One is a deterministic machine on your desk, that you own, to do stuff at your desk.

The other is a nondeterministic thing somewhere else, that you don't own, to do stuff at your desk.

In the military we have a maintenance tracking system. It's electronic. We literally bdo drills for if it goes down and we have to resort to paper backups. And there are paper backups.

Without a computer I could still manage an entire flight line worth of planes, and everything they need. Maintenance, fueling, sorties, etc. What you're telling me is that this company and lots of companies do not have a contingency for if there is a system failure or other outage.

That seems acceptable? Why? Short of a power outage (and probably not even then unless we can't Jerryrig a lighting solution) we can do all the jobs required with hand tools. It's crazy to think that people don't think this should be a thing.

If the Internet is down for a period of time at the office, I would expect that my dev team is able to continue working (assuming they’re not exclusively hitting a third party API). At least for a few hours, if not days. It might not be the same cadence, but I’m not about to send them home.

Computers are a tool; AI is an outsourcing. It’s the difference between a carpentry team not having saws, hammers, etc. and having the carpentry team unable to do work if Jose (the outsourced carpenter) doesn’t come in.

Except, unlike computers and the internet, AI is not essential, unless your whole business revolves around it (in which case, good riddance).