"It's in the Cloud" is a well-known phrase in everyday society. But what exactly is the cloud? I will clarify this from a small personal history lesson. Call it a fairy-tale. There once was this kid who got a very lucky break, because his granddad gave all his grandchildren a nice cash present. He had to plead with his Dad, but in the end he could spend it on a Commodore 64 and a simple cassette player. Back then, home computers were solitary, because they could not communicate with one another, other than through the cloud of humans who used sneaker net and other means of getting programs from computer A to computer B. It was a period of excitement for this kid.
By that time of course the first few computers were already connected into a network, but it was still a long way off from the massive Internet that today connects billions of computers in various ways. We can call it the cloud, but essentially it just means that the information and the processing power have become so entangled, that we hardly ever do anything on one single computer anymore. For instance when you click on a link in any webpage, it means a server somewhere gets a request to process, and in doing so it requests lots of information from other servers to create the appearance you want on your screen. And that included a hefty amount of unwanted information we call advertizing spam.
Now this kind of distributed processing makes it difficult to determine where data is processed, and even how it is processed. The same goes for Artificial Intelligence: in this case the actual way data is processed cannot be determined, since nobody actually wrote that code. We just know that it learns from its training, and sometimes learns tricks better than its human counterparts. So yes, there is a certain degree of obfuscation going on here, but that is not necessarily a bad thing. But eventually we will reach what Teilhard de Chardin called the Omega Point, where intelligence surpasses collective human intelligence by leap and bounds. We simply need to approach this from the all-connected thought, and trust that abuse of IT will be curtailed by a meta-human intelligence that far exceeds our common collective wisdom.