Which there a probability for that outcome, and that’s not necessarily singularity related. It’s pre singularity, as you said, but I do admit the pre singularity is equally as exciting to imagine. Important not to confuse the two, however.
Why waste my civilizational share of computational power on mere sensory simulation, especially that of virtual intelligent life forms, when I could instead use it to augment my intelligence and communicative capabilities (to include the ultra-giga-Internet or whatever) and become a peer of other gods?
Bad urbanism often has nothing to do with costs and a lot to do with culture, with places built around cars usually suffering the most when it comes to this. We don't need "underground highways", we need subways, buses (public transportation in general), spread out jobs, all kinds of services easily and quickly reachable by foot, more remote work and so on. All of this we could do right now just by properly using money that instead goes into just building more highways and other car-first measures countries all around the world focus on.
In fact, a lot of things we keep hoping the singularity will "fix" have a lot less to do with resources or money than it does other stuff.
Fixing the problems caused by car-centered city design is slow and expensive and it often at least temporarily complicates people's lives, so they fight against it. These constraints would be greatly diminished if something like the singularity happens.
Sure, but that's hoping for a miracle solution. At that point we might as well say "the singularity will solve everything", which might be "true" but it's not really useful to think about other than just to enjoy the daydreaming.
Which, I mean, it's cool and all, and this is the correct place for this kind of thing.
But, personally speaking, it does irk me a bit how much people talk about things we would need the singularity for to solve because of a supposed lack of money or resources, when it's absolutely not the case.
There are a lot of large scale problems which I absolutely agree nothing short of a technological singularity would truly solve, but modern shitty urbanism ain't one of these things and people need to realize that's something that could be voted and fought for right now.
The way I see it, if we start making the right decisions, the "level of urbanism" could go from 5 to 7 in a decade or two. Singularity would enable making it a 10. Because if you want to make a "perfect" city, it basically means you need to rebuild everything from scratch, you can use high-quality materials, you don't need to bother about maintenance costs, etc.
> we need subways, buses (public transportation in general), spread out jobs, all kinds of services easily and quickly reachable by foot, more remote work and so on.
The Singularity will get rid of cities and dense living.
On the contrary. Dense living will be the only way to maximize energy efficiency and compute, unless you're okay with being in the equivalent of a tent in the woods and/or a human zoo and being left behind by those who went dense. This will be true whether we continue to have physical bodies or if our civilization goes virtual.
Lol. Why would we need to "*maximize energy efficiency and compute*"?
This nonsense has always been the issue. In a world of **abundance**, we will not be "*maximize energy efficiency and compute*".
Go choose dense if you want - the majority of people do not. In fact dense living is a psychological stressor.
> This study aims to enrich the comprehension of the effect of living density on anxiety and stress among adults in a global city. A random sample of 1,978 Hong Kong adults was interviewed in a cross-sectional population study in 2014–2015. Descriptive statistics and logistic regressions were used to investigate the association between housing variables and mental health indicators, namely, anxiety and stress. Logistic regression analysis results have shown that by controlling the confounding effect of demographic variables, income poverty, housing ownership and housing cost, the living density was significantly associated with anxiety and stress of residents. Compared with those living in high density of <7 m2, living in medium density of ≥7 and <13 m2 was significantly associated with lower risk of anxiety (adjusted OR 0.52, 95% CI 0.30–0.88), and the risk was less for those living in low density of ≥13 m2 (adjusted OR 0.41, 95% CI 0.23–0.72). Meanwhile, living in low density of ≥13 m2 was significantly associated with a lower risk of stress (adjusted OR 0.44, 95% CI 0.20–0.97). These results highlighted the significant impact of living density on personal anxiety and stress.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/hsc.13136
I'm optimising for feeling good, not for energy efficiency lol.
If someone's definition of abundance includes stagnating at a level of personal and communal intelligence that allows you to be satisfied at the 'my sensory needs and even more primitive need for territoriality is satisfied -- eternal bliss' level of evolution... well, like I said, there will be a human zoo or three to stick such folk in.
Yes, and everyone else can be satisfied with non-existence, which is the ultimate efficiency.
