Bill Gates buys land in Arizona to build 'smart city'
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Although I admit I have a slight repulsion to the thought of a few billionaires being able to wield almost complete autonomy, and assuredly the tech billionaires have a vested interest to build these cities such that the inhabitants depend on their technology (e.g. what would happen if Google built a city, and look how convenient it is that the ISP is Google Fiber, with Google self-driving cars servicing the roads, etc.).
In any case, I wish any effort to re-think how we build towns and cities the best of luck, because it feels like to me we've been grasping this (failing) strategy of car-addiction for far too long now, and it's draining our society financially, environmentally, and socially.
Which means seasteading is pointless unless you are doing something the federal government really doesn’t like.
90% of problematic regulations are city rules, and another 9% are county level, which means most people can just move to a different city and be completely free to experiment with whatever governance they want, and another 9% will need to switch counties, but only 1% at most need to be on a boat. And frankly many of those are actually anti-social people who aren’t experimenting with governance, they’re incompatible with it.
You’re not serious are you.
>You’re not serious are you.
The OP was certainly underestimating the influence the US federal government (and federal governments around the world) have on their constituent states, but certainly in the USA, Canada, Australia, etc., subnational and local governments have considerable power which they consistently fail to use in an innovative way. Most subnational entities simply replicate the institutions of their national or sibling polities.
Yep, tell that to my old sheriff who had the feds all over his ass for messing with the illegal immigrants. And a federal indictment. And a presidential pardon.
Ah, good 'ol Sheriff Joe...
(Edit, because my first reaction may appear creepy by itself. Your comment reads like that speech in `Good Will Hunting` on why he doesn't want to work for the NSA. Or anything written by Aaron Sorkin)
However, federal law has grown, and state law and even local law has all become highly standardized. In practice there's very little distinction between regions. America is just one big "stroad."
https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2014/01/dangerous-str...
https://www.wired.com/story/google-sidewalk-labs-toronto-qua...
https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2017/06/walt-the-quas...
Epcot was to be organized around more or less the same principles as European fascism.
Holding up his plans (or those of Gates) without questioning the fundamental morality of the vast inequality of wealth and power they represent is how America went so far off the rails in the first place.
Huh? It was always an owners republic, like Rome before.
For the 2.0 version they upped the advertising budget.
In the UK, planned towns have a long and venerable history as a means of social improvement. If you look at smaller communities then there are good examples of corporate involvement, e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Port_Sunlight.
There is always a dark side to this. Brora in Sutherland, Scotland was subject to a number of improvements for the betterment of the population by George Granville Leveson-Gower, the first Duke of Sutherland, http://www.scottish-highlands-explorer.com/brora.asp which also included https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duke_of_Sutherland#Clearances
What's the benchmark there? Is there an organisation doing reviews of planned cities or are you just going by the number of them?
The US have many planned cities/communities, but much of it seems to simply be suburbia set up at once by real estate developers à la Levittowns, it's not exactly Palmanova/Neuf-Brisach (star fort cities) or Louvain-la-Neuve (pedestrian city built on a concrete slab, all motorised traffic is underground).
It'd be akin to writing an article about how a new apartment building is a ghost building just because they hadn't started letting people move in yet.
Just not whole empty cities...
You've just answered your own question. In America, we believe it is illegitimate for any city or state government to not be a democracy. And democracy in practice means rule by a web of committees and bureaucracies. (Electing a strongman to cut through all of this is considered anti-democratic.)
But building an innovative product, whether that be an iphone or a new kind of city, requires directly responsible individuals ( https://medium.com/@mmamet/directly-responsible-individuals-... ). It cannot be design by committee. It requires having a singular will with the power to overrule the squabbling factions that just want to protect their own interests.
If you want innovation in the way cities are built and managed, you need cities to be able to have a Steve Jobs/Bill Gates-like CEO with powers far beyond that of any mayor, beyond the powers of any city government. But our current ideology of democracy does not allow for that.
If a bunch of anarchists or communists had access to a few billion dollars in capital, I have no doubt they could build innovative environments.
