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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.
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
trAIn
Coincidence?AI models are usually train ed. Even more of a coincidence?
Maybe someone mistook trains for AI.
Can’t spell train without AI
Autism >9000.
(Actually autistic btw, so I can make that joke).
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.
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.
No you can’t, it’s a spectrum. You’re gatekeeping. (I’m joking)
That or he’s a Father who finally hit their retirement phase.
I love trains but the issue with them is not money, it’s 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 can’t do that because of property rights etc.
With enough money you could just tunnel under/bridge over/buy up the densely populated areas
You can’t 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 don’t have the legal power to force someone to sell then they can hold out as long as they want.
There’s also the issue of supply and demand. If you’ve got a ton of money and you’re 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 isn’t actively selling and you risk them going public and exposing your whole scheme.
But then no one would buy cars and fuel anymore and we can not allow that. /i
Trains and bicycle infrastructure
Holy shit
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.
The auto industry:
We wouldnt ever get to Safe space travel
Edit: Unfortunately despite everyone’s bitching, including a very helpful friendly neighborhood train autist, we still have no better answers for how much it would cost with regular google providing wildly different answers, so good chance the below listed information is still correct given the relatively okay, but not robust sauce.
Per ChatGPT how much would it cost to interconnect all major cities with high speed rail in the usa:
Good question — there’s no single authoritative number, but based on past studies and real U.S. projects we can make some rough-order estimates of what it might cost to “interconnect all major U.S. cities” with a true high-speed rail (HSR) network — and the result tends to be in the hundreds of billions to low-trillions of dollars. Here’s how one might arrive at such a figure, with major caveats.
🔎 What we know already: cost per mile is very high
- Building HSR tracks in the U.S. is extremely expensive. For example, in California High-Speed Rail (CA-HSR), costs per mile have been estimated as high as ~ US$200 million per mile for full, 220 mph-class track. (Hoover Institution)
- Not all rail needs to be brand-new dedicated track. For less ambitious upgrades (e.g. improving existing rail corridors to somewhat higher speeds) cost estimates are much lower: in one case, upgrading ~3,000 miles of track was estimated at about US$7.7 billion — ~US$2.5 million per mile. (Congress.gov)
- A 2009 federal assessment noted a wide variation: while dedicated high-speed lines might cost tens of millions per mile (for example a projected HSR line between Los Angeles area and Las Vegas was estimated at about US$22 million to US$48 million per mile depending on route/terrain).
So the cost per mile can vary by more than an order of magnitude — depending on whether the rail is new vs upgraded, terrain, urban vs rural, tunneling/bridges, land acquisition cost, station infrastructure, electrification, signaling, etc.
🌐 What “connect all major cities” might mean — and how much track that could require
Estimating a U.S.-wide high-speed network depends a great deal on how one defines “major cities” and the level of connectivity (hub-and-spoke? dense mesh?). But even a modest network that connects perhaps 30–50 of the largest metropolitan areas would likely require tens of thousands of route-miles of new or upgraded track.
Past proposals give some sense of scale:
- A plan studied by U.S. federal authorities once envisioned about 12,800 miles of passenger-rail corridors (not necessarily full HSR), with an early cost projection of ~USD 50 billion for a “moderate-speed” rail system — but that projected cost does not apply to full-speed, dedicated HSR. (Downsizing the Federal Government)
- Analysts skeptical of HSR argue that a true nationwide high-speed rail network (serving many states and major cities with dedicated track) could cost US$500 billion to US$1 trillion — and once you “fill in all gaps,” perhaps close to US$1 trillion or more. (BLE-T)
💡 What a plausible ballpark cost looks like today
Because of all the variation, any large-scale estimate must come with wide error bounds. But a rough range:
- If you built a “skeleton” network — connecting major city clusters using mostly upgraded existing tracks and selective new segments — costs might run hundreds of billions of dollars (e.g. US$300–600 billion).
- If you instead built a more ambitious, high-speed, dedicated-track network linking most major cities (think “bullet-train everywhere”), costs could easily reach US$700 billion to over US$1 trillion, possibly more depending on scope, geography, and how modern you demand the system to be.