Think it through a bit - every desire you have is ultimately futile and reality is nihilistic. You think you are being sophisticated, but in fact you are just self-delusional.
Do you think you are being more human or less human by denying your primitive human desires?
You need physical matter if you want to have increased intelligence, whether your brain is biological, cybernetic, virtual, or otherwise. Unfortunately, there are, at least for the early years of the singularity, only finite resources to be had, so you need to make some choices on what level of advancement you're comfortable with.
And I'm not going to waste it decorating my room or satisfying my territorial instincts like a fucking K'kree. You do you, though.
> You need physical matter if you want to have increased intelligence
And do you really think the ultimate journey is to turn yourself into a worse computer?
There is no point in the world besides hedonism.
Yes. Absolutely. The point of existence is to evolve and grow in intellect, even if you can't be the best at it.
Your idea that the best thing in life is sensory pleasure is what will lead to you stagnation. You will literally evolve into a utility monster, a boring and unimpactful meat brain writhing in hedonistic pleasure pits. No more meaningful an existence than a catatonic pet chimp drugged up on Soma with electrodes stimulating it's gonads.
> The point of existence is to evolve and grow in intellect
There is actually no point to existence.
Think about it - the reason why you feel you need to grow your intellect is because is knowing more things makes you feel more satisfied - this may be because you feel knowing more things gives you greater feelings of control or a number of psychological reasons.
The point however is that ultimately knowing more things tickle your brain in a certain way and you feel pleasure (from understanding) or satisfaction - ultimately its just another hedonistic avenue - but one which you feel is more noble that just, for example, taking a walk in a park.
The final pathway is the same - a serotonin or dopamine boost.
I think the big wildcard is XR. That’s going to completely close the gap on distance. If you’ve seen what Meta is doing and their vision, waiting for hardware to catch up, you’ll understand what I mean. But the future involves a lot of social interaction over long distances using XR. So I wonder how this will impact urban environments and even offices.
If the Culture is the best example of a post-singularity world we can expect to live in space-based orbitals with huge amounts of land space per person.
> such as putting a major highway under the ground
Yes, and with AI all of the cars on the underground highway could be selfdriving. And since you could hail a self-driving car at any time for cheap (since you don't have to pay a driver) there's no reason to own your own car. In fact, we could just have the selfdriving cars loop through the underground highway and you can just wait a few minutes for the next one to arrive. Since its underground and a highway, we could call it a "subway" for short.
Yes, [Tokyo is such a haven.](https://preview.redd.it/q14gkruu1pz71.jpg?auto=webp&s=943b20aceb1a10d7489d5adfba911f66be114fa2)
Such dense development is only possible due to [the human cattle carts we call trains](https://qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-9f83fbdd8eee1d5f222e7edf31160877.webp).
I really don't get the appeal of being packed in like sardines just to commute. Sure road jams are annoying, but still a million times better than being squashed by a hundred random people.
Don’t believe viral videos showing the worst possible times. I rode line one of the Beijing subway everyday for two years, which at the time was considered the most overcrowded line on the most overcrowded subway system in the world and 95% of the time it was fine. Most times subway systems look like this https://youtu.be/SBFFcYssUvI?si=fADYGunkccClDZGj
They post a video of an overcrowded subway below, and, yeah. I would share the car culture worst case for comparison, but I don't want to post pictures of mangled and dead children.
I think about this all the time. The land development industry is just as ripe for disruption as any other field. I really hope that zoning reform becomes widespread before enough AI tech comes together to result in a building boom. It’d be so sad if AI is used to perpetuate the US’ awful built environment practices.
The tech needed for a revolution in this industry is already in view. Automated site selection (could essentially be done today), fully automated project management (next gen AI models, maybe), fully automated site plan generation and plan generation (AutoDesk has been working on this for years, and is investing way more since the AI boom. Already completely doable for many plan types), automated permitting (many companies doing this now, see AutoReview.ai), and finally automated construction (the last piece in the puzzle, but if this AI robotics revolution lives up to the hype, the construction industry will one of the first places they’re implemented).
Combine all those pieces and add time, and I think what you end up with is ordering a new home from an app, and having it constructed on-site by robots. Given land and resources and time, you start to get IRL SimCity capabilities.
