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 think of the resell value for ho-moewners!

And we’ll need it then too, with all the bone rot.

So I’m starting to notice.

Though… we don’'t all like trains. So some may not have appreciated that whimsical comment.

That’s a different type of AI. Not Artificial Intelligence, but American Ingenuity.

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

Get on board the train bubble before it leaves without you!

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…

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.

if firing people is the ultimate good, maybe we can get the corpos behind UBI so nobody cares too much about getting fired?

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.

Yeah but if you no longer need workers, you don’t need downtowns anymore, so screw the plebs /s

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.

Making me think of the hemp fuel powered car with a hemp fiber composite body stronger than steel, that got suppressed (or at least, “shelved”). Not to mention other clean fuel car innovations, and so on. But instead, we get the same old two evils false dichotomy bs. We can have individual autonomy and clean efficient transport.

… Reminding myself of that Bakunin quote:

We are convinced that freedom without socialism is privilege and injustice, and that socialism without freedom is slavery and brutality.