Soap was essentially the onset of what we’d consider urban living, before soap (and even for a long time after to be fair) medical operations had a stupidly hi morbidity and city life was also quite.. unsurvivable. Soap itself may not have been an investment, but it unlocked a lot of capabilities for our civilisation. Almost impossible to quantify how much.
Locomotives were something that had a definite upfront cost, unlike soap, and we invested so much money - up to 3% of GDP in some years in the 1800s.. but the economic benefits were ridiculous.
I dont know why you keep on bringing up soap. Soap, something anyone with knowledge can create in their own home, is not comparable to gpus and ai models which both require massive capital investments and skills to produce and thus are able to command massive margins.
> Spending on AI data centers is so massive that it's taken a bigger chunk of GDP growth than shopping
You havent compared this to previous bubbles like the internet, smart phones and personal computing in general. Your argument isnt convincing.
But AI investment is outpacing all the things you mentioned.
I mentioned soap not because of capital investments, but because of what the GDP growth was following the invention. If AI is qualitatively lower than the GDP growth caused by SOAP then we're going to see a lot of unemployment. So, it's a bubble- nothing could possibly match soap.
Locomotives were something that had a definite upfront cost, unlike soap, and we invested so much money - up to 3% of GDP in some years in the 1800s.. but the economic benefits were ridiculous.
Spending on AI data centers is so massive that it's taken a bigger chunk of GDP growth than shopping! (according to Yahoo!: https://consent.yahoo.com/v2/collectConsent?sessionId=3_cc-s...)
I mean, it’s really apples to oranges, but I can’t imagine us getting the returns anywhere close to what rail gave us in the 1800s.