All the same, it still reminds me of past infrastructure changes which ended up being widely distributed, with or without standards, from railroads to fiber optic cables.
And this:
> if we wanted to go beyond the bare minimum, we'd plug the potholes, paint the markings and fix the road signs first
...just strikes me as a major logical fallacy. It's like the people who say we shouldn't continue exploring our solar system because we have too many problems on Earth. We will always have problems here, from people starving because of oppressive and unaccountable hierarchies they're stuck under to potholes and road markings the local government is too broke or incompetent to fix. We should work on those, yeah, but we should also be furthering the research and development of technology from every angle we realistically can. It feels weird to be explaining this here.