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It would be great, but it could never happen. All the marketing of AI is around speculation of what it could do.
Investors know what a train is, what it does and how much it costs. They don't know any of those things when it comes to AI, so they're willing to spend a lot, because they were promised a lot.
But what about this promise makes it so uniquely seductive?
There are a million guys with ideas for cars that will go 750km on a thimble-full of Fresca, robot butlers that can't turn evil because they don't have red LEDs in the eye positions, and 200:1 data compression as long as you never have to decompress it. They must all be looking at Altman and company and asking where their bubbles.
I sadly suspect the charm is "we can sack some huge percentage of workers if it delivers"
But what about this promise makes it so uniquely seductive?
Part of it is, as you pointed out, just the elimination of costly labor. That's a capitalist's wet dream. But the main thing that makes it attractive as a slick, highly marketable investment vehicle is that AI models are inherently black boxes.
There are ways you can examine the ways they work (for example, researchers found that the parts of an LLM that "understand" one topic, like money, can also simultaneously "understand" other different, yet related things, like value, credit, etc), but we can't truly comprehend everything about them. It would be like looking at a math problem billions of equations large and assuming we could hold the whole equation perfectly in our brain and do the mental math to solve it. We can't.
That means that instead of seeing "here's our robot that is currently capable of this, but these are the components that could be upgraded/replaced, X is an issue it faces because of Y" and so on, instead you get "It's not good at this yet, but it will be if you just throw a few billion dollars more compute at it, we promise this time."
Problems are abstracted away to "something that will fix itself later," or something that "just happens, but we'll find a way to fix it", and not any kind of mechanical constraint a VC fund manager might be able to understand.
I sadly suspect the charm is "we can sack some huge percentage of workers if it delivers"
It's that, and a really impressive working prototype.
It's that LLM output looks like human writing, so it looks like they might be able to do anything a person can.
Do you know what good mass transit could do though? Imagine cities without parking lots and garages. Imagine having spaces that are much safer and more comfortable to walk. Imagine solving the housing crisis, since you can now build downtown complexes where those parking garages were.
Imagine getting most semis off the road and reducing road repairs by more than half.
Trains could do a lot, and it doesn't take much imagination.
No need to imagine, that has already happened: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_Mania
A total of 6,220 miles (10,010 km) of railway line were built as a result of projects authorised between 1844 and 1846โby comparison, the total route mileage of the modern UK railway network is around 11,000 miles (18,000 km).
Wow. Must have been nice having such a solid foundation to expand upon. Meanwhile in the US:
There is no such thing as trains. Now get back in you gas guzzler, sit in traffic for 3 hours each way on each day, consume more gasoline to enrich the corporate overlords, and run over as many kids as you can because you can't see them in your behemoth.
-The political establishment
Fuck yeah! Damn those environmental pansies! I'll even hang a ton of flags on the guzzler expressing my obnoxious political-opinion so I can own the libs. That'll teach 'em.
-The morons
the total route mileage of the modern UK railway network is around 11,000 miles (18,000 km).
Public transit in the US is trash, but the country is so much larger than the UK, that we still have like 15x that here.
It's fair to say the direct comparison between UK and US doesn't add up. But, Europe as a whole is roughly as big-ish as the United States. They have a really well-developed rail system and they are better because of it.
My dumbass coworker said that we should use AI to click the "next" button for us on our OSHA guideline training.
This comment looks like a tweet that could be published on this community. So much questions about it. Your coworker is double-dumb, thinking that OSHA training isn't useful, ans that it needs an AI to click next?
He's unironically the dumbest person I've met. The best part is he thinks he's incredibly clever, and loves telling people to "do their own research" after making claims that are easily disproven. Make a caricature of your average MAGA moron and you've probably given it a few too many brain cells.
His proposed solution to forest fires is to build a perimeter of water tower sized retractable sprinkler heads around endangered areas that will pop up and prevent it from spreading.
He shows everyone every grainy cell phone video of "aliens" that comes across his feed
After struggling for 15 minutes to get logged in to the OSHA training site, he claimed that if we were using chrome rather than Firefox, he could use the "inspect element" tool to bypass the 10 hour time requirement for the course. When he found out that Firefox has the same tool, he made up some technical jargon to explain why it wasn't working. (This is where the AI suggestion came in.)
He overheard me and someone else make an Epstein joke (didn't even mention or implicate Trump) and he went on a tirade about how nobody says anything about Biden (???) and that "the director of the FBI has even said that Trump was on that island as an informant". This comment was the eye-opener.
He says that AZT (AIDS treatment) killed more people than the virus did, which is an entirely fabricated claim that didn't exist until after COVID, and the only "source" is a movie that just states it with no background evidence.
The training routines are made for these types.
The rest will just end up reading it if you keep it close enough.
We don't need to imagine, we only need to look at China and see with our own eyes.
I read money as monkey and wondered why monkeys were being turned to AI.
Shakespeare isn't gonna write itself I guess.
The value of the entire tech megacorp bunch but in public or nonprofit train infrastructure - yes please.
... but considering that China is investing only 100bn monies annually into their railroads (and doing things beyond imagining with it) with such an investment you would just sit into your train seat & instantly get teleported to the desired location.
Gets even better when you count work-hours in a full economic net over direct implementation costs.
How you dare to say that? Don't you want to sloppy misinformation AI? You should be jailed! /J
I don't think trains would require so much energy :)
Are the trains all maglev?
And each get to go around in them to anywhere on our own when we want, like our own personal luxury private jets?
Surely we can get creative to have trains require so much energy.
You could probably walk from east coast to west coast while the train stands still, while never touching the ground and having periodical spots to eat and drink (in the restaurant wagons) and to sleep in comfort (in the sleeping compartments). All of it for free too because they don't know what to do with that amount of money.
Or public transportation in general. Making cities more walkable. Helping with housing. Helping with food. Helping with medical or student loan debt. So many things
Even running trains would be better.
Weird way to segue to your mum.
Still better.