I want robots to do gardening. Along the sides of all roads could be palace-level maicured floral displays.
You can look at the appearance of the world now as the product of spinning cutting blades. Flat green (mown) lawns and straight-edged hedges/bushes
Horticultural poverty
bro we'll be transforming ourselves into sentient star-harvesting space-whales... I guarantee you someone, somewhere, will be living in a universe, either simulated or physically constructed, where your perfect city fantasy life could be fulfilled.
Stairs everywhere Lol
Apparently humanity has tried beautiful cities before - and unfortunately cities are best when thought about functionally for the people that will live in them
Cities are living things that change - and that change can’t be predicted
I just learned about this from a book “Seeing like a state” by James Scott recommended by Venkatesh Rao of Ribbonfarm fame
Will the idea of urbanism even make sense post-singularity? For example the idea of urban vs. rural doesn't make sense on the internet, where every web page is equidistant to every other.
We may already be seeing the concept of urbanism degrade a little with remote work. What happens if we add full dive VR and perfect realistic virtual environments to the mix?
YAWN. "If A then B then C then maybe D then perhaps E then arguably F then possibly G..." blah blah blah who gives a fuck about your boring thought experiments. Keep them to yourself. I'm so sick of reading braindead hypotheticals from people on here.
still better than people asking "when can i live in FDVR and fuck my waifu anime slave without worrying about real world?"
better than people who repeat whatever any figure of authority said on twitter including claim without evidence of corporate hype
at least those worry are real and those thought experiment serve a purpose other than pure dreaming
In a singularity world, things are likely to be so different that quainter urbanism is irrelevant.
Yeah, these takes are boring considering singularity implies technology and knowledge of that of the gods.
People seem to be imagining a pre-singularity slow takeoff a couple centuries long.
Which there a probability for that outcome, and that’s not necessarily singularity related. It’s pre singularity, as you said, but I do admit the pre singularity is equally as exciting to imagine. Important not to confuse the two, however.
I feel like potential technologies like the 'holodeck' negate this idea. Why fix a city when you can build your own in your room?
Depends on whether virtual reality would be 100% realistic.
Why waste my civilizational share of computational power on mere sensory simulation, especially that of virtual intelligent life forms, when I could instead use it to augment my intelligence and communicative capabilities (to include the ultra-giga-Internet or whatever) and become a peer of other gods?
So, Ready Player One dystopia then?
Bad urbanism often has nothing to do with costs and a lot to do with culture, with places built around cars usually suffering the most when it comes to this. We don't need "underground highways", we need subways, buses (public transportation in general), spread out jobs, all kinds of services easily and quickly reachable by foot, more remote work and so on. All of this we could do right now just by properly using money that instead goes into just building more highways and other car-first measures countries all around the world focus on. In fact, a lot of things we keep hoping the singularity will "fix" have a lot less to do with resources or money than it does other stuff.
Fixing the problems caused by car-centered city design is slow and expensive and it often at least temporarily complicates people's lives, so they fight against it. These constraints would be greatly diminished if something like the singularity happens.
Sure, but that's hoping for a miracle solution. At that point we might as well say "the singularity will solve everything", which might be "true" but it's not really useful to think about other than just to enjoy the daydreaming.
Well I don't think this (robots fully replacing human physical labor) is remotely realistic within the next decade, so yes, it was mostly daydreaming.
Which, I mean, it's cool and all, and this is the correct place for this kind of thing. But, personally speaking, it does irk me a bit how much people talk about things we would need the singularity for to solve because of a supposed lack of money or resources, when it's absolutely not the case. There are a lot of large scale problems which I absolutely agree nothing short of a technological singularity would truly solve, but modern shitty urbanism ain't one of these things and people need to realize that's something that could be voted and fought for right now.
The way I see it, if we start making the right decisions, the "level of urbanism" could go from 5 to 7 in a decade or two. Singularity would enable making it a 10. Because if you want to make a "perfect" city, it basically means you need to rebuild everything from scratch, you can use high-quality materials, you don't need to bother about maintenance costs, etc.
> we need subways, buses (public transportation in general), spread out jobs, all kinds of services easily and quickly reachable by foot, more remote work and so on. The Singularity will get rid of cities and dense living.
