that is actually a competition between AI and collective public intelligence, where the first being a pure engineering problem with no limits for growth has been improving exponentially over mere decades while the second has been improving really slow over the observable millennia. So, i'd bet on AI :)
China took on lots of debt to do that, and it will take a while to pay it off if ever (we can argue whether SOE debt is government debt or not). It might make for some interesting development opportunities in the future, but only an authoritarian government could divert so many resources.
I’m much more excited by Japan’s new maglev that will go from Tokyo to Nagoya by 2026 or 2028.
Hyper loop had a lot of potential to avoid the problem facing most rail projects in the states (lack of land for straight shots needed for HSR, and the government’s unwilling to use eminent domain to get that, also, I think Americans are more adverse to viaducts everywhere than the Chinese). A vaccine tube underneath would solve a lot of that.
Only if you don’t count SOE debt as government debt. It gets weird when so many companies are owned by the state. That SOE debt also includes all the debt used to build china’s HSR system.