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Autism >9000.
(Actually autistic btw, so I can make that joke).
But it is being used for train
-ing AI models.
Trains are not profitable or generate an Ai bubble of investments. Duhhhh
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.
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 1846—by 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
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
I read money as monkey and wondered why monkeys were being turned to AI.
Shakespeare isn’t gonna write itself I guess.
Probably too many trains at that point.
No such thing.
Better than not enough
Or the post office. Or consumer protections. Or wage increases. Or UBI. Or housing. Or food distribution. Or infrastructure maintenance. Or nuclear. Or teacher pay.
Or anything else has that a proven track record of being beneficial to our country.
AI investment is expected to reach $1.5 trillion dollars in just this year alone.
Housing every single homeless person in the entirety of America would cost anywhere from $11B to $30B, per year.
That’s anywhere from 50 to 136 years of housing, full paid for, for every single person currently homeless in the USA, at current market rates without any investment in affordable non-profit federal/state/city housing.
You could do so much fucking good with this money, and yet they choose to throw it all away on things that when they are successful in delivering value, deliver much less than the value that could otherwise be gained from that money, and at worst, create their own problems, like actual, direct deaths.
But think of the resell value for ho-moewners!
We don’t need to imagine, we only need to look at China and see with our own eyes.
trAIns
Just saying
TRAiNS
Just saying
The subway trains in Singapore is automated, no driver.
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
AI trains that are never on time and derail constantly? 🤔
Between Amtrak and freight trains I think this is already the state of trains in the US, no need for AI.
That’s a different type of AI. Not Artificial Intelligence, but American Ingenuity.
You are right to have expressed concerns. I didn’t actually run the train today.
AI trains that calculate profitability of each route while in transit. If profits are too low your trip is canceled mid trip and you are left in Arkansas. Partial refund, then you book to continue the journey tomorrow but now there is surge pricing
Better take the AI back out then, before it decides to ‘simulate’ not derailing.
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”
if firing people is the ultimate good, maybe we can get the corpos behind UBI so nobody cares too much about getting fired?
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.
It’s that LLM output looks like human writing, so it looks like they might be able to do anything a person can.
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.
And because the rest of the market is really slow and barely above inflation so not really worth much to invest in while AI is going like it’s the good ol’ days. That’s how the money boys see it anyway.
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.
I mean there was a train bubble once, simpler times tho
