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Comment by RyanMcGreal | Hacker News Reader

One of the things Clarke got wrong was his contention, expressed in at least a few of his books, that instant global telecommunications would eliminate the need for people to live in close proximity in cities. Despite the proliferation of low-density sprawl around many North American (and some European) cities, density is still a principal driver of innovation and big cities are, if anything, even bigger and denser than they were when Clarke made this prediction.

Edit to add - One more thing: in case anyone here doesn't already know, Clarke invented the concept of geostationary communications satellites in a 1945 article he wrote for Wireless World. http://lakdiva.org/clarke/1945ww/

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Wait for robotic cars, and the subsequent explosion of time-shared rent-a-cars (imagine if ZipCars could be really truly computer-scheduled), robotic public transport and mixed transport (freely intermixing various transport types), even cheaper robotic delivery services, and the still-improving telepresence software and cheaper hardware. We're still at the beginning of that moreso than the end. Driving to the city half-an-hour away is annoying when it carves half-an-hour out of your day, but if you just click to order a car, get in and continue doing whatever it is you were doing before, and just arrive half-an-hour later it'll feel much less like it was An Event to go to the city. Or going from the city to something half-an-hour away.

It's still half an hour, whether or not you're able to do something else during that period of time. I think the cost of oil and, in time, energy in general will work to increase rather than decrease population density in the long run.

Environmental concerns aside for a moment, a half-hour or more in a self-driving car is actually more productive/convenient than many city-dweller's commutes - most people could essentially begin their workday in the bubble of a car with a 4G connection and VPN.

Can't you have much the same environment today in a commuter train with assigned seats and WiFi, at least in terms of ability to get work done?

Private space is important. So is freedom from interruption. And of course, the fact that trains don't always run on time, and never go from exactly where you are to exactly where you want to be.

Agreed, and we're also just at the beginning of teleconferencing. Once teleconferencing can approximate more of the nuances of being in a room or building with a group or people (Google Huddle's automatic focusing on the speaker in a group chat is a nice example), it will become increasingly possible to run an organization of remotely connected workers.

Robotic cars will make it even easier to live in cities. Cabs will actually go robotic and be the preferred use of cars because they will actually get much cheaper than owning one.

In fact cabs are already cheaper than owning a car where parking space is very expensive, but robotic cabs will reach a whole new level of cheapness.

Cars and engines are going to get a lot smaller when you don't need to accommodate a driver or the need to speed. Think rickshaw size with a top speed of 35 mph.

Mopeds get 120 mpg. That's like 4 cents a mile. Door to door for a dollar a trip will be a reality and make mass transit AND the traditional automobile industry increasingly irrelevant.

Some interesting points, but I think robotic cars will/would be a bigger enabler for exurbs than for actual city dwelling. Get yourself some acreage at the edge of some teeming metropolis, have 60-90 minutes of uninterrupted time each way in your little cocoon to do as you please, have face time in the office once you get there.

Use the commute time to telecommute and shorten (or extend!) your in-office work day, or spend it pursuing solitary leisure activities and work a normal-length day at the office.

This would be awesome.

All this talk about robotic cars carrying people long distances reminds me of Robert Heinlein's short story "The Roads Must Roll". Huge, underground moving sidewalks running at 100 mph replace highways and railways as the dominant transportation method in the United States.

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/The_Roads_Mus...

Interesting, I'd always thought that idea was due to Asimov in The Caves of Steel, but apparently the Heinlein predates the Asimov by 14 years.

Unfortunately, fast-moving underground moving sidewalks sound like an incredible waste of energy.

or tiny gears that only move when vehicles arrive and mesh with the bottom of them, carrying them along.

Would be nice to expend only the energy required to move people and things and anything needed to take care of them (safety systems)

You still have to power the thing. Declining oil production and the limitations of battery power are going to be a severe limiting factor that will influence the way we roll out self-driving automobiles.

Fleets of self-driving vehicles nearly eliminate the problems with battery power; they can easily schedule when they need to return to the station to swap out their battery packs for fresh ones.

I still think technology is winning the resource depletion race, even if we ignore the fact that it's really starting to look like oil production isn't actually near the end of its road yet. And if we don't ignore that, the likelihood that gas (or more broadly "energy") will just be "too expensive" for people to want to jaunt about anytime in the next 20 years seems to be decreasing rather than increasing. A great deal of our current apparent shortages of various things are 100% self-imposed.

Presumably a robot could also connect to overhead or embedded wires, reducing the size of batteries to that needed for areas without that infrastructure.

Buses in SF run totally with overhead wires. You see the drivers having to reconnect to them when they pop out.

