But, and this I have not yet heard suggested here, you could solve that problem by having tunnels underground, instead of streets above, and all the cars auto-piloted. Then the AI problem would become vastly easier and could have been solved in the early 2000s of this Earth.
Current cars do not already travel through underground tunnels.
But how much of the cost of underground construction is due to government regulations? According to Wikipedia, the world’s first underground railway was opened in 1863. Given the massive amount of innovation in the mining industry that must have taken place since then, you would think we would now be really good at building cheap and safe underground tunnels.
Lots of it, but this is misleading since government regulation of underground construction is mostly about proving that you won’t accidentally dig through pipes or other utilities, or cause nearby buildings to collapse. The need to do that manifests as a regulatory expense because governments are responsible for keeping the records about these things, but in a differently-arranged society that cost would still exist somewhere else. In 1863, they had it easy since there wasn’t nearly so much pre-existing construction to worry about.
(In the modern world, this could be solved by founding new cities with better planning up front.)
Also, China can dig tunnels for vastly lower prices than the US.
And China still doesn’t have lengths of tunnel within an order of magnitude (or 4?) of its roadways, because tunnels are just that expensive no matter where you are or under how corrupt or laissez-faire a government you’re digging under.
What is the cost of moving dirt in an open-air mine? This would give some figures on the automated cost of moving dirt apart from non-automated labor, regulatory barriers, cost of avoiding existing pipes, etc.
A quick google led me to this page, which tells me that the cost of moving dirt is a very complicated topic with its own jargon, and that the cost depends somewhat on the geology of the dirt to be moved, the slope of the ground in question, and, very importantly, the cost of the fuel required to run the earthmoving equipment.
However, one estimate on the page (dated 2007, so using 2007 diesel prices and driver wages) was $2100 for a 3000-yard ditch (assuming I understand the jargon correctly, that would be an eight-foot ditch (I don’t know if that’s width or depth, the word used is ‘cut’)).
A ditch, or an open-air mine, is also a lot easier than a tunnel because you don’t have to worry about the roof falling in on you (I understand properly shoring up a tunnel roof is another very complicated topic, which most certainly reduces the speed at which you can dig, which in turn means you’d need to keep paying your workers for longer to cover the same distance, thus adding a multiplier to the earth-moving cost)
There’s also ventilation, and pumping if you’re going to be digging below the water table. These are ongoing costs: you need to keep incurring them for as long as you want your tunnel system to remain viable, not just during the initial digging phase.
This page suggests that avoiding water during the mining process is yet another complicated and surprisingly expensive topic, and one that often requires exploratory digging before one commits to a major tunnel. I don’t know if transit systems handle it in the same way, but it’s worth noting that people tend to build cities at low elevations and near major bodies of water.
$21,000 per 3000 yards of tunnel is an eminently practical price for a city. $210,000 is $2100 per 30-yard-wide house. Dig big trench, lay down premanufactured tunnel pipe sections, close up trench. We’re not talking subways here.
$210,000 would strike me as cheap for a permanent above-ground structure of that size, never mind an underground one. Looked at another way, $2100 sounds about right for thirty yards of concrete storm sewer pipe but orders of magnitude off for transit—prefabricated tunnel sections big enough to drive cars through and strong enough to carry however many tons of earth or rubble would not be cheap to make or to move into place, especially if there isn’t an above-ground transport grid to carry them on.
(In the modern world, this could be solved by founding new cities with better planning up front.)
The local geology is another major issue, so presumably that would be a major factor in the decision of where to build your world city. Various modern cities are built on hard volcanic stone, so digging beneath them is fairly pointless.
Some of it is regulatory, but the majority of it is simply all the stuff in the way. The area immediately under cities is crowded and dense with piping and wiring, in older cities. Also, under that there is often more city that was simply built-over.
If you were building from scratch, you could plan nice systems, but trying to redo the area under an existing dense city is incredibly costly.
I’m not sure that metaphor’s got legs here. The Donner Summit railroad tunnel was completed in 1868, for example, and blasting through solid granite in a (then-)remote mountainous area with harsh winters and little infrastructure doesn’t sound like low-hanging fruit to me, then or now.