We live in a culture that concentrates capital in the hands of autocratic industrialists. They’re the ones with capital, but it doesn’t follow their management style is the only way to innovate.
The large plot of land is about 45 minutes west of downtown Phoenix off I-10 near Tonopah.
The proposed community, made up of close to 25,000 acres of land, is called Belmont. According to Belmont Partners, a real estate investment group based in Arizona, the goal is to turn the land into its own "smart city."
Belmont Partners seem to be pushing the "smart city" angle but they are not one of the aforementioned Bill Gates' investment firm. So it's only second hand knowledge?
Much more toned down story on the land acquisition here:
http://www.azcentral.com/story/money/real-estate/catherine-r...
Let's build a 'quiet place' we can share with friends and family that is completely unplugged, with one landline phone downstairs in the hall, a newspaper on the porch in the morning, and a library full of books we've always meant to read....
It would be like re-charging your brain from the attenuation of interruption.
Personally I think the effects are similar to meditation when you are on a long hike.
https://www.mnn.com/earth-matters/wilderness-resources/blogs...
How do countries without mass car ownership pull this off?
I have been to some very nice ones in europe (but also left some bad ones). In the US I heard, they are much more extreme, so I can't talk about that.
But if you can't stand naked people dancing around the fire to drums etc. at all, than I recommend a simple mountain hut off the grid, or something a similar. I like both ...
Specifically, I think it's plausible that advancements in VR over the next 20 years will drastically enhance the ability of people to work remotely; I believe that was one of the justifications provided by Facebook for their purchase of Oculus, and may also be one of the reasons behind Microsoft's push into "Mixed Reality".
A major factor for housing desirability currently is its physical proximity to jobs (SF, NYC, etc.); this could be a way to hedge a bet against that trend. And at $80M, it's really not a huge investment in the grand scheme of things. The biggest question is if VR can bridge the "uncanny valley" of video chat and other current technologies, and make virtual interaction/communication as seamless as in-person communication (or at least, within some acceptable margin).
If you're going to be sitting in what's essentially an air-conditioned VR cocoon for 8-10 hours a day, it probably doesn't matter where that's located, provided that the infrastructure is good. Since infrastructure seems to be one of the stated priorities, it could serve as a prototype for a "virtual outpost".
Why would we need prototypes for a "virtual outpost"? If you want to connect your spine to your company's backbone, fine. But you can do that anywhere, right? That's the point, isn't it? Then why do it in the middle of the desert?
We already have these "virtual outposts". They're called "city". Or "town". It's where people "live" and have fun, "with some acceptable margin".
Because land in the desert is cheap.
> They're called "city". Or "town". It's where people "live" and have fun, "with some acceptable margin".
Some people hate "cities" and don't think being forced to be in one is "living" or any kind of "fun".
Or, more broadly, my point to OP was: assuming we have perfect telecommuting and the era of the city is coming to an end: Why build a city??
But maybe a university-campus-size city is beneficial for human interaction and symbiosis.
And a 1M people metropolis with an abused under-class , squeezed middle-class and entrench NIMBY land owners is not ?!
That's a lot closer to "suburb" than the "cities" you were talking about.
Wow, the VR problem is latency? Have you ever had a real-time conversation with anyone outside your hemisphere? If 15ms is 15,000 feet then 1/0.015 = 66 times that should be the speed of light, i.e. 300,000 km/s. Does that (66 x 15,000 ft = 300,000 km) seem even vaguely in the right ballpark to you?
You're off by a factor of 1000. It's 15 microseconds, not milliseconds. And incidentally, this might be a good excuse to go travel outside the country and meet people from elsewhere on the planet... you never know what you might learn about the world around you.
I assume the 15ms was chosen for the 60fps that VR needs to run at to be considered reasonable. If so, having a local machine handle redraws would be reasonable and requiring a 30fps update on all "agents" and other world elements would probably be pretty unnoticeable by most people.
Anyone can notice the total latency in even a Skype conversation.
