5 ms·

> we unlock whole new ways of living Please speculate on what some of these ‘whole new ways of living’ might be. I’m struggling to picture it.

pests 3y ago
You're house could be mobile and drive itself to new locations every night while you sleep. You wake up in a new location every morning to a new sunset. I meant this to be sarcastic because we already have this with campers and RV's - but it does sound kind of cool on second thought. Pointless, but cool.
- uoaei 3y ago
  > Pointless, but cool. Lovely turn of phrase to describe a whole swath of "why shouldn't this make money" startup ideas. If your goal is revenue, maybe don't base your entire marketing strategy on people with disposable income and decent financial literacy, because once an economic lull hits you're going to be stranded with a whole lot of responsibilities and a huge drop in income. I keep thinking back to Jupe[1], and how YC actually put their money behind it, as a synecdoche of the absurd and surreal decade we've had with all that money flying around. Some people got very rich on a wish and a promise -- maybe some think that's laudable, I think it's sociopathic. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37886420 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37886420
johndevor 3y ago
Kids can go to friends' houses when they please... Making suburbia kid friendly.
- jackvalentine 3y ago
  The world I lived in was kid friendly when I grew up and there weren’t self-driving cars. There were just fewer cars. We can achieve that again with sane urban planning.
npunt 3y ago
Rebuilding the tribe. We have divided ourselves into neat little nuclear family boxes and thrown ourselves together with a bunch of other randos in neat little boxes, with the unstated assumption that the family unit is the end all be all of human lived experience. This has separated us from our physical (atom-based) communities, to many ill effects including our friends and extended family being further away. This makes having and raising families more difficult than it should be, as we work rando jobs in order to hire rando nannies to do the job that a community otherwise would. A lot of this comes down to proximity, and available space for people to group up in spaces larger than apartments or single family homes. We've simply lost a part of our daily lived connection to our close community, and being connected to them via only bits is a poor substitute. When atoms and bits are easy to move around, we have the best of both worlds, pushing the frontier out for having a community experience and having the positive aspects of what we have today.
- tuatoru 3y ago
  This reads like utterly history-blind fantasy. You need to explain why all the other times and ways we have tried what you propose did not work, and what will be different this time. Start, perhaps, with "The Tyranny of Structurelessness".
  - npunt 3y ago
    Sorry can you be more specific? Humans have lived on and off in community structures throughout history, we evolved as social creatures in these structures. We're proximally further away from these structures in the present time, which has brought up the issues I mentioned. Among other things, a means of allowing proximity to be less of a factor allows us to explore different sized dwellings due to a greater area of possible land within proximity to us, which allow for a broader range of different sized social units, which allows for some relief of those issues as people can choose to live in more ways according to their preference (e.g. community/kibbutz, loose structure of friends nearby, big family nearby, nuclear family, anonymous in city). You can literally break it down to a tradeoff of cubic meters of space for a social unit vs time/effort it takes to get to things you want. If you want a commune of X families and a convenience store within Y mins, more efficient transport makes those numbers, on average, work better for people. Maybe it's 60 minutes out of town for 5 families to get together, but only 15 minutes for 3 families, based on ease of getting shared property at a reasonable cost. Do you see where I'm going with this? If you wanted to go further you could say ease of moving atoms lets you even rethink aspects of dwellings (why we cache food in a fridge, instead of having what we need dropped off to us in a few minutes) and notions of community property (a 'tool/whatever share' program among an opt-in group), and ultimately how we pick what infrastructure serves whom. Lots and lots of implications to unpack when we move atoms around more cheaply, and many of these ideas unlock with small changes. See apps/services that only work economically in cities but not suburbs for a modern example. Not sure how this relates to The Tyranny of Structurelessness, maybe you're assuming I meant something that I didn't?
Raidion 3y ago
I mean, a ton of people spend time driving, freeing that time would be huge efficiencies. Not to mention that it would mean cars can be shared between people, hugely reducing cost of operation and greenhouse emissions. Parking areas are reduced and put farther away from city centers, freeing land. If cars learn to share the road with us, they can also used optimized lanes and traffic patterns, speeding up commutes and reducing accidents. Like it's not any one thing, but a self driving car really changes a lot of things about how cities and transport are designed. Interesting thing is that it's harder to have a self driving car now than it would be in 20 years, because as they get closer and closer, the roads are going to adapt to them.
- jackvalentine 3y ago
  Nothing you’ve described is a new way of living though.