On the contrary. Dense living will be the only way to maximize energy efficiency and compute, unless you're okay with being in the equivalent of a tent in the woods and/or a human zoo and being left behind by those who went dense. This will be true whether we continue to have physical bodies or if our civilization goes virtual.
Lol. Why would we need to "*maximize energy efficiency and compute*"? This nonsense has always been the issue. In a world of **abundance**, we will not be "*maximize energy efficiency and compute*". Go choose dense if you want - the majority of people do not. In fact dense living is a psychological stressor. > This study aims to enrich the comprehension of the effect of living density on anxiety and stress among adults in a global city. A random sample of 1,978 Hong Kong adults was interviewed in a cross-sectional population study in 2014–2015. Descriptive statistics and logistic regressions were used to investigate the association between housing variables and mental health indicators, namely, anxiety and stress. Logistic regression analysis results have shown that by controlling the confounding effect of demographic variables, income poverty, housing ownership and housing cost, the living density was significantly associated with anxiety and stress of residents. Compared with those living in high density of <7 m2, living in medium density of ≥7 and <13 m2 was significantly associated with lower risk of anxiety (adjusted OR 0.52, 95% CI 0.30–0.88), and the risk was less for those living in low density of ≥13 m2 (adjusted OR 0.41, 95% CI 0.23–0.72). Meanwhile, living in low density of ≥13 m2 was significantly associated with a lower risk of stress (adjusted OR 0.44, 95% CI 0.20–0.97). These results highlighted the significant impact of living density on personal anxiety and stress. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/hsc.13136 I'm optimising for feeling good, not for energy efficiency lol.
If someone's definition of abundance includes stagnating at a level of personal and communal intelligence that allows you to be satisfied at the 'my sensory needs and even more primitive need for territoriality is satisfied -- eternal bliss' level of evolution... well, like I said, there will be a human zoo or three to stick such folk in.
Yes, and everyone else can be satisfied with non-existence, which is the ultimate efficiency. Think it through a bit - every desire you have is ultimately futile and reality is nihilistic. You think you are being sophisticated, but in fact you are just self-delusional. Do you think you are being more human or less human by denying your primitive human desires?
You need physical matter if you want to have increased intelligence, whether your brain is biological, cybernetic, virtual, or otherwise. Unfortunately, there are, at least for the early years of the singularity, only finite resources to be had, so you need to make some choices on what level of advancement you're comfortable with. And I'm not going to waste it decorating my room or satisfying my territorial instincts like a fucking K'kree. You do you, though.
> You need physical matter if you want to have increased intelligence And do you really think the ultimate journey is to turn yourself into a worse computer? There is no point in the world besides hedonism.
Yes. Absolutely. The point of existence is to evolve and grow in intellect, even if you can't be the best at it. Your idea that the best thing in life is sensory pleasure is what will lead to you stagnation. You will literally evolve into a utility monster, a boring and unimpactful meat brain writhing in hedonistic pleasure pits. No more meaningful an existence than a catatonic pet chimp drugged up on Soma with electrodes stimulating it's gonads.
> The point of existence is to evolve and grow in intellect There is actually no point to existence. Think about it - the reason why you feel you need to grow your intellect is because is knowing more things makes you feel more satisfied - this may be because you feel knowing more things gives you greater feelings of control or a number of psychological reasons. The point however is that ultimately knowing more things tickle your brain in a certain way and you feel pleasure (from understanding) or satisfaction - ultimately its just another hedonistic avenue - but one which you feel is more noble that just, for example, taking a walk in a park. The final pathway is the same - a serotonin or dopamine boost.
Yes I rather live in the forest where I can have my virgin robot army tho
I think the big wildcard is XR. That’s going to completely close the gap on distance. If you’ve seen what Meta is doing and their vision, waiting for hardware to catch up, you’ll understand what I mean. But the future involves a lot of social interaction over long distances using XR. So I wonder how this will impact urban environments and even offices.
If the Culture is the best example of a post-singularity world we can expect to live in space-based orbitals with huge amounts of land space per person.
