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Will the high-tech cities of the future be utterly lonely?

64 pointsby ytNumbersabout 8 years ago

13 comments

VLMabout 8 years ago
The article seems like three disconnected stories. I&#x27;ll try to do a better job of combining the stories:<p>When the automation eliminated the blue collar jobs, my friends, if I had them, would laugh because we are white collar.<p>When the automation eliminated the rural jobs, my friends, if I had them, would laugh because we were superior urbanites.<p>When the automation eliminates my white collar urbanite job, there is no one left to laugh at me, because urbanites are lonely and have no friends.<p>But on the bright side we&#x27;ll spend the income we don&#x27;t have, from the jobs that don&#x27;t exist anymore, on fitbits to make us happy, instead of spending the money on other people. The progressive stack was to eliminate the family, no more babies, then eliminate the pets, no more fur babies, finally eliminate the jobs to eliminate the human-like machines such as fitbits. The last step will be eliminating the remaining people.<p>Devices becoming more human like, is good, because humans won&#x27;t be able to afford living in the expensive cities without any jobs and no personal relationships. In the old days people worked and retired to a pension and were given a pocketwatch they don&#x27;t need at a retirement party. In the new days people will be downsized as population only increases and the number of jobs only decreases, teased by being shown a fitbit they can&#x27;t afford and don&#x27;t need, and left to die under the freeway overpasses unemployed.<p>Although historical experience indicates the outcome will look a lot like Mogadishu shaken with the French Revolution and a sprinking of Detroit, we would like to think instead that our biggest problem will be solving loneliness, because lonely people are unproductive. People have to be productive, British Stiff Upper Lip and all that, even though we no longer have any jobs for them to be productive in. If they were not lonely they would not notice they are unemployed.<p>I like to think I did a better more serious and thoughtful job than the article. Its a little funny because the topic is of course ridiculous but I still think I made numerous serious points.
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hfsktrabout 8 years ago
&quot;By 2050, more than 66 percent of the world&#x27;s population will be living in so-called &quot;smart cities.&quot; These are metropolitan areas where everything will be digitally connected. ... we&#x27;ll have smart hospitals, farms, and highways, and it&#x27;s likely they&#x27;ll all talk to one another. Connected devices will monitor everything from air quality to energy usage and traffic congestion.&quot;<p>While that might lead to efficiency that makes me feel it&#x27;s more of a dystopia than a place I&#x27;d want to live.<p>To me says: there will be someone monitoring you to make sure you are a good little cog and don&#x27;t disturb the status quo.
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neomabout 8 years ago
I doubt it. I spend my days looking at this &quot;smart city&quot; trend, it seems that in the future modern services will allow cities and city planners to focus on more things like community spaces and social infrastructure. As it stands today I&#x27;d hazard over 85% of the productivity within a city at the government layer is spend managing and dealing with existing infrastructure. Very bullish on cities. Highly recommend reading Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier by Edward Glaeser
kristofferRabout 8 years ago
I think the claim made in the article, that minor social interactions like receiving a &quot;Thank You&quot; from the cashier instead of using a self-checkout booth, prevents loneliness is really dubious. In fact, the article also mentions shallow conversations as creating loneliness, so it contradicts itself there. I don&#x27;t get what the article is trying to say.<p>Loneliness is a communication, information and anxiety problem. The first two, communication and information, are problems technology can easily help solve. Helping people getting over their anxieties is way harder of course, but technology used properly can help there too.<p>People&#x2F;governments just needs to take the issue seriously and start doing stuff to solve it.
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shriphaniabout 8 years ago
I can assure you that the loneliness is because of the clown city planners who think humans enjoy living in boxes.<p>People will organically cluster to optimize proximity to others + get personal space when they need it.<p>Hopefully we will reject the clown-car of urban design and return to our organic roots.<p>It is costing people their livelihoods, their soul, their spirit.<p>All because someone who dresses like a penguin has a broken model of the world.
tzsabout 8 years ago
Off Topic: that site is doing something I&#x27;ve seen on a lot of sites: not correctly taking into account that menu banner overlay on the top when the user hits space to scroll a page.<p>On Firefox it works correctly. The page scrolls up just enough to make what had been the bottom visible line become the top visible line.<p>On Chrome and Safari it scrolls a few lines too far. If I go in to the inspector and delete that menu overlay it is then clear that it scrolled the amount that would have been correct had the menu overlay not been there.<p>As I said I see this quite a bit around the web. I&#x27;m curious why. Is there a bug in calculating the size of the visible region in Webkit browsers in the presence of overlays? Are the sites using some non-standard CSS that is only supported in Firefox? Is this one of those things that you just have to have separate code for different browsers and these sites didn&#x27;t realize that and only tested with Firefox so didn&#x27;t realize they weren&#x27;t done yet?
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jrs95about 8 years ago
Wait..cities aren&#x27;t <i>already</i> utterly lonely?
marsroverabout 8 years ago
Lately I don&#x27;t seem to have time to feel lonely. Can&#x27;t say that I don&#x27;t miss it sometimes. I feel like being lonely every now and then is good for you. Being lonely all the time, that&#x27;s a different story.
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wallflowerabout 8 years ago
I am reminded of the videogame in Spike Jonze&#x27;s &quot;Her&quot; in which the main protagonist after coming home from his day job ghostwriting hikes through landscapes with his AI buddy.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;m.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=Xr7aI0RqtXc" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;m.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=Xr7aI0RqtXc</a>
dbg31415about 8 years ago
No, we&#x27;ll still have Tinder... for our avatar-on-avatar VR sexcapades.<p>* Demolition Man sex scene - YouTube || <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=k80UQWWUIYs" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=k80UQWWUIYs</a>
xg15about 8 years ago
&gt; <i>But in a future where robots sound and objects look increasingly sentient, we might be less inclined to seek out behaviors to abate our loneliness. Indeed, one recent study titled &quot;Products as pals&quot; found that exposure to or interaction with anthropomorphic products — which have characteristics of being alive — partially satisfy our social needs, which means the human-like robots of tomorrow could kill our dwindling urge to be around other humans.</i><p>So basically Chobits was right all along.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;aB50gL4rpiM" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;aB50gL4rpiM</a>
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gokusaaaanabout 8 years ago
man, can&#x27;t wait for tech to come out that chops out the need to socially connect, depression caused by the lack same is absolutely annoying
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crimsonalucardabout 8 years ago
The key to making societies not lonely is communal dining areas for every 100 or so people.
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