pests 3y ago

You're house could be mobile and drive itself to new locations every night while you sleep. You wake up in a new location every morning to a new sunset. I meant this to be sarcastic because we already have this with campers and RV's - but it does sound kind of cool on second thought. Pointless, but cool.

uoaei 3y ago
> Pointless, but cool. Lovely turn of phrase to describe a whole swath of "why shouldn't this make money" startup ideas. If your goal is revenue, maybe don't base your entire marketing strategy on people with disposable income and decent financial literacy, because once an economic lull hits you're going to be stranded with a whole lot of responsibilities and a huge drop in income. I keep thinking back to Jupe[1], and how YC actually put their money behind it, as a synecdoche of the absurd and surreal decade we've had with all that money flying around. Some people got very rich on a wish and a promise -- maybe some think that's laudable, I think it's sociopathic. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37886420 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37886420

johndevor 3y ago

Kids can go to friends' houses when they please... Making suburbia kid friendly.

jackvalentine 3y ago
The world I lived in was kid friendly when I grew up and there weren’t self-driving cars. There were just fewer cars. We can achieve that again with sane urban planning.

npunt 3y ago

Rebuilding the tribe. We have divided ourselves into neat little nuclear family boxes and thrown ourselves together with a bunch of other randos in neat little boxes, with the unstated assumption that the family unit is the end all be all of human lived experience. This has separated us from our physical (atom-based) communities, to many ill effects including our friends and extended family being further away. This makes having and raising families more difficult than it should be, as we work rando jobs in order to hire rando nannies to do the job that a community otherwise would. A lot of this comes down to proximity, and available space for people to group up in spaces larger than apartments or single family homes. We've simply lost a part of our daily lived connection to our close community, and being connected to them via only bits is a poor substitute. When atoms and bits are easy to move around, we have the best of both worlds, pushing the frontier out for having a community experience and having the positive aspects of what we have today.

tuatoru 3y ago
This reads like utterly history-blind fantasy. You need to explain why all the other times and ways we have tried what you propose did not work, and what will be different this time. Start, perhaps, with "The Tyranny of Structurelessness".
- npunt 3y ago
  Sorry can you be more specific? Humans have lived on and off in community structures throughout history, we evolved as social creatures in these structures. We're proximally further away from these structures in the present time, which has brought up the issues I mentioned. Among other things, a means of allowing proximity to be less of a factor allows us to explore different sized dwellings due to a greater area of possible land within proximity to us, which allow for a broader range of different sized social units, which allows for some relief of those issues as people can choose to live in more ways according to their preference (e.g. community/kibbutz, loose structure of friends nearby, big family nearby, nuclear family, anonymous in city). You can literally break it down to a tradeoff of cubic meters of space for a social unit vs time/effort it takes to get to things you want. If you want a commune of X families and a convenience store within Y mins, more efficient transport makes those numbers, on average, work better for people. Maybe it's 60 minutes out of town for 5 families to get together, but only 15 minutes for 3 families, based on ease of getting shared property at a reasonable cost. Do you see where I'm going with this? If you wanted to go further you could say ease of moving atoms lets you even rethink aspects of dwellings (why we cache food in a fridge, instead of having what we need dropped off to us in a few minutes) and notions of community property (a 'tool/whatever share' program among an opt-in group), and ultimately how we pick what infrastructure serves whom. Lots and lots of implications to unpack when we move atoms around more cheaply, and many of these ideas unlock with small changes. See apps/services that only work economically in cities but not suburbs for a modern example. Not sure how this relates to The Tyranny of Structurelessness, maybe you're assuming I meant something that I didn't?

Raidion 3y ago

I mean, a ton of people spend time driving, freeing that time would be huge efficiencies. Not to mention that it would mean cars can be shared between people, hugely reducing cost of operation and greenhouse emissions. Parking areas are reduced and put farther away from city centers, freeing land. If cars learn to share the road with us, they can also used optimized lanes and traffic patterns, speeding up commutes and reducing accidents. Like it's not any one thing, but a self driving car really changes a lot of things about how cities and transport are designed. Interesting thing is that it's harder to have a self driving car now than it would be in 20 years, because as they get closer and closer, the roads are going to adapt to them.

jackvalentine 3y ago
Nothing you’ve described is a new way of living though.