CITE: A $1B city that nobody calls home | Hacker News Reader

CITE: A $1B city that nobody calls home

cnn.com

49 pointsojbyrne30 comments

This is total vaporware, and likely total bullshit. See the Wikipedia article. That project has been promoted for years, by some guy who has no funding for it. He was previously promoting a private spaceport at White Sands.[1] Nothing was ever built. And a private satellite network using lasers.[2] Also didn't happen.

He's good at PR, though.

[1] http://www.pegasusglobalholdings.com/international-commercia... [2] http://www.pegasusglobalholdings.com/laser-light-communicati...

> "Others are skeptical of the premise of testing without people."

The quotes following that are what annoy me about journalism today. No one is saying "never test around humans!". It's that wouldn't it be nice to put, say, 50 autonomous vehicles in a controlled city-scape and see how they behave? Run them 24/7 and see how long it is until an accident occurs. Now add in 10, 20, 30, etc human driven cars and repeat the experiment.

Shouldn't existing autonomous vehicles already be tested that way? Aren't they?

Why do we need a new corporation-town?

I'm sure they are, to a degree, but if we're at all thinking about starting to replace wide swaths of our vehicles with autonomous ones over the next few decades, a wider scale test site, with things like a freeway and off ramps (from the picture), seems like it would be necessary.

I was under the impression that some autonomous vehicles have been driving existing freeways and off ramps for many years.

Am I wrong?

No. I've seen Google's cars driving all around Austin recently.

http://www.theverge.com/2015/8/31/9233435/google-self-drivin...

No, but you're starting to be kind of pedantic.

What percentage of possible scenarios involving getting on and off a highway do you think autonomous vehicles have encountered so far? I would guess the number is quite low.

Now extrapolate that across a city. And the point isn't that it is not possible to test these scenarios in the real world, but that it would be far easier to do so when you can control scenarios to a greater extent.

The bigger point: When you create a new version of software, do you re-run your existing tests on it, or just play around with it in production and call it good enough? The real world is production. This would be your QA environment.

And your QA facility will not have every possible on-ramp, off-ramp, or other.

My point is that these things have already been tested on a much larger scale than this QA (I actually think it was billed as Research) facility would seem to provide.

The downside of testing all your autonomous vehicles in one little town is overfitting. It's easy to recognise the same darn freeway offramp that you've driven thousands of times, but your software needs to recognise every darn freeway offramp.

There's actually a autonomous vehicle test facility in Concord, CA's old naval base where I reckon they're doing these types of tests.

http://gomentumstation.net/project/av/

It's being used by several different manufacturers apparently:

http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-33945098

I interpreted that differently:

If you're going to develop technologies for humans living in cities, testing said technologies absent of human interaction would likely be misleading.

It's like YC advocating not talking to your users while you develop and test your product.

An example they gave was self-driving cars. Are there sufficient challenges in the actions that don't involve human? It seems to me that the challenges that do involve humans are much greater in scope and importance.

Sounds like the original plan for EPCOT (Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPCOT_(concept)

Well, minus the residents :)

"You can bring new things to have them stressed, break them, and find out the laws of unintended consequences"

It seems to me that human beings are often the very stressor needed to produce the unintended consequences.

>Planned for a population of 35,000

Does that mean it is possible to build a city for $28,571 per person including housing and business sectors? Sounds good to me. I wonder if it really is livable or just mock-ups.

From the project scope, it's even more specialized than a normal town, with lab areas for things like aging infrastructure and green energy. Plus operations/campus facilities for monitoring/flight control and planning of tests inside the facility.

Conversely I doubt every building will be fully fitted/furnished from the get go. Most likely certain areas will have more filled in detail, depending on what scenarios they are supporting.

I have a feeling that the land there ("In the arid plains of the southern New Mexico desert") is really cheap though.

Dirt cheap. I'd wager that land would ordinarily go for about $250 an acre if all purchased at once.

... Nobody lives there, though.

Yeah. It's too crowded.

Couldn't you just buy a slice of Detroit?

it seems like one of these ideas that look great in a PowerPoint presentation

This doesn't make sense to me. Tech for people does indeed need people, otherwise you just test it in the company/lab's back yard. Now, what would be really interesting is if they created a city called BETA, which you could sign up to live in for a year, obviously after also signing a clutch of no-sue clauses and safety disclaimers. I think they'd find 35000 willing participarnts for that.

> You can bring new things to have them stressed, break them, and find out the laws of unintended consequences

Sure. But how will they do it without people?

Say you want to stress-test the new sewage handling system. How will you get the sewage? How will you get 35,000 people pooping in a day with a certain distribution?

There may be some prior art here:

https://patents.google.com/patent/CN203310960U/en?q=feces&q=...

Uh test something else? This may be hailed as a cureall but it would more likely be restricted to stuff that can be easily controlled. (Human defecation might not be one of these things)

Interesting that communications lines are underneath water lines. The engineer in me wonders if that's a good idea, and also wonders if there's a good reason for it. Anyone have an idea?

My best guess is that's not the actual layout, it was just "simplified" for the video.

That they're testing a place designed for human interaction and living without people is retarded. They should instead consider allowing people to live there that would cause minimal disruption and accept tradeoffs. Whole area doesn't need to have people but activity going on would be good for research. Might even pay for some of it in form of taxes or bills for infrastructure. Later they can test the stuff in areas with more diverse crowds.

Seems having people there would be minimally disruptive while giving more real-world information about the stuff. I'll also throw in that they might have those people there in one spot and people in other spots picked for controlled studies. You can do both.

what happened to Eureka?

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