On the other hand, that was one of the major engineering projects of the time, and reducing costs by a factor of five or ten still wouldn’t make it competitive with surface roads.
That particular tunnel in that particular place was worthwhile compared a surface route, which could only have been a long detour. By low hanging fruit, I mean a favourable cost to benefit ratio, not easy to do in absolute terms,
Isn’t that rather assuming the conclusion? I don’t actually buy Eliezer’s suggestion, but by making it he’s essentially saying that large-scale transit tunnels would have a favorable cost-to-benefit ratio after adjusting for overhead costs.
Yeah, that was my very first thought re the tunnels. Excavation is expensive. (and maintenance costs would be rather higher as well.)
OTOH, we don’t even need full solution (including legal solution) to self driving cars to improve stuff. The obvious solution to the “but I might need to go on a 200 mile trip” is “rent a long distance car as needed, and otherwise own a commuter car.”
That needs far less of coordination problems, because that’s something that one can pretty much do right now. Next time one goes to purchase/lease/whatever a vehicle, get one appropriate/efficient/etc for short distances, and just rent a long haul vehicle as needed.
(Or, if living in place with decent public transport, potentially no need to own a vehicle at all, of course.)
if living in place with decent public transport, potentially no need to own a vehicle at all, of course.
This I realized as a 15 year old. I balanced the costs of a drivers license (time and cost), total cost of car(s) and the time spent driving against the costs of public transportation (including occassional larger transports) and freedom of mobility. Note that public transportations saves lot of time and time was important to me. So I decided against a car. And I have not regretted it. Since I’m free-lancing I’m using cabs more often. But driving a car myself? What a horrible waste of precious time. Disclaimer: Public transportation is quite good where I live and allows to work on a laptop during commute.
From my point of view in an ideal system significant commute and relocation shouldn’t be neccessary at all. Besides leaving a place often means leaving a social environment which has to be balanced—except you see independent singles as more highly motivated or that virtual relationships are sufficient.
Note that public transportations saves lot of time
What? How does that work? Public transportation runs on a specific schedule, and you have to wait to catch it. It also runs on a specific route, which is not always the most direct route to your destination, and which therefore takes longer, plus any extra time for walking if it doesn’t take you exactly to your destination. Transfers also require waiting. Are you in New York? Or in one of those European cities that deliberately sets up the system to discourage the use of cars?
In Bremen, where public transportation is regularly used (and cars are banned in the city center), buses run every half hour, and light rail runs every ten minutes—sometimes at even shorter intervals.
In most of America, public transportation is inefficient because of the suburbs, but suburbs are inefficient anyway, a product of strange priorities (a house! with a lawn! that you have to mow! but we really care about having a lawn! even though there are lawns in Bremen!) and stupid misgovernance (see: busing) which would really be better replaced. Saying public transportation is inefficient because of the suburbs is like saying cars are inefficient because there are no roads—the inefficiency is not inevitable, but caused by a deeper problem, which can be fixed.
I live in the city purported to have the best public transportation west of the Mississippi. My apartment could probably be considered to be on the edge of the suburbs, but inner suburbs, not exurbs. I have a driver’s license and a membership of Car2Go (freeform by-the-minute rental SmartCars).
It takes roughly a quarter of the time to drive anywhere that it does to take the bus. And on the bus, I spend about as much time having to focus on making connections as I would have to spend on driving.
Fwiw my experience of public transportation is similar (although I still prefer it when the costs are tolerable), it’s slower to get where you’re going, and my productivity is not optimal, although I can do simple tasks like going through my anki decks and checking my email on my phone pretty well.
Public transportation does take longer. On most routes a lot (x2-x3). But this is wall-clock time, not lost life-time. At least it doesn’t need to be.
The schedule in Hamburg is very good mostly. Often every 10 minutes with good connection. The pricing is good and you get get almost everywhere with at most 5mins to the station (bus or train) by foot. It is publicly funded. Note that in Europe the cities are old thus not built for cars esp. in the inner cities.
For me this means that I take the commute heavily into account when evaluating jobs.
The last years my commute was as follows: 1min. to the bus, avg. 5min. waiting, 35min. bus ride (in almost all cases with a laptop on my lap), 1min to the office. Compare this to a car commute which would likely take 20min. (but might be longer due to traffic, ice scraping, parkinglot,...) of which no part allows for productive or free time (I admit that some people like to drive, so for some this might count as fun/free time).
