>My one hope for AI, robotics, self driving cars, is that they can enable more people in cities to migrate back to rural places
Ah, the perennial dream of the technologist. Here's a Le Corbusier quote on the same theme from 100 years ago
> The cities will be part of the country; I shall live 30 miles from my office in one direction, under a pine tree; my secretary will live 30 miles away from it too, in the other direction, under another pine tree. We shall both have our own car.
My impression is that this isn't exactly settled science. If you look in the history for the article you can see that it's mainly written by the lead author of the main citations. He also did the cute illustrations that everyone loves
Fascinating how clearly you can see this with the 5hr limit from Dusseldorf being pretty much exactly the French border from the Atlantic to Switzerland
MATSim or ActivitySim are used for that sort of thing. Most modellers don't bother to simulate every individual person though. Instead they use a sample which they scale up because it isn't worth the order of magnitude more computing time when just simulating a representative 10% does fine.
Digital twins aren't simulations, they're just data. The idea is that it's openly available and easily queryable so that people have good data to run their models and simulations on.
Useless outside the US? Ignoring the obvious objection, one of the design goals of the initial iteration of the NATO/ICAO phonetic alphabet was that every word in it would be familiar to you as long as you were fluent in either English, French or Spanish.