The part that's not correct is 15ms ~ 15,000 feet @ c:
15ns ~ 15 ft
15us ~ 15,000 ft
15ms ~ 15,000,000 ft
Some other fun figures: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=earth+circumference
Light travel time t in vacuum from t = x/c: | 134 ms (milliseconds)
Light travel time t in an optical fiber t = 1.48x/c: | 198 ms (milliseconds)
If it had been a typo or just an arithmetic error, I wouldn't have cared (or even noticed). But you also completely confidently declared that the problem had been identified to be c and that the boundary for VR is "city limits". It means that either [1] you have never had a real-time conversation with anyone much farther away to help you sanity-check this result (in which case it's an innocent mistake, and like I said, it's a good excuse to also go out and see the world), or (or possibly "and") that [2] you did not even care to try to think about this topic for 2 seconds before writing about it -- not when you first heard about it wherever you did, nor when you wrote about it here to teach it to other.
Whatever the larger issue, the silly math error is 100% beside the point... you could've written light-years for all anyone cared, and forgotten about it the day after. However, the underlying issue is not the kind of problem to forget about the next day. Lots of alarm bells should be going off in your mind that you need to actively do something to correct whatever the root problem is (which I was trying to help you identify), because otherwise you'll keep actively making the world (and HN) a worse place with this kind of misinformation, and that is something I'm tacitly assuming you don't want to do.
So: please, please, please ensure put 1-2 seconds of thought into sanity checking whatever you write in the future -- especially it's too painful to at least qualify what you write with an "I think" so that readers realize you're deriving your own conclusion and not propagating an established fact. We have enough problems in this world with the spread of misinformation that hinges on subtle nuances that we don't also need to put up with problems that should be pretty easy to spot from light-years away.
Its doesn't matter if the person's movement lags by 200ms, even if you were in the same room you probably would not notice. For meeting with someone over long distance really doesn't matter.
Typically in VR applications you buffer the last 3 packets just to make up for lag and frame jitter. It doesn't matter how much the lag is, it's much more important that the user doesn't experience it.
I have been writing applications that do VR meeting for 17 years, so I do know a little about the subject.
Even the latency on the smartphone display-loop is terrible (try moving your finger back and forth), mice were better; we're just used to it. MS experiments show that a perceptual transformation occurs at around 10-15ms. The same figure pops up in VR lit.; also in electronic music instruments (where it has been solved). [\tangent Perceptually-instant smartphone interactions are a potential revolution.]
And since it affects us when interacting immediately, it also affects us when interacting remotely.
If they hit uncanny valley they’ve already put too much realism in. Realism isn’t the issue... video chat fully photorealistic already and it doesn’t work.
The issue is conversational cues. You need to be able to see where other people are looking. You need to be able to hear their breath and the non-word mouth sounds they make. You need to see gestures and posture changes. And you need to be able to see them for every person in the meeting simultaneously in 3D space.
These are all well documented tells that we need in order to carry on a group conversation. The science on this subject is thoroughly studied.
Getting an MVP in place doesn’t require photo realism. It probably does require full body tracking, more like Leap motion than Oculus Touch. It probably does require mics and headphones that are calibrated together and it probably does require specifically tuned audio codecs. It probably requires eye and face tracking equivalent to what Apple has on the iPhone X.
But I doubt the uncanny valley will come into play. Animal heads like Apple already has might already be enough. None of the announced headsets will be able to do VR conferencing well, but I doubt we’re more than 5 years away from one that can. It’s mostly an integration problem at this point. With a lot of iterative design until people are like “yeah, that was a comfortable conversation! Weird but comfortable.”
First, the Central Arizona Project borders to the north, providing good access to water before it reaches Phoenix.
Second, it would have access to some of the best solar energy concentrations per meter squared of anywhere on the planet including the Sahara Desert. Agua Caliente is just to the southwest, north of I-8.
Third, close proximity to 345-500 kva transmission lines just to its west and presumably access to the main natural gas pipelines that run through on their way to Phoenix.