If you can bill by the hour then this time alone is worth much. If you can’t you could still think/work on job topics and thereby produce better results and earn better paid jobs.
Not many people report enjoying inner city commutes, but if you enjoy driving it might be worth commuting by car in order to order to enjoy leisure driving on the weekend.
I have stuck to public transport usage in the UK , although I have to say that the French, German, Belgian and Dutch systems are exquisitely blissfully in comaprison to what we have.
Having the license would be useful, but you have to balance the cost against the benefit. I figured that a) I (or my parents) could put the money to better use, b) the investment wouldn’t pay off.
Note that if you are in a relationship or larger family it is usually sufficient that one person has a drivers license (but then better one including lorries and/or trailer, which has additional costs).
More than a few. Add up the costs of buying or leasing a vehicle, fuel, maintenance, parking, and increased risk of getting smashed to death (http://www.schallerconsult.com/taxi/crash06.htm), and that’s quite a lot of taxis.
Public transport isn’t free. My interpretation of Gunners point is that while a tank of fuel can look cheap compared to a long distance train ticket, the private car has a lot of hidden costs.
Exactly. No need to put tunnels underground when it makes substantially more sense to build platforms over existing roads. This also means cities can expand or rezone more flexibly since you can just build standard roads like now and then add bridges or full platforms when pedestrians enter the mix. Rain, snow, and deer don’t require more than a simple aluminum structure.
Even as it stands, on the highways, there’s rarely any obstacle except other cars, which tunnels wouldn’t eliminate. In cities, pedestrian overpasses and sidewalk fences could make this mostly true.
You wouldn’t reap the aesthetic benefits, but it’d be just as good for automation.
The biggest obstacle here is that underground construction is orders of magnitude more expensive than above-ground construction.
But how much of the cost of underground construction is due to government regulations? According to Wikipedia, the world’s first underground railway was opened in 1863. Given the massive amount of innovation in the mining industry that must have taken place since then, you would think we would now be really good at building cheap and safe underground tunnels.
Lots of it, but this is misleading since government regulation of underground construction is mostly about proving that you won’t accidentally dig through pipes or other utilities, or cause nearby buildings to collapse. The need to do that manifests as a regulatory expense because governments are responsible for keeping the records about these things, but in a differently-arranged society that cost would still exist somewhere else. In 1863, they had it easy since there wasn’t nearly so much pre-existing construction to worry about.
(In the modern world, this could be solved by founding new cities with better planning up front.)
If you were building a city from scratch and routing pipes through the same tunnel, that would not be an issue.
Also, China can dig tunnels for vastly lower prices than the US.
Also, not much force has been put into automating the digging process.
And China still doesn’t have lengths of tunnel within an order of magnitude (or 4?) of its roadways, because tunnels are just that expensive no matter where you are or under how corrupt or laissez-faire a government you’re digging under.
What is the cost of moving dirt in an open-air mine? This would give some figures on the automated cost of moving dirt apart from non-automated labor, regulatory barriers, cost of avoiding existing pipes, etc.
A quick google led me to this page, which tells me that the cost of moving dirt is a very complicated topic with its own jargon, and that the cost depends somewhat on the geology of the dirt to be moved, the slope of the ground in question, and, very importantly, the cost of the fuel required to run the earthmoving equipment.
However, one estimate on the page (dated 2007, so using 2007 diesel prices and driver wages) was $2100 for a 3000-yard ditch (assuming I understand the jargon correctly, that would be an eight-foot ditch (I don’t know if that’s width or depth, the word used is ‘cut’)).
A ditch, or an open-air mine, is also a lot easier than a tunnel because you don’t have to worry about the roof falling in on you (I understand properly shoring up a tunnel roof is another very complicated topic, which most certainly reduces the speed at which you can dig, which in turn means you’d need to keep paying your workers for longer to cover the same distance, thus adding a multiplier to the earth-moving cost)
There’s also ventilation, and pumping if you’re going to be digging below the water table. These are ongoing costs: you need to keep incurring them for as long as you want your tunnel system to remain viable, not just during the initial digging phase.
