I was still, in every sense that matters, waiting. That’s the trap, and it’s worth saying out loud: every speed feels like the finish line while you’re standing on it. We never think we’re on dial-up. We always think we just got off it.

We’ve already walked this road

The internet didn’t stay on dial-up, and the thing that changed wasn’t really speed. Each step quietly deleted the waiting, and every single time the waiting vanished, we didn’t just do the old thing faster. We did things that had been unthinkable the day before.

Cable made you “always on.” No more dialing in, no more kicking your sister off the phone. The page arrived whole instead of strip by strip, and the internet stopped being an event you scheduled and became a utility you forgot about. The version of that for AI is the moment short answers simply appear, too fast to track token by token. You stop asking-and-waiting. You ask, and it’s already there.

Broadband pushed it further. Video, calls, the cloud. The connection slid into the background and you stopped thinking about it at all. You quit saying “let me get online.” You just were. The AI version is when the model stops being a place you go. It’s ambient, sitting quietly inside everything you touch, half-answering before you’ve finished forming the question.

Then fiber...