Listen to the audio version of this article (generated by AI).
Picture two crews of laborers, swinging sledgehammers under a desert sun, racing toward each other from opposite ends of a continent never crossed by rail.
Skeptics back East called it overbuilding. The railroad men, they believed, were laying track faster than the country could possibly need it, betting fortunes on demand that hadn’t shown up yet.
Then the final spike went in at Promontory Summit. Within a decade the freight volume crossing that line made the doubters look foolish. The infrastructure came first. The economy that needed it came roaring in right behind.
I bring this up because something almost identical just happened in the AI trade, and if you only watched the headlines this week, you missed it.