This page suggests that avoiding water during the mining process is yet another complicated and surprisingly expensive topic, and one that often requires exploratory digging before one commits to a major tunnel. I don’t know if transit systems handle it in the same way, but it’s worth noting that people tend to build cities at low elevations and near major bodies of water.
$21,000 per 3000 yards of tunnel is an eminently practical price for a city. $210,000 is $2100 per 30-yard-wide house. Dig big trench, lay down premanufactured tunnel pipe sections, close up trench. We’re not talking subways here.
$210,000 would strike me as cheap for a permanent above-ground structure of that size, never mind an underground one. Looked at another way, $2100 sounds about right for thirty yards of concrete storm sewer pipe but orders of magnitude off for transit—prefabricated tunnel sections big enough to drive cars through and strong enough to carry however many tons of earth or rubble would not be cheap to make or to move into place, especially if there isn’t an above-ground transport grid to carry them on.
What is the cost of building a ship compared to a submarine?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunnel_boring_machine
I dint know what you are expecting. The technology started in 1825.
The local geology is another major issue, so presumably that would be a major factor in the decision of where to build your world city. Various modern cities are built on hard volcanic stone, so digging beneath them is fairly pointless.
Some of it is regulatory, but the majority of it is simply all the stuff in the way. The area immediately under cities is crowded and dense with piping and wiring, in older cities. Also, under that there is often more city that was simply built-over.
If you were building from scratch, you could plan nice systems, but trying to redo the area under an existing dense city is incredibly costly.
But the low hanging fruit have gone.
The low hanging fruit have gone … underground.
Adding ”… underground” improves any sentence … underground.
I’m not sure that metaphor’s got legs here. The Donner Summit railroad tunnel was completed in 1868, for example, and blasting through solid granite in a (then-)remote mountainous area with harsh winters and little infrastructure doesn’t sound like low-hanging fruit to me, then or now.
On the other hand, that was one of the major engineering projects of the time, and reducing costs by a factor of five or ten still wouldn’t make it competitive with surface roads.
That particular tunnel in that particular place was worthwhile compared a surface route, which could only have been a long detour. By low hanging fruit, I mean a favourable cost to benefit ratio, not easy to do in absolute terms,
Isn’t that rather assuming the conclusion? I don’t actually buy Eliezer’s suggestion, but by making it he’s essentially saying that large-scale transit tunnels would have a favorable cost-to-benefit ratio after adjusting for overhead costs.
Yeah, that was my very first thought re the tunnels. Excavation is expensive. (and maintenance costs would be rather higher as well.)
OTOH, we don’t even need full solution (including legal solution) to self driving cars to improve stuff. The obvious solution to the “but I might need to go on a 200 mile trip” is “rent a long distance car as needed, and otherwise own a commuter car.”
That needs far less of coordination problems, because that’s something that one can pretty much do right now. Next time one goes to purchase/lease/whatever a vehicle, get one appropriate/efficient/etc for short distances, and just rent a long haul vehicle as needed.
(Or, if living in place with decent public transport, potentially no need to own a vehicle at all, of course.)
This I realized as a 15 year old. I balanced the costs of a drivers license (time and cost), total cost of car(s) and the time spent driving against the costs of public transportation (including occassional larger transports) and freedom of mobility. Note that public transportations saves lot of time and time was important to me. So I decided against a car. And I have not regretted it. Since I’m free-lancing I’m using cabs more often. But driving a car myself? What a horrible waste of precious time. Disclaimer: Public transportation is quite good where I live and allows to work on a laptop during commute.
From my point of view in an ideal system significant commute and relocation shouldn’t be neccessary at all. Besides leaving a place often means leaving a social environment which has to be balanced—except you see independent singles as more highly motivated or that virtual relationships are sufficient.
What? How does that work? Public transportation runs on a specific schedule, and you have to wait to catch it. It also runs on a specific route, which is not always the most direct route to your destination, and which therefore takes longer, plus any extra time for walking if it doesn’t take you exactly to your destination. Transfers also require waiting. Are you in New York? Or in one of those European cities that deliberately sets up the system to discourage the use of cars?