"... big cities are, if anything, even bigger and denser than they were when Clarke made this prediction."

Big cities are definitely bigger and denser, see the BBC special report on urbanisation: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/shared/spl/hi/world/06/urbanisation/...

Cities may have become denser but cities in the developed world became far nicer places now than they were in 1945. Plenty of rich people live in city's not becase they need to but becase they like it there. What changed was not the removal of people from cities but industry from cities. There are plenty of great things about being near other people, and plenty of horrible things about being near industry. Indoor plumbing and the catalitic converters changed what people think of a city's that only contain people from toxic dumps to livable space.

It appears he was wrong about it. If anything, the cities are not just getting bigger and denser, they are starting to "specialize". (Geeks tend to congregate in the SF area, investment bankers in the NY city, ...) Anyhow, he described the rest of the changes brought about by the revolution in telecommunication technology rather well.

Looking back it looks obvious, but I wonder how many people at that time agreed with his vision of the future? That brings the question, how many "Arthur C. Clarke"s lives today that we are dismissing as lunatics?

He certainly got that wrong, at least for now.

However there may come a trend to move out of the cities sooner or later. For example even now a lot of people get tired of 'busy city life' and would like to move to the land and have some more space. If you can work remotely, why not.

As a Detroit http://goo.gl/hyOts suburbanite, Clark's prediction certainly seems to be very relevant for me right now.

I live in a relatively sparsely populated area. I often work remotely. When I do go into the office, I'm headed for another suburb. I'm about as removed from urban life as you can get, and still have a major hospital within 5 miles. I've not had to visit downtown Detroit since I worked their 11 years ago.

I much prefer the deer eating our hastas in the garden vs. drive-by shootings in the next neighborhood.

If Clark's prediction isn't true yet, I do see a time when it would be more typical.

Your problem isn't cities; it's Detroit.

Maybe cities are the problem, and Detroit is the solution.

Lots of people happily live in cities that aren't Detroit. Lots of people even prefer to live in cities over suburbs.

Maybe. There are more things in a large city than jobs that can move anywhere. Friends. Potential new friends. Entertainment. Recreation. Concentration of goods and their presumably cheaper prices. Scenery. Yes, all of those things can be had elsewhere, but each individual has his own mix of things for which nothing will do but the specific instance available in a specific location.

Most of the biggest cities have been losing population over the 20th century. The population of Manhattan peaked around 1920, for example, and a lot of other metropolitan inner-cities peaked in population around the 1950s (such as Detroit, Cleveland, Chicago, Baltimore, etc.) That trend has only started turning around very recently, and only in some places.

There is no need for me to live in a city. I work from home and telecommute. I travel to a city that is 45 minutes away for pleasure. He was 100% on from my perspective.

Yet, you are still an outlier. I also work from home and telecommute, but I enjoy living in a city because of the diversity of choice available for nearly every endeavor, be it schooling, dining, or cultural.

If telecommuting does become the defacto mode of work, I expect people will live in a greater variety of places. For instance, I wouldn't mind living a few years in Europe and Asia.

You don't live in a City because your job requires it. That is what he is saying. You live in a City because you "enjoy living in a city"

But you never know when you're going to be in a city, go to bar, meet someone who says something that gives you an idea that makes you go, "Hey, we should try doing that." And when you do it, suddenly you have an opportunity you wouldn't have had if you lived in a distant exurb.

Cities open more of what Steven Berlin Johnson calls "the adjacent possible" in Where Good Ideas Come From. As I said above, if you're interested in knowledge spillover effects promoted by cities, see Edward Glaeser's The Triumph of the City.

Shit man, where I'm from I live in a city and travel 45 minutes to get to a different part of the city.

Everybody in this discussion seems to be focusing on the problem of work, but how many of us would want to move out to some remote location even if we could perfectly telecommute?

I know I wouldn't. I'd go crazy being alone all the time, and video chat is a piss-poor substitute for actually being in a room with somebody, whether it's a friend or a colleague. Besides, I like the fact that within 20 minutes' drive of my house there's hundreds of restaurants, hundreds of bars, dozens of theaters, thousands of shops, et cetera.

City's have advantages independent of a location to work. For example, do you know where the individuals with the lowest carbon footprint in the entire USA live?

New York city.

If you're curious about this, see Edward Glaeser's book Triumph of the City. Cities appear to promote knowledge dissemination and overflow better than other forms of living, which is why Manhattan rents have gone from basically reasonable in 1980 to insane today.

Virtual cities are just starting to form. Many other commenters have pointed out working remotely, but it is still in its infancy. Once fully immersive VR gets cheap/effective enough, and it's as common as iPhones, there will be no need whatsoever for people to physically be next to each other.

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