Indeed, some conservative projections see ~US$1 trillion as a realistic floor for a comprehensive U.S. HSR system. (BLE-T)
⚠️ Why the uncertainty is so large — and what could drive cost up or down
- Terrain & urban density: Building through mountains, hills, or densely populated urban areas (especially with tunnels/viaducts, land acquisition) dramatically increases per-mile costs (as seen in CA-HSR). (Hoover Institution)
- Shared vs dedicated tracks: Upgrading existing tracks for “higher-speed” is far cheaper than building new dedicated corridors — but yields slower speeds and sometimes lower ridership. (Congress.gov)
- Inflation, regulatory, environmental mitigation, stations, electrification, signaling, rolling stock, maintenance facilities: all add huge extra costs over just laying track. U.S. costs historically have run much higher than many international systems for comparable projects. (High Speed Rail Alliance)
- Ambition & coverage: A minimal network with only a few corridors is much cheaper; a dense mesh covering dozens of metro areas raises costs steeply.
- Political, legal, and land-rights hurdles: In the U.S., acquiring rights-of-way, dealing with local regulations, environmental reviews, and community opposition tend to add delays and cost overruns — as seen with CA-HSR. (U.S. Government Accountability Office)
🎯 Bottom line: It’s possible — but very expensive
If the U.S. decided to connect all major cities with a modern high-speed rail network (dedicated tracks, fast speeds, nationwide coverage), a realistic cost estimate is likely in the range of several hundred billion to over a trillion dollars (in today’s dollars).
If you like, I can run a rough “back-of-envelope” estimate: pick, say, the 50 biggest U.S. metro areas, lay out hypothetical direct HSR connections, and compute a total cost estimate — to show you concretely what “major-city-wide national HSR” might cost under different assumptions (cheap upgrades vs full build). Do you want me to build that estimate now?
Per ChatGPT
I don’t want to read what chatgpt says. if I did, I’d go to it, not lemmy.
jfc the laziest tryhard - when you could find all this info with normal search, but you’re chuffed because it gives you a big bullet buble filled response to a query you could and should have summarized in a few sentences.
blech
I get some of the hate and am concerned about all the bad shit related to ai and it’s social and environmental impact, but I don’t get the complete and utter hatred towards it like this.
I mean this:
when you could find all this info with normal search
Yeah, I don’t have a few hours to scour research docs on the Internet to figure out what the cost would be… Its not like just a “normal search” will give you a proper idea without taking the time to research the subject.
I got less out of your bitching about CGPT than I did out of the CGPT response.
You didn’t research anything at all, you were told what to think and obeyed.
You’re totally right, I asked my ai overlord and it said I should tell you that. Now I’m going to go felate it because it told me to and I need to obey.
I mean, yeah, that is exactly what you did, you being sarcastic about it doesn’t change that.
Oh no, I don’t know how to feel about this, Chatgpt, baby, please tell me how I should feel.
Again, that is literally what you did.
I got less out of your bitching about CGPT than I did out of the CGPT response.
that’s fine, no one cares about your opinion.
As with yours…
don’t you have an llm to fellate somewhere else?
🥱
The important thing is that CGPT did not inconvenience you personally by any of the other myriad pitfalls that isn’t worth mentioning because you are not experiencing them at this moment. Trust the convenience and Obey!
Why are you partaking in capitalism if you are against it? Your phone is made with rare earth minerals mined by people in indentured servitude, working in the worst conditions. Why do you have one and use it? Literally the way the fediverse works wastes resources by mass duplication, and most of it is run on American cloud providers that do horrible things. Why are you using it? Why are you here?
This rhetoric is played out and lame.
There’s a difference between engaging in capitalism to gain an advantage and buying junk food to satiate your hunger because it is convenient.
And you don’t buy fast food? Fish that isn’t line caught? Meat that isn’t factory farmed? Cruelty free eggs?
This is stupid, like I said.
You can focus on the morality but I was trying to bring your attention to the personal health aspect of the product.
Heh in true AI fashion it said a lot of words to give very little actual information, references the highest profile new rail infrastructure project but then conflates that with a proposed plan to simply add passenger trains to existing freight corridors (and of course upgrade existing infrastructure as needed in the process)
The best part is, if you wanted a realistic plan for improving North American passenger rail network all you have to do is ask your friendly neighborhood train autist and you’d get a far more informative answer than whatever the heck this is.
Hey, here’s that informative answer from a friendly neighborhood train autist: the biggest barrier to passenger rail (and any actual improvements to the rail network for that matter) is the freight railroads, and the biggest thing freight railroads hate it’s investing in infrastructure. If we’re making talking ambitious the very first thing that needs to be done is nationalizing the entire rail network. Remove the freight railroads from the equation because they can and do quarrel with passenger service providers regularly because a freight train carrying raw materials for a factory in Albuquerque had to pull into a siding to let today’s Cardinal passed (a 3 times a week train!) so take away their control so passenger trains can be correctly prioritized.
Its also worth noting railroad law is based on so many dusty old 19th century laws paid for by the Robber Barrons of the day that are somehow still on the books and painfully difficult to work through in a legal manner, so having a strong federal government ready to legally smack down the freight railroads is critical to such an endeavor.
