your finger press over ~10 ms closes a switch in a keyboard matrix, during which ~10¹³ electrons flow through pull-up resistors and scan circuitry. Firmware encodes the event, and a microcontroller emits a USB or Bluetooth HID report of a few dozen bytes. the OS services an interrupt in a few us, maps scan codes to characters, and updates 10²~10³ bytes of state in DRAM, stored as charge from ~10⁸ electrons on capacitors refreshed every ~60 ms. your browser constructs an HTTPS request of 1~5 kB, which the TCP/IP stack segments into ~1.5 kB payloads matched to the Ethernet MTU. These drive a network interface with SerDes operating at a few GHz, shoving 10⁶~10⁸ electrons per bit. electrical signals propagate a few cm across copper traces, then drive optical transceivers where electrons jump a semiconductor bandgap to emit 10⁶~10⁸ photons per bit at telecom wavelengths. These photons traverse access, metro, and backbone networks, undergoing a dozen electrical <-> optical conversions at endpoints and regeneration sites. these photons might further go through hundreds to thousands of kilometers of fiber, amplified every ~100 km by erbium-doped fiber amplifiers via stimulated emission, wavelength-routed by ROADMs, might even bounce off google's MEMS optical circuit switches a few times, and eventually reconverted to electrons by photodiodes at termination and routing boundaries. at the data center, packets are reassembled and delivered to inference servers where GPUs perform matrix multiplications involving ~10¹² model parameters over milliseconds, with transistors toggling at 10¹⁶~10¹⁷ times per second. those parameters were produced earlier by training runs lasting weeks to months, using ~10⁴ accelerators drawing who knows how many megawatts of power, shoving 10³⁰~10³³ electrons through transistor channels for the 10²³~10²⁵ floating-point operations. the inference result is serialized into kilobytes of data and transmitted back through the same chain, again undergoing repeated electrical - optical - electrical conversions across access, metro, and backbone networks. back on your phone or laptop or whatever, the browser parses the response, updates layout and rendering structures, and issues GPU draw calls that write millions of pixels per frame into a framebuffer at 60~120 Hz. display interfaces stream multiple gigabits per second to an OLED or microLED panel, where the pixels emit roughly 10⁸~10¹¹ visible photons per frame, driven by ~microamp currents over ~microsecond switching intervals. those photons traverse a few meters in nanoseconds, absorbed by your retinal photoreceptors, transduced into electrochemical signals, and interpreted by a ~20 W biological neural system. end-to-end, you have astronomical numbers of highly coordinated electrons and photons, and dozens of conversions between them (ofc not including training), for a single thought from the little intelligence to appear on a screen and read by you.