I think you're badly missing the point.

It is true that car drivers replaced horse carriage drivers and car mechanics replaced the people who took care of horses and what not.

But in the horse carriage vs car metaphor with AI, people are not the drivers and blacksmiths, people are the horses.

How many horses do you see around lately?

Which makes using it as a metaphor for the climate change and humanity either entirely wrong or much more fitting, depending on where you stand.

I don't think that assumption holds. People routinely vote for candidates that will worsen their lives, gamble, smoke, don't exercise, some people even don't brush their teeth.

On the other hand, there's as many examples of people being selfless as of people being selfish.

Human behavior is much more complex.

But I only know of them because they bought some successful small companies in my country and shut them down to reduce competition, for which they are universally hated around here.

* solar with no storage

* shutting down existing nuclear

* natural gas peaker plants

* making everyone to use natural gas for heating by making it much cheaper than electricity

* slowing down the EV rollout by keeping to subsidize gas and diesel

could definitely be seen as a scheme to make the fossil fuel gravy train last as long as possible.

And that's not even talking about the absolutely out there schemes that didn't succeed like hydrogen powered vehicles (with most of hydrogen coming from fossil fuels and you can theoretically switch to zero emission one but you never would have because the fossil one is always going to be cheaper because making hydrogen is difficult).

But it could also all just be incompetence.

My new favorite game at work is "guess if this person is really into AI or they just have to be because their boss is and if they weren't they would get replaced by someone who is" and it's quite hard to say.

And since the "boss" of CEOs are the investors in the stock market, and the stock market is automated to ridiculous degree, is this AI pushing for itself?

Columnar storage is very effectively compressed so one "page" actually contains a lot of data (Parquet rowgroups default to 100k records IIRC). Writing usually means replacing the whole table once a day or appending a large block, not many small updates. And reading usually would be full scans with smart skipping based on predicate pushdown, not following indexes around.

So the same two million row table that in a traditional db would be scattered across many pages might be four files on S3, each with data for one month or whatnot.

But also in this space people are more tolerant of latency. The whole design is not "make operations over thousands of rows fast" but "make operations over billions of rows possible and not slow as a second priority".

The equivalent of cars would be pricing by how much gas you burned, not horsepower.

It does not have good UX because good UX was never the objective.

I wish I didn't live in coal and NIMBY land.