[hoaw]

> Infrastructure requires a continual investment, which means that at any given time you can always point at something that is, quite literally, crumbling away.

I don't really see your point. It is easy to point to something that is crumbling in e.g. California because many of the investments were made in past decades. In Northern Europe e.g. overhead power lines are increasingly rare in urban settings. It isn't really investment in maintenance, but in upgrades.

Science has progressed rapidly in the last couple of decades. These days we are to a large extent limited by other factors, like organizing. For instance if you had a barrier separated self-driving lane on certain highways you could already have self-driving. Of course self-driving already exists in things like trains, there just isn't a lot of incentive to implement that. Having self-driving train carriages departing every minute is entirely possible with today's technology.

So to address the top comment I do think people are wasting their time, even those working on more qualified problems. Because without the larger support and investments it is like trying to bake a cake without eggs.

(I guess trying to bake cakes without eggs on a large scale could actually have a lot of merit, but you get the idea).