Railways? Good example of tech abandoned in favor of something else.
How the AI ‘bubble’ compares to history
Submitted 3 weeks ago by sirboozebum@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world
https://archive.md/bg97E#selection-1567.0-1567.39
Comments
RockBottom@feddit.org 3 weeks ago
kikutwo@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Huh? Rail handles about 40% of long distance freight in the US.
RockBottom@feddit.org 3 weeks ago
But I want to know the tech that will replace 60 % of AI.
tal@lemmy.today 3 weeks ago
Like, the automobile? It looks like the boom in the UK they were talking about was in the 1840s.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_Mania
Railway Mania was a stock market bubble in the railway industry of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland in the 1840s.
There were primitive automobiles earlier, but the mass market automobile didn’t come around for a long time after that, and then it’ll have taken longer to get substantial marlet penetration.
searches
It runs a bit off the edge — I don’t know how far back they had licensing.
But extrapolating from those lines, I’d guess that annual distance traveled in motor vehicles on roads surpassed rail only in the 1940s or so, about a hundred years later.
That’s probably outside the investment horizon of people investing in the 1840s — in evaluating whether an investment is worthwhile, they won’t be considering returns a century hence.
That being said, it is possible to maybe consider freight rail, and it’s possible that that qoeks out differently. The US doesn’t use much passenger rail in 2025, but it does do quite a bit of freight rail; the two can be decoupled.
RockBottom@feddit.org 3 weeks ago
I mean a hundred years is not much for a technology your government decides to build society around.
gwl@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 weeks ago
Laughs in European
nyan@lemmy.cafe 3 weeks ago
They picked the wrong history, in my not so humble opinion. The AI situation looks more like the dot-com bubble, recycled.
multiplewolves@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
What’s the original link? The archive won’t load for me.
MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip 3 weeks ago
How? Archive even loads in Dillo, no JS.
gwl@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 weeks ago
500 error, that’s service-side
Usually from too many requests for the server to handle
elgordino@fedia.io 3 weeks ago
The trouble with the railways comparison is that after investing tons of cash the railways were built. With AI the GPUs have no value after 6 years (if that). So the investment must continue forever. It’s madness.
baggachipz@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
The other trouble with the railways comparison is that trains actually work and can generate a profit for their owners.
mustlane@lemmy.zip 3 weeks ago
What? GPUs don’t age. They might get old technologically wise, but they don’t just… die. The silicone cheap itself doesn’t care about age.
elgordino@fedia.io 3 weeks ago
It’s not that they don’t technically work. It’s just they’re no longer efficient compared to newer versions that can do more with less power. So to remain competitive you need to upgrade otherwise your cost to execute a model is too high.
Hyperscalers used to write GPU’s down to zero value after three years, over the last couple of years they’ve all increased this to six.
MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip 3 weeks ago
But transistors break after what? 100’000 cycles? GPUs can get “used up”. And if your computing center has twice as much running costs due to old, less efficient hardware, it isn’t competitive.
Edit: looks like transistors can partially recover with sleep cycles.
embed_me@programming.dev 3 weeks ago
I’m not an expert but I was under the assumption that electronic components (including silicon chips and their internals) will age and give out on the decade timescale