Fourth, open access to I-10 running from L.A. to Jacksonville, FL. and the added bonus of the I-11 corridor which is just getting started to the east (the 303) intending to run from Mexico to Canada.
Fifth, a clean slate land-wise to build whatever you'd like.
This is a carefully crafted, well researched, and for anyone who's been to the west valley lately, easily envisioned, project to be completed over the next fifteen years.
Interesting idea Bill.
Disney CEO Michael Eisner took an especially keen interest in the development of the new town in the early days, encouraging the executives at Disney Development Company to "make history" and develop a town worthy of the Disney brand and legacy that extended to Walt Disney's vision of an Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow (EPCOT).
https://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21712156-utopia...
America is flooded with the latter (particularly for younger cities), not many with the former.
Another thing I just realized is that in my mind a big part of a new experimental "smart city" would be lots of dense, walkable and bike-able, mixed use neighborhoods (and public transit which also kind of requires areas around stations to be walkable). But it's way too hot to be outside for much of the year in that part of the country.
They could push a train of some sort (like the planned one from Phoenix to Tucson) or the metro light rail out that far, dunno?
But anyways - I doubt this is even minutely likely. Cool thought experiment nonetheless.
We used to have butchers and bakers and vegetable-sellers and dry goods stores, then we had supermarkets, and they employed cashiers and truck-drivers and shelf-stockers.
Now we've got supermarkets with self-checkouts, robot price checkers, soon shelf stockers, and sooner still self-driving trucks. One guy owns the warehouse, the supermarket, and the trucks, and employs, essentially, no one.
Now, imagine a city owned by one man, you rent your house from him, buy from his stores, work in his factory, and let his cars drive you around.
Just because things could work out well doesn't mean they will.
For example, you wouldn't make enough to save more than $5/week, the rest would have been spent on food and power and rent. So, if you missed a weeks work you'd miss a weeks rent. You'd have nothing in the bank to travel to an out-of-town interview.
Just a theory I don't expect to happen any time soon, but an interesting thought exercise when a billionaire buys a town.
It's interesting that I'm being downvoted without many comments arguing that I may be wrong in some way, it feels like a downvote-of-disagreement. I thought HN meant downvote for irrelevance, not for disagreement. That's what comments are for.
Is it truly not worth even considering? Is our tech worship that strong? We talk of dystopias in every other thread, about Amazon owning the economy, Facebook owning our communication, and Google owning a lot of things, and we talk about the dangers of these; is it forbidden to be suspect of a billionaire experimenter when it pertains to a society who could arguably get no vote in such a city?
Why do you believe those things?
why else would you ban low-karma accounts from downvoting? It seems like upvote-only systems make for better comment sorting, thus why downvoting is not even allowed by low karma accounts.
Still, trolls and total irrelevance need to be policed to keep the quality of discussion high, so high karma users will police the trolls and irrelevant posters, rather than down-sorting things they disagree with, but which contribute to the discussion? I thought I had read this somewhere on here, that it's all about relevance and inciting conversation, rather than sort-by-mob-rule and prevailing opinion?
Reddit's "reddiquette" has a rule like the one you suggest for HN. I think the fact that this rule has failed to show up in the published Guidelines, after a decade or so, even through Guidelines edits, is (weak) evidence that HN does not use Reddit's rule.
As far as I can tell, downvotes are for whatever you want them to be for. I mean, I mostly only use my downvotes according to the rule you propose. But I think your claim that this is the "meaning" of downvotes is unsupported by evidence. And, from the Guidelines:
Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.
As such, one thing I do downvote for: unconstructive complaining about downvotes.
[1] http://inuxwetrust.waxle.com/keynote-evgeny-morozov-the-smar...
Bobby wasn't kidding when he said Phoenix was "A Monument To Man's Arrogance. He might as well picked a site on the face of the sun.
Pretty much like many Northern states but with the seasons reversed.
(Give me heat over snow and slush any day of the year.)
In the desert you can cool quite a bit with evaporation.
But then you need water but not all the oil to produce the fuzzy stuff in parkas so... IDK. Complicated formula with lots of inputs.
