> efficiency gain from cities Sure. It's just that "tolerable commute" would no longer need to be one of those gains. A fun conversation went by with someone

> efficiency gain from cities Sure. It's just that "tolerable commute" would no longer need to be one of those gains. A fun conversation went by with someone from the Sierra Club. It was pointed out that the built environment which best matched their resource conservation/efficiency goals, was Manhattan. Their response was something like "yes, but we don't emphasize that, because it wouldn't appeal to our membership". ;) > dasein Picture brainstorming in front of a hallway whiteboard. Picture grabbing some nearby colleagues to collaborate. Now picture how relatively ineffective and unpleasant it would to do that collaboration over video conferencing and such. It's suboptimal, but that's a price you're sometimes willing to pay for non-locality. But now imagine that given a choice, you would much prefer to be brainstorming in front of a virtual whiteboard.[1] And collaborating there. Simply because it's a more powerful and helpful environment. So your physical whiteboard languishes, gets taken down for wall painting, and is never rehung. Then non-locality is no longer something you pay for. Locality constraints are just gone. There's a fun decades-old metric on communication technology: Given some communication task, and a choice of technologies, how far would you walk to get access to them? Physical letter, email, phone, in-person conversation. Down the hall, different floor, different building, across the city. Already, there are some tasks where even if you are sitting in the same office, you would use some tech rather than turning around. VR/AR seems likely to greatly increase that set of tasks. Reducing the importance of being able to physically walk to people. [1] Here's a limited existing virtual whiteboard: http://store.steampowered.com/app/585040/Dry_Erase_Infinite_VR_Whiteboard/ http://store.steampowered.com/app/585040/Dry_Erase_Infinite_...