Maybe when there are nanobots, better 3D printers and human-level AI…
Fantasy talk and will never happen. Take housing as an example. [ul]
[li]The cost of land may go up and down, but never to be close of approaching zero. [/li][li]There is the cost of lumber, masonry, appliances, drywall, everything. [/li][li]There is the cost of labor to put it all together.[/li][li]Even if this gigantic 3-D house building printer is made it will still require very specialized raw material.[/li][li]And a piece of equipment that size will have to be hauled around and put together at each place.[/li][li]Use smaller 3-D printers and your back to the raw materials, transportation, and the labor to install it.[/li][li]What about the Architect? Your plan for this brave new world perhaps means to stiff him for his fees ? If not you will have to pay that cost.[/li][li]Finally what about government fees, permits, and taxes ? Do you have any idea how expensive all of that is ? No politician on earth will allow those to drop to approaching zero.[/li][/ul]
I grant you some things will, and have, gone to zero. Take Entertainment. We all can rip songs and video from whatever and put them on our own devices. But you want to see the artist in person, or the movie on a big screen, that will cost you.
Places that are cheap are that way because no-one wants to live there - not just because it’s far from work, but because it’s far from amenities & friends, has crappy weather or similar. Telecommuting doesn’t fix all of those.
Not really. Most of it is based on supply and demand. My 3BR/1BA ranch cost just over 30k. The weather in central KY is pretty pleasant (winters are much eaiser than Chicago), the amenities are pretty much the same (high speed internet, water, sewer, roads). The price difference was based mostly on fewer people living in the entire state of KY than the city of Chicago. Someone here could easily do the data processing job my team used to do via telecommuting (before we were laid off and outsourced) - hell, all the data was on servers in Colorado anyway.
As with what others have said, the article in the OP misses the crucial point. Yes, advances in technology and productivity push specific components and products in the direction of lower and lower costs. But (and it’s a big but) comparing the same product over time is meaningless. A phone today that does exactly what a phone in 1960 did will be much closer to zero in cost than it was in 1960. But that is not what we have today when we have a phone. Products and technology continues to advance, and get more complex with features and functions. That is what keeps the cost stable over time.
Seems like someone should come up with some sort of bet/pool/tontine about whether this sort of thing, or fusion energy will come to pass first.
“Amenities” here includes things like upscale restaurants, world-class museums, symphonies, shopping malls, 1000 different coffee shops etc. All the stuff cities have and ranches don’t. Also stuff like beaches, ski slopes, etc.
In rural places in Australia land is cheap but when subdivided the price goes up again… partly due to the costs of adding roads, electricity and water. Maybe those costs could be dramatically decreased in the future. 10% of the original price could be considered to be approaching zero…
When there is human-level AI robots could do it.
“…printed 10 houses in 24 hours, using a proprietary 3D printer that uses a mixture of ground construction and industrial waste, such as glass and tailings, around a base of quick-drying cement mixed with a special hardening agent…”
The printer “stands 6.6 metres high, 10 metres wide and 40 metres long (20 by 33 by 132 feet).”
If you have human-level AI they could design it. Or do you think human level AI is impossible? And non-qualified people are able to build 3D levels inside game editors - people could do that as well with easy to use smart software.
There might be certain countries that are cheap.
Funny you should mention the last two. Before cellphones, it wasn’t possible to come out of the water, notice you’d missed a call, call back and have an interview. That’s what my brother Ed did back in '99, on the beach at La Pineda. Last month he defended a Mechanical Engineering Degree project (his previous degree doesn’t have a direct equivalent under “Bologna” rules) and a Masters in Education thesis on the same day, via videoconference from a hotel room in Peñíscola. There are villages which had almost disappeared that are getting repopulated by people doing IT work remotely.
On one hand, the notion that telecommuting will suddenly solve hunger in Africa, sanitation problems in India and create peace in the Middle East is a pipe dream. But on the other, there are many, many people who are perfectly happy to take advantage of the ability to live at the beach or the slopes, which they wouldn’t be able to do if their job was presential.
I guess space in crowded/dense cities will always be relatively expensive or the government would have a rule involving a maximum amount of space a person can occupy.
Ultra cheap drones could deliver cheaply produced genetically engineered food…
Things like genetic engineering or nanobots could help solve that.
