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.
this post was submitted on 25 Nov 2025
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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!
Or things beneficial to the whole world.
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"We don't even need all of these trains!?"
Shhhh, you're gonna love it. We put a train on your phone. Windows is now powered by trains.
trAIn
Coincidence?
AI models are usually train ed. Even more of a coincidence?
Maybe someone mistook trains for AI.
Getting on board, but as I'm looking for my seat a giant anthropomorphic paper clip starts shoving me and shouting that I'm using the train wrong
I love trains but the issue with them is not money, itβs NIMBYs. China can build all the railroads they want because the government can just toss people out of their homes to build the tracks. In the west we canβt do that because of property rights etc.
With enough money you could just tunnel under/bridge over/buy up the densely populated areas
You canβt though. People have the right to refuse to sell. See the whole saga with trying to get Mr Acker (played by Barry Corbin) to sell his house in Better Call Saul. If you donβt have the legal power to force someone to sell then they can hold out as long as they want.
Thereβs also the issue of supply and demand. If youβve got a ton of money and youβre willing to spend above market prices for many different properties you need to buy along a route then the market price will skyrocket as people learn and start to hold out for more and more money. The usual way developers get around this is to quietly acquire the land at market prices without drawing attention to it but that can take years and years because most properties are not up for sale at a given time. Try to make an offer to someone who isnβt actively selling and you risk them going public and exposing your whole scheme.
Canβt spell train without AI
Autism >9000.
(Actually autistic btw, so I can make that joke).
Can we please give everyone Tylenol so we can get a better passenger rail network?
And we'll need it then too, with all the bone rot.
I don't think you need the disclaimer. This is Lemmy. We're all autistic here.
So I'm starting to notice.
Though... we don''t all like trains. So some may not have appreciated that whimsical comment.
No you can't, it's a spectrum. You're gatekeeping. (I'm joking)
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But it is being used for train
-ing AI models.
But then no one would buy cars and fuel anymore and we can not allow that. /i
AI trains that are never on time and derail constantly? π€
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.
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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.
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Trains and bicycle infrastructure
Holy shit
Trains are not profitable or generate an Ai bubble of investments. Duhhhh
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My dumbass coworker said that we should use AI to click the "next" button for us on our OSHA guideline training.
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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 1846βby 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
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We don't need to imagine, we only need to look at China and see with our own eyes.
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