Aside from the environment (or rather, regarding a much more personal environment), people do die from heat in the desert. But it's not common. As long as you have shade and water you'll survive with no protection. On the other hand, a night outside in Minnesota in January is pretty much guaranteed to kill a person without protective gear. (To say nothing of cars sliding off the road in ice storms).
I suspect (although don't know) that it requires less energy to make a livable climate in desert summers than northern winters.
Lacking water, much of Arizona is not naturally suitable for large-scale human habitation. People can live there in great numbers today only because enormous quantities of industrial effort have been expended to bring water there from the Colorado River (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Arizona_Project).
Lots of other Western communities pull their water from the Colorado too, though -- so many that the river is effectively "over-subscribed," meaning people are pulling more water out of it than nature is putting in. Current projections are that its water levels will drop so low as to provoke serious crises in the communities that depend on it sometime in the 2020s.
Until then, though, enjoy the sunshine!
Phoenix is sometimes called "Valley of the Sun". Well, it's not in the mountains, (there are some low mountains around I guess but not really "mountains"). It's called a valley because it's a river valley at the con-flux of several smaller rivers (the Gila, the Salt). Granted these are kind of dry most of the time but water flows underground also. So there are a lot of wells. And water comes from rain and snow melt in the mountains to the north.
To your point though it still isn't sustainable at growing population levels. My understanding that much of the well water used is from rain that fell during the last ice age. That's why they call it Phoenix probably. One day it will burn up.
But this is a futuristic city on the outskirts. Presumably it will have a sustainable water supply created with cosmic zeolith ions, heavy duty science and good karma :)
http://www.kgw.com/news/bill-gates-buys-big-chunk-of-land-in...
But yes, this bill gates thing is nice too...
More like Smart Exurb?
It's like my headphones that promise me to "take you places", but my travel agency -- which actually takes me to places -- promises me to "take you into your dreams."
Free energy would solve any water problems.
Oh really now? I had no idea we could pull water out of our ass for any number of people at any time with free energy!
Feasible, but out of thin air is easier and less disturbing. Places in Arizona seem to have around 40 or 50% average air humidity.
And air conditioners are good at getting water out of air.
Desert land is plentiful and cheap.
Belmont will create a forward-thinking community with a communication and infrastructure spine
that embraces cutting-edge technology, designed around high-speed digital networks, data centers,
new manufacturing technologies and distribution models, autonomous vehicles and autonomous logistics hubsHow about if we have sustainable cities, smart cities, and "intelligent cities", the last of which encompasses the previous two.
I wish however he would also consider how we can build a village that has a reasonably self sustained ecosystem so that people who no longer can function in a "tech city" would have a place to live that would be supportive.
2) It would take and awfully lot of red tape and fraudsters to undo what he has amassed.
Otherwise we'd get another property bubble and inflated costs soon enough.
That sentence is such a grandiosely engineered testament to everything that's wrong with urban planning in the US.
Bill Gates has done excellent things (after Windows). And this executive emeritus (aka pensioner) isn't connected to the project, and his point, if interpreted with good will, isn't actually wrong. But still: could there be anything more uninspiring than that sentence?
Ideas for "utopian" planned cities have existed for centuries (Like Walt Disney's original vision for Epcot) but they almost never get built. If they do, they end up being not much more than a novelty before becoming abandoned.
Perspective: CA is expensive. Seattle is expensive. Phx is not... this is a big deal. Perhaps more so than Google in Toronto.
Gates has been engaged in a massive PR campaign on a lot of websites to gain some kind of stairway to heaven for a few years now.
You'll find than, while in the 90' we all were strongly shocked by how he managed a company so powerful, and yet engaged in lying, cheating and corrupting institutions.
But today you have many supporters claiming he is an awesome person with all his humanitarian work, publicized by social media with quite precise targeting. It seems you can get away with hitting somebody in the face and stealing his money if you come back later with pictures of all the cats you are saving.
So no. Not dumb.
And it’s only going to get worse.
[1] https://www.gatesnotes.com/Development/Omniprocessor-From-Po...