Dec 17, 2022 4 min read digital-health

What a rail expansion or a transplant list can teach us

What a rail expansion or a transplant list can teach us O’Reilly Next:Economy Newsletter Live abundantly. But do it right.

The kidney transplant algorithm’s surprising lessons for ethical AI

What’s more fair when approving a potentially life-saving kidney transplant recipient—calculating a patient’s allocation score out to 16 decimal places or flipping a coin? The point of extending the allocation score out to 16 decimal points is to avoid those messy human ethical decisions. But what if the technical answer is extended to the point that it’s meaningless—or worse, inaccurate?

In this case, the data scientists at UNOS (the nonprofit that runs the kidney allocation process) recognized that the question was not purely technical—it was a moral question, and they weren’t the people to resolve it. As David Robinson says in this Slate article, the UNOS data scientists raised a question that is applicable to many AI decisions: “Which decisions really belong to the technical experts? And where instead are we stretching the role of the expert too far, and latching on to technical details as an excuse not to face a hard moral question?”

+ “AI-Generated Answers Temporarily Banned on Coding Q&A Site Stack Overflow” (“ChatGPT simply makes it too easy for users to generate responses and flood the site with answers that seem correct at first glance but are often wrong on close examination.”)

A $100 billion lesson for the US

The Northeast Corridor, running from Washington DC to Boston, is the nation’s busiest rail corridor. A new 15-year development plan to improve it won’t add any stations or new lines. It won’t extend any existing lines. It will convert just 100 miles to high-speed track, meaning most of the corridor will still be conventional slow rail. According to the project cost breakdown, it will cost an estimated $101.8 billion.

Compare that to the Grand Paris Express, a 125-mile expansion of that city’s rail system. 80% of the system will be in tunnels. It will have 68 new stations, four new lines, and two extensions of existing lines. It’s expected to be completed in 2030, with the first line opening in 2025. It will cost about $38 billion—or approximately one-third of the cost of the US project.

Another US project, New York’s Hudson Tunnel upgrade, will create a mere nine new track miles and two 4.5-mile tunnels but is slated to cost $16 billion—$1.55 billion per mile. Meanwhile, Denmark and Germany are constructing a train and road tunnel underneath 11 miles of the Baltic Sea—the longest immersed tube tunnel in the world—for about $6 billion less.

With the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law pumping up to $108 billion into transportation, it’s worth asking: Why can’t the US build infrastructure as efficiently as other countries?

Alon Levy, a member of the Transit Costs Project, calls the US $100 billion Northeast Corridor project a “staple job”: putting together a bunch of expensive, unrelated projects and calling it a plan, wasting tens of billions of dollars in the process. And as Matthew Yglesias points out, Amtrak’s new “vision” for passenger rail expansion in the US appears to be almost as ad hoc. Yglesias calls it an “incremental expansion of a national network of slow, infrequent trains” that’s like a “giant pork barrel program.” In order to make the best use of our money, we need to get better at envisioning the future and planning our projects to help us get there.

+ ICYMI: “Why Are US Transit Projects So Costly? This Group Is on the Case.”

+ Alon Levy on Metcalfe’s Law for High-Speed Rail

Forget “reduce, reuse, recycle”

We’ve mentioned Saul Griffith’s book, Electrify: An Optimist’s Playbook for Our Clean Energy Future, in previous issues. In this Atlantic interview with Saul, Derek Thompson calls the book ”one of the most quietly revolutionary policy books I’ve ever read.” This interview is wide-ranging, but it focuses on moving past the “1970s mentality” of energy efficiency, which says we can save the planet with a bit more recycling. Rather than guilt Americans over their living standards, Saul suggests that we can keep our luxurious lifestyles without destroying the planet if we all—governments, companies, and individuals—get a small number of big decisions just right.

+ We need to move toward a lower-energy future, but we can’t present it as a punishment.