If a person gets caught running a red light, the name of the charge is something along the lines of “failure to obey a traffic control device”. So we’re already at the point where the law says man has to obey machine.

“I for one, welcome our new computer overlords.”
Richard Jennings

Moore’s law is about to bump to a stop against the wall of atomic diameters. The best chip fabs are now down to nine nanometers, or ninety angstroms. Typical metal atom diameters are two to three angstroms. In addition, what we think of as a computer is a device which can trivially load a program and run it. The result is that you can buy a cheap, mass-produced computer, and use it for specialized purposes. Well naturally, this capability has some overhead. It is somewhat doubtful whether a computer will ever become more intelligent than a dog. Woof!

That said, we can discard the stuff about Super-intelligence. However, there are a lot of people who do work which, in its general complexity, would not challenge a suitably motivated rat. The problem is that a rat is already programmed to do rat things, not to do people things. Staying one jump ahead of a cat takes absolute precedence, obviously.

The ongoing effects of Moore’s Law will be at the bottom, not at the top. They will involve fairly simple devices which collect information on the spot, and act on it, rather than performing high-level cognitive tasks. The devices will act on what they know, rather than making complex inferences about what they do not know.

Railroading is probably one of the best working-class jobs there is, in the same league as policeman or fireman. A lot of railroaders are in “maintenance-of-way,” which is construction work. I should like to focus on the other branch, the people who run the trains. At the pinnacle, of course, is the Locomotive Engineer. His deputy is variously described as a Conductor or a Fireman (both historical anachronisms), but is actually a Brakeman/Switchman. His job is to walk along the length of the train when it is stopped (or nearly so), for a mile or more, connecting up air hoses, opening and closing air valves, setting various lever on the cars and cranking various wheels, and sometimes to walk in front of the train, setting up track switches. Apart from everything else, this is dangerous work. There is a European railroad joke that you can tell the experience of a brakeman by how many fingers he has, and there are cases of people getting impaled by railroad couplers, skewered like a butterfly on a pin.

Virtually all of this work is work which could be done by remote control, by devices similar to a garage-door opener. A railroad freight car costs about a hundred thousand dollars. All the electronics that car has, is a crude form of RFID, so that the car can be electronically identified. The culture of railroads is such that it is very difficult to insist that equipment be upgraded to a given standard. The kinds of upgrades which work are those which can be performed unilaterally. Subways are in a fairly high state of upgrade, because one entity, such as a transit authority, owns a five or ten mile line, and the cars which go back and forth on it. It is immaterial that a city might be served by as many as three or four transit authorities. In a freight railroad, however, a given train will commonly include cars belonging to everyone in the country who owns railroad cars.

When the train is rolling, the Brakeman/Switchman becomes the Locomotive Engineer’s apprentice, learning the fine art of driving a train. A traditional train is only very minimally under control. Braking is managed by a single air-hose, running for anything up to two miles. This hose supplies both power for the brakes and control, only it cannot do both at the same time. So it is possible to get into a catch-22 situation with the brakes. Supplying pressurized air to the air-hose supplies power to the brake system, but it also releases the brakes. Releasing the air pressure causes the brakes to apply, but it also starves the brake system of power. It takes perhaps a minute for the control signal to run the length of the train. Catch-22. There are electrically controlled brakes (ECP, or Electronically Controlled Pneumatic), in which there is a signal wire to direct application of the brakes without cutting off their power source. However, this has only proved economically practicable in groups of cars which stay more or less permanently coupled to each-other, eg coal trains. A coal train goes to a mine, every car in the train is loaded with coal, then it goes to an electric power plant, every car in the train is dumped onto the coal-pile, and then back to the same mine, and back to the same power plant again, just like a conveyor-belt. To reduce the possibility of failure, every six cars are commonly connected with fixed draw-bars instead of automatic couplers. The draw-bars are stronger, and less likely to break.
The other aspect of non-control is “slack action.” A train’s couplers stretch slightly under load, so that the train behaves somewhat like a child’s slinky-toy. Since the different cars are spread out over a mile or more, they may very well be on different sides of a hill, so that the brake setting which is right for one car is wrong for another. When the load shifts, say as cars come over the hilltop, the spring-energy can violently release itself. Between these two factors, the response to the Locomotive Engineer’s controls, the throttle, the engine-brake, and the train-brake, is often counter-intuitive. It’s not anything like as simple as the way an automobile behaves. The Locomotive Engineer can keep the train under control by virtue of at least ten years experience. To replace a Locomotive Engineer, one does not build one big artificial-intelligence robot. Instead, one provides each car with a computer, and each computer is provided with sensors to measure various relevant information, eg. speed and acceleration, the loads on the couplers, and the loads on the car trucks, plus, of course, means to communicate up and down the train. All of this enables each car’s brakes to be adjusted on a second-by-second basis, only partially on the basis of the command from up front, but much more on the basis of local measurements. Effectively, this is something like automobile anti-skid braking, adapted to the needs of a train.

For a system like this to work, there has to be some kind of means of automatically establishing communications and a power supply for each car. The Federal Railroad Administration is trying to promote a new kind of automatic coupler, with additional sockets for air hoses and electric wires. However, it might be more practical to provide each car with a wheel-mounted electric generator/compressor and wireless devices. These devices, and the conversion of all the cars’ mechanisms to run off them, would render the Switchman/Brakeman superfluous. At the same time, the Locomotive Engineer would be de-skilled. He might also be “remoted.” Video cameras can be put in all the right places, and their output streamed back to an office somewhere. If the video connection should be lost, the system would automatically apply the brakes, so remote-manned operation should be safe enough. If one compares it with the analogous task of train/track dispatching, there is good reason to believe that trains could be run at a distance of thousands of miles.