Seems reasonable to say that AI is in a railway mania bubble, the kind where there is too much hype for a technology that actually has decisive long-term value. But if so, where’s the decentralised infrastructure that can last after the hype dies down?
Data centers are now about energy and compute, not so much about telecommunications. And compute data centers are still a question mark tied up with how fast the software is evolving. Maybe GPUs are the thing, maybe it’s overall memory. We only know that we should be putting something inside a box that can be kept cool and electrified. And centralisation is how these boxes are stacked, which is the opposite of infrastructure that spreads out into the world.
But is that infrastructure the phones we carry in our pockets? Great idea in theory, but we see in practice that people can’t afford those as prices just go up. Chips are too much of a monopoly, where it’s easier to just keep making the same hardware and collect more money for it. Why would monopolies risk making the changes needed to increase production?
Capitalism is failing on these fronts, so we should also be asking what the role of public and cooperative investments is in this AI railway? As private, public, and cooperative efforts converge, where’s the middle ground between the gigafactories and the tiny pockets of compute?
Any true railway bubble needs shared civic access points. Yes, we need fair datasets, open models, public APIs, and privacy-preserving tools. But beyond that, we’re missing actual physical libraries and workshops where people can learn, explore available knowledge, and move progress further down the road. Local hubs that empower communities are the stations missing in these AI tracks for this to be a true railway bubble.
Unfortunately, tech is being rushed through public perception to keep us from understanding what we need. And politicians surfing the surface of power don’t even want to be aware of it. Even ordinary people aren’t given the time to care about anything besides their own convenience.
But public pressure is starting to mount at least over what we don’t want. We should also be reaching towards what this AI fever dream can do for everyone. We’ve learned from the Industrial Revolution that technological disruption needs to be matched by civic movements that disperse its benefits across society and protect our environment. Democratic capitalism has to mean no power for machines without power to the people.