Peace in the Middle East has nothing to do with technology. It is kind of related to religious beliefs.
About 3D printed houses again: (including video)
It’s also very much related to resources, especially such limited resources as real estate.
I think it depends on which parts of the Middle East you’re talking about to some degree.
Sure, of course. But it’s nevertheless incorrect to say the major conflicts are about/“related to” religion. It’s certainly not the driving force for the Arab-Israeli conflict. A side factor, no doubt, but ultimately that one’s about territory. Remove religion and there’d still be an Arab-Israeli conflict. There’d probably still be an Iran-Iraq one, too, Persia vs Mesopotamia conflicts go back to the Chalcolithic…
I was thinking about conflicts involving Israel and I thought Israel was established based on a religion and the homeland from that religion (in the Bible it was the land God gave to the Israelites and they were told to exterminate the inhabitants). Also conflict in Israel involved suicide bombings though that is spreading around the world now.
This. Yes, technology improvements provide an overall benefit to society. But disruptive technology also creates winners and losers and has the potential to create class stratification between those with access to the technology and those who don’t.
Take my job. If I don’t need to actually visit a client site, 90% of my job can be done remotely. It’s mostly conference calls, emails and creating documents out of PowerPoint and Word. I can do that job from literally anywhere. And it’s great for work life balance because even if I have to answer calls and emails for a longer stretch of time, I can use breaks and down-time to take care of stuff around the house, play with my kid, or otherwise not sit there in an office pretending like I’m working when I don’t have anything to do.
One thing I notice though, while I’m enjoying a nice leisurely lunch while listening to a conference call is that a lot of people can’t work remotely or virtually. The nanny who cares for my kid during the day, the doormen and maintenance staff for my building, the work crews building the apartment across the street, the waitstaff at the restaurant, cops and firemen and other municipal workers around town, my dentist, eye doctor, hair guy and other service professionals. None of those people can just sort of come and go into their offices or decide to work from home if they feel sick, tired or need to wait for the cable guy. They need to physically be at their jobs at very specific times.
So right there you have two classes of people. People like me who have flexibility around when and where they work and people who do not.
Now maybe technology might replace a lot of those jobs. So now you have a third class - people who are not marketable because they don’t have the education, skills, talent or creativity to perform the jobs that can’t be done by a machine.
And even if we create some sort of socialist society that provides for the people who don’t have those marketable skills, they will still be an underclass. Those who have the most marketable talents (whatever those will be) will have first dibs on the most desirable locations (however that is defined). Whether that looks like modern Manhattan and San Francisco with the less affluent forced to suburbs further and further away from the city core, or something more like some sci fi dystopia where most people live warehoused in massive urban centers while the rich work remotely from estates scattered across the countryside, I cannot say.
That’s why people decide to live in different places.
The market can do a far better job than the government. Why do you think people are willing to spend a fortune to live in a shoebox in Manhattan? But New York as a city is more than just Manhattan and the other boroughs. Highway and rail service and even telecommunication lines effectively make most of northern New Jersey, Long Island, Westchester Counter, NY and Fairfield County, CT a single metropolitan area.
umm…where’s the singularity?
We already have houses for that price. The future is already here!!! Isn’t it amazing ??? !!!
They’re called mobile homes, or pre-fabricated homes.
Here’s one in England, that costs 6OOO pounds., and it meets Western building codes. In China or India, it would certainly be cheaper.
I mentioned a whole house printer tongue in cheek, not thinking there was one already in service. I am impressed that there actually is one in operation, and that is neat I admit.
However reading the article on Cnet that you linked I am quite positive that it is structural components only. The article mentions insulation needed to be added. Well there is also plumbing pipes, heating source, cooling source, electrical wiring, boxes, etc. Plus the finishes.
In my area of the country there are a number of prebuilt modular housing companies. I see their products rolling down the road often. They bring these sections to the job site and put them in place with a crane. Less expensive than stick built, yes but still pretty damn expensive.
Nope. An ethnicity. The dominant trend in Zionism at the founding of Israel was the strong-left, a-religious Labor Zionism
…but didn’t originate in that conflict - the use of suicide belts in the modern way was originated by the secular Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka.