Everyone agrees AI is about to get smarter. Jo Guldi thinks intelligence was never the bottleneck. The real constraint is something quieter and far harder to fake: the infrastructure that tells us what actually happened.

Guldi is a historian who grew up coding on the Texas "Silicon Prairie," then became, in 2008, the first person ever to hold a faculty post in "digital history." She's now Professor of Quantitative Methods at Emory, a historian of capitalism and infrastructure, and the author of The Dangerous Art of Text Mining. She's spent her career on the seam between data science and the archive, which makes her uniquely clear-eyed about what large language models can and can't do.

Her argument cuts against the moment. As AI becomes the way most people get their information, the scarcest resource won't be answers -- it'll ...