The US might be the world leader in technology, and at the forefront of its current AI revolution, but its leaders aren’t quite keeping up.
US Vice President and Democrat Presidential nominee Kamala Harris appears to think that data in the cloud is literally stored in the clouds “above us”. In an undated speech that’s going viral on social media, Harris appears to point towards the sky to indicate where cloud data is stored.
“No longer are you keeping private files in some file cabinet that’s locked in the basement of the house,” she said. “It’s on your laptop, and then — therefore — it’s up here in this cloud that exists above us,” she continued, while holding her hand up in the air and looking upwards.
“Right?” she says while looking at her interviewer. “It’s no longer in a physical place,” she added.
The US Vice President appeared to be labouring under the misapprehension — that’s quite common among non-technical people — that cloud storage refers to literally storing data in the clouds. This is of course untrue — cloud storage refers to data that’s stored in specialized datacenters that are very much present on terra firma, not in the skies. And while Harris believes that cloud data is not stored in a physical place, the data is stored in massive datacenters that are dotted across the world.
But Kamala Harris isn’t the only person who believes that cloud storage happens literally in the cloud. In India, former Income Tax Commissioner Viswa Bandhu Gupta had similarly explained cloud storage in an interview more than decade ago. Gupta had even gone on to say that cloud storage suffers from outages during rains, and that snippet had gone viral and spawned thousands of memes. But’s Gupta’s gaffe was over a decade ago when cloud technology was in its infancy — Kamala Harris, on the other hand, is not only the American Vice President, but also the US government’s “AI czar“, and is tasked with formulating regulations relating to Artificial Intelligence. And the fact that she believes that cloud storage appears to occur in the clouds “above us” shows that no matter how developed the country, competency — and basic technical literacy — among politicians can be hard to find.