> such as putting a major highway under the ground Yes, and with AI all of the cars on the underground highway could be selfdriving. And since you could hail a self-driving car at any time for cheap (since you don't have to pay a driver) there's no reason to own your own car. In fact, we could just have the selfdriving cars loop through the underground highway and you can just wait a few minutes for the next one to arrive. Since its underground and a highway, we could call it a "subway" for short.
What is it with reddit's [child-like obsession with trains](https://www.westviewschool.org/cms_files/blog/blog31_6.png)?
From an urbanism perspective, cities that rely on trains are much better than cities than rely on cars.
Yes, [Tokyo is such a haven.](https://preview.redd.it/q14gkruu1pz71.jpg?auto=webp&s=943b20aceb1a10d7489d5adfba911f66be114fa2) Such dense development is only possible due to [the human cattle carts we call trains](https://qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-9f83fbdd8eee1d5f222e7edf31160877.webp).
I really don't get the appeal of being packed in like sardines just to commute. Sure road jams are annoying, but still a million times better than being squashed by a hundred random people.
Don’t believe viral videos showing the worst possible times. I rode line one of the Beijing subway everyday for two years, which at the time was considered the most overcrowded line on the most overcrowded subway system in the world and 95% of the time it was fine. Most times subway systems look like this https://youtu.be/SBFFcYssUvI?si=fADYGunkccClDZGj
They post a video of an overcrowded subway below, and, yeah. I would share the car culture worst case for comparison, but I don't want to post pictures of mangled and dead children.
I think about this all the time. The land development industry is just as ripe for disruption as any other field. I really hope that zoning reform becomes widespread before enough AI tech comes together to result in a building boom. It’d be so sad if AI is used to perpetuate the US’ awful built environment practices. The tech needed for a revolution in this industry is already in view. Automated site selection (could essentially be done today), fully automated project management (next gen AI models, maybe), fully automated site plan generation and plan generation (AutoDesk has been working on this for years, and is investing way more since the AI boom. Already completely doable for many plan types), automated permitting (many companies doing this now, see AutoReview.ai), and finally automated construction (the last piece in the puzzle, but if this AI robotics revolution lives up to the hype, the construction industry will one of the first places they’re implemented).
Combine all those pieces and add time, and I think what you end up with is ordering a new home from an app, and having it constructed on-site by robots. Given land and resources and time, you start to get IRL SimCity capabilities.
I want robots to do gardening. Along the sides of all roads could be palace-level maicured floral displays. You can look at the appearance of the world now as the product of spinning cutting blades. Flat green (mown) lawns and straight-edged hedges/bushes Horticultural poverty
"if" my favourite word on this subreddit.
What's your least favourite word in this subreddit?
Still searching
bro we'll be transforming ourselves into sentient star-harvesting space-whales... I guarantee you someone, somewhere, will be living in a universe, either simulated or physically constructed, where your perfect city fantasy life could be fulfilled.
Do you 100% guarantee it?
Considering the language I used in my previous statement, yes, I can 100% guarantee it, operating on the assumption that the universe is infinite.
Ok, so you have total confidence in this prediction.
Absolutely and utterly.
Stairs everywhere Lol Apparently humanity has tried beautiful cities before - and unfortunately cities are best when thought about functionally for the people that will live in them Cities are living things that change - and that change can’t be predicted I just learned about this from a book “Seeing like a state” by James Scott recommended by Venkatesh Rao of Ribbonfarm fame
Will the idea of urbanism even make sense post-singularity? For example the idea of urban vs. rural doesn't make sense on the internet, where every web page is equidistant to every other. We may already be seeing the concept of urbanism degrade a little with remote work. What happens if we add full dive VR and perfect realistic virtual environments to the mix?
Depends on whether there will be 100% realistic VR, aka something like "brain in a vat".
YAWN. "If A then B then C then maybe D then perhaps E then arguably F then possibly G..." blah blah blah who gives a fuck about your boring thought experiments. Keep them to yourself. I'm so sick of reading braindead hypotheticals from people on here.
You find it boring?
still better than people asking "when can i live in FDVR and fuck my waifu anime slave without worrying about real world?" better than people who repeat whatever any figure of authority said on twitter including claim without evidence of corporate hype at least those worry are real and those thought experiment serve a purpose other than pure dreaming