Movable Housing for Scalable Cities: A Reply to YC
steemit.com
steemit.com
Sounds intriguing, if skeptical about cost, material strength, coordination, labor costs, longevity, etc.
> All-robotic car fleets are an obvious first step.
This is a truly big ask.
The rest of the essay makes a point similar to homesteading, where you pick an arbitrary lot you like and move your movable house to it. It has a section about land value taxes that offers a total non-solution to the supply-and-demand problem of land.
There are some good, insightful observations, and some wishful thinking; the essay even ends with the admission that it's more of a "wistful sigh" and the author is "nearly certain that none of that will actually happen". But intellectually rigorous analysis or proposal this is not.
From the article: The technology for an all-robotic car fleet is probably already available... if we take all the non-robotic cars off the road.
Many of the challenges in autonomous vehicles (maybe even all the remaining ones) are related to modelling/predicting an uncertain world. Will a pedestrian jump out at me? Will a truck do a left-turn across my path? What in the world is that bicyclist doing?
Take all that out, and things get vastly easier.
It's been suspected for some time that a mixed environment of autonomous vehicles and human-operated everything else (including pedestrians) will be the worst of both worlds, as like you said, those algorithms will be face with un-anticipated inputs.
The problem is, while cars we can automate way (given enough time), pedestrians we can't, unless we're willing to expend even more money in re-engineering our infrastructure to segregate road traffic entirely, keeping the contact surface to as minimal as possible -- only every home, every workplace, every commercial establishment, every rest stop, and every place vehicular maintenance is done. While this goal tends to appear in 'next city' brainstorming, it's easy to see why it's a challenge.
Sure, you'd have to segregate away pedestrians, but there's already precedent for that with many roads (no pedestrians on the highways!), and aren't we dreaming about making new cities anyway, rather than retrofitting old ones?
"No pedestrians allowed on the lanes which are painted red, not that you'd want to cross that small spiked fence anyway. Just use the overhead walkway like everyone else."
Can you expand on this? I'm not exactly sure what you consider the problem to be.
Human interactions will develop in the virtual dimension.
Virtual and Augmented Reality will keep you in touch with your friends and get you to your workplace.
You don't go to the store. The Internet of things brings the store to you.
With V/AR you will not only fully access any city around the world but a large set of virtual places and cities limited only by imagination.
There still be transportation and physical proximity like there is still paper books but that wouldn't be the place where the biggest chunk of the economy lies.
And since someone's said this every couple years for decades, it better be a pretty solid one.
1. Are the majority of the evil extractors (a)regional powers that impose uniform rents or are they (b)targeted extractors that specifically exploit low educated/frail-minded individuals?
2. Does a subset of the latter group of wealth extractors (b) benefit from high mobility in any way? I don't know the full range of extraction schemes which is why I'm asking.
PS. There is a lot of overlap between a&b (see: Ferguson PD and private prisons) but the questions still stand.