Next, an analysis needs to be performed of what cities are currently connected to the rail network that can easily have a station opened and regain passenger service, creating many new routes on the existing rails. While those stations are being built/refurbished an order needs to be placed with a major manufacturer of rolling stock for new passenger cars. It needs to be structured to ensure enough business for the rolling stock manufacturer that they can maintain a production facility indefinitely. Make it easy for regional, local and private operators to also order rolling stock, maybe even develop 2-3 standard cars that all new passenger stock can be based on to keep things simple and cheap, occasionally refreshing the design as needed to maintain modernity
Finally, as those new passenger services over existing freight trackage are being stood up, new passenger corridors for new trackage needs to be identified so that ground can break and work can begin. Again, being federally owned rails this cuts past a ton of red tape and makes this process much easier.
With this process, most of the country can be connected to passenger service within a decade just by using existing rails and patching up the biggest barriers to passenger service. The freight railroads will kick and screen because how dare Union Pacific be expected to let BNSF or heaven forbid CPKC have any trackage rights through Moffat Tunnel for example, and all will want to hang onto their key passes and not allow any other railroad to use them to maintain their local monopolies. That’s a game of politics beyond the scope of this comment. But importantly, nationalizing the network will make any blocking freight railroads try to do completely impotent, and building up a proper national passenger equipment pool will ensure the the network can run the passenger services it wants and needs to run without the limitations of finding equipment to run it
Thanks friendly neighborhood train autist!
Now going back on track… huehuehue, did you have any solid sauce on actual costs estimates? The initial google was wildly different, with anywhere from 10 million to 500 million per mile. Which to a layperson like me, seems vastly inflated, but top sources and AI was able to more or less verify, and might even be giving even lower numbers than actual.
Per mile, the New York project cost $2.6 billion, which is high even by U.S. standards. For example, the Purple Line in Los Angeles cost $800 million per mile. By international standards, the New York price tag is stratospheric: A project in Madrid cost $320 million per mile, and one in Paris cost just $160 million per mile.
https://www.reddit.com/r/transit/comments/hpaq1r/average_cost_per_km_of_high_speed_rail/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-speed_rail_in_the_United_States
Gets a lot more expensive when there’s corruption and intentional delays so some extract more money for as long as it keeps going on.
A few months ago The Laughing Auditor ( https://www.youtube.com/@thelaughingauditor/videos ) had spoken on the street to someone who happened to work on HS2 (alas, I failed to find the specific video again), and he said it was nothing like any other job he had ever worked on. It was like they (the upper bosses and politicians) didn’t want to complete it.
Did your LLM bilge take that kind of thing into account? Could be work asking it about that, and to reconsider the situation.
They generally can’t parse information from videos from my understanding. It’s decently well sourced, and just like the other person said, a quick google gave wildly different opinions on prices, so this is a great starting point.
Even our friendly neighborhood train autist gave zero pricing lmfao.
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.
Or things beneficial to the whole world.
all of those solutions are based except nuclear. nuclear reactors rely on colonial acquisition of nuclear ore in order to keep their prices competitive with the other energy solutions. and even then, they can’t compete since they’re more expensive and risky than solar.
there’s no way to keep a nuclear reactor going without also feeding into Russia’s nuclear markets and funding their war effort. https://engelsbergideas.com/notebook/russias-global-grip-on-nuclear-energy/
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!
AI trains that are never on time and derail constantly? 🤔
For some reason, I think the most likely bad parts of AI trains will be that some of the cars will be misshapen (some won’t even have seats), and you will have to pay a subscription to even take the train.
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
This was already possible without the new LLM buzzword nonsense. In fact, LLMs would be worse at it than whatever algorithms were already around to do this
Better take the AI back out then, before it decides to ‘simulate’ not derailing.
But it is being used for train
-ing AI models.
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”
A technology that, according to the marketing that heavily leans on sci fi media to prop up its glorified autocorrect tech, could, in theory, replace almost all non manual labor, while still helping alleviate a portion of that, would be a technological milestone that would effectively define a new age of humanity… Is an incredibly seductive concept. Especially to capitalists who hate having to share company revenue with the people actually doing things that generate that revenue.
Although LLMs are unlikely the avenue to general AI they claim to be…
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.
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.
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.
Yeah but if you no longer need workers, you don’t need downtowns anymore, so screw the plebs /s
I mean there was a train bubble once, simpler times tho
trAIns
Just saying
TRAiNS
Just saying
The subway trains in Singapore is automated, no driver.
