While I do agree that we should not blindly build HSR, and wait to see Mumbai Ahmedabad success, before moving to next project, there are some issues in his suggestions.
1. Airports will always be 20-30 kms from city, and barring good metro connectivity to airports, it will take 1 hour just to get from airport to house, by road. Also, I don't see issues at airport getting solved by some mythical AI. It will still take 40mins-1 hours to checkin at bigger airport and again more time to collect baggage at destination if you have checked in luggage.
2. Semi high-speed trains cannot do much on existing lines. Most of the lines are not straight enough to run trains higher than 130kmph, so. even upgrading tracks and signals will not work. On top of that, skipping rail stations also sometimes require trains to slow down and dependant on availability of empty platforms. Plus running different speed trains on same tracks at same time, is already a headache.
3. An alternative is building bullet train like dedicated tracks for for semi high speed (200 kmph), I am not sure how much money this will save, but if its substantial, we should definitely think about this.
4. Comparing India to US is dumb. US population density is too low.