In Bremen, where public transportation is regularly used (and cars are banned in the city center), buses run every half hour, and light rail runs every ten minutes—sometimes at even shorter intervals.
In most of America, public transportation is inefficient because of the suburbs, but suburbs are inefficient anyway, a product of strange priorities (a house! with a lawn! that you have to mow! but we really care about having a lawn! even though there are lawns in Bremen!) and stupid misgovernance (see: busing) which would really be better replaced. Saying public transportation is inefficient because of the suburbs is like saying cars are inefficient because there are no roads—the inefficiency is not inevitable, but caused by a deeper problem, which can be fixed.
I live in the city purported to have the best public transportation west of the Mississippi. My apartment could probably be considered to be on the edge of the suburbs, but inner suburbs, not exurbs. I have a driver’s license and a membership of Car2Go (freeform by-the-minute rental SmartCars).
It takes roughly a quarter of the time to drive anywhere that it does to take the bus. And on the bus, I spend about as much time having to focus on making connections as I would have to spend on driving.
Which city is this?
Fwiw my experience of public transportation is similar (although I still prefer it when the costs are tolerable), it’s slower to get where you’re going, and my productivity is not optimal, although I can do simple tasks like going through my anki decks and checking my email on my phone pretty well.
Portland, OR.
Public transportation does take longer. On most routes a lot (x2-x3). But this is wall-clock time, not lost life-time. At least it doesn’t need to be.
The schedule in Hamburg is very good mostly. Often every 10 minutes with good connection. The pricing is good and you get get almost everywhere with at most 5mins to the station (bus or train) by foot. It is publicly funded. Note that in Europe the cities are old thus not built for cars esp. in the inner cities.
For me this means that I take the commute heavily into account when evaluating jobs. The last years my commute was as follows: 1min. to the bus, avg. 5min. waiting, 35min. bus ride (in almost all cases with a laptop on my lap), 1min to the office. Compare this to a car commute which would likely take 20min. (but might be longer due to traffic, ice scraping, parkinglot,...) of which no part allows for productive or free time (I admit that some people like to drive, so for some this might count as fun/free time).
If you can bill by the hour then this time alone is worth much. If you can’t you could still think/work on job topics and thereby produce better results and earn better paid jobs.
See the boring advice for more on this.
Not many people report enjoying inner city commutes, but if you enjoy driving it might be worth commuting by car in order to order to enjoy leisure driving on the weekend.
I have stuck to public transport usage in the UK , although I have to say that the French, German, Belgian and Dutch systems are exquisitely blissfully in comaprison to what we have.
I wonder what parts of Belgium you’re talking about . I find it horrible, generally speaking.
Zey perhaps meant the ability to work during the journey, and the lack of upfront time cost in getting a licence.
Cool! (Though does seem that a license would be useful for longer trips, so you’d at least have the option of renting a vehicle if needed.)
And interesting point re social environment.
Having the license would be useful, but you have to balance the cost against the benefit. I figured that a) I (or my parents) could put the money to better use, b) the investment wouldn’t pay off.
Note that if you are in a relationship or larger family it is usually sufficient that one person has a drivers license (but then better one including lorries and/or trailer, which has additional costs).
Yeah, you can get a few taxis a month for what it costs to keep a car in a garage.
And you can read or even work in the taxi.
More than a few. Add up the costs of buying or leasing a vehicle, fuel, maintenance, parking, and increased risk of getting smashed to death (http://www.schallerconsult.com/taxi/crash06.htm), and that’s quite a lot of taxis.
Public transport isn’t free. My interpretation of Gunners point is that while a tank of fuel can look cheap compared to a long distance train ticket, the private car has a lot of hidden costs.
Exactly. No need to put tunnels underground when it makes substantially more sense to build platforms over existing roads. This also means cities can expand or rezone more flexibly since you can just build standard roads like now and then add bridges or full platforms when pedestrians enter the mix. Rain, snow, and deer don’t require more than a simple aluminum structure.
Wouldn’t walls/fences suffice?
Even as it stands, on the highways, there’s rarely any obstacle except other cars, which tunnels wouldn’t eliminate. In cities, pedestrian overpasses and sidewalk fences could make this mostly true.
You wouldn’t reap the aesthetic benefits, but it’d be just as good for automation.