It’s possible to live inside a car-sized gizmo like an RV. Since it already exists, it’s not what Yudkwosky means.
It’s possible to site a more-than-car-sized mobile gizmo, such as a trailer, somewhere outside a city. Yudkwosky is talking about cities, so that’s not what he means either.
It’s not really possible to get mobile house-sized contrivances into cities, because of the width of the roads. RV’s are the size they are because of that limitation.
You could put trailer parks in city centres if there was enough space, but there’s also no point, because you are just diluting the high density that makes a city a city.
So you need to solve the problem of getting house-sized living podules into a city, and also the problem of storing them in a high-density manner. You could do that by building something like a giant server rack and using a crane to slot your living podule into the nth floor. But then you would still need to knock down an existing high-rise building.
And remember that there is an alternative technology available: you can move house by putting your stuff in boxes and unpacking it at a new location. On the one hand, there is a slightly inconvenient solution in the $100s, and on the other, a highly convenient solution in the $1,000, 000s, at least.
Good points, and I think we mostly agree. If I understand correctly, the idea would rely on building a city from the ground up elsewhere rather than modifying existing cities.
In principle, pods anywhere between shipping container size and coffin size could be warehoused somewhat like cargo, although obviously more safety considerations apply, and you’d need things like supply and air conditioning lines. I wouldn’t want to put up with a small pod unless the VR experience was very good, and it was easy to get out of.
The moving company analogy is interesting because in principle, you could automate the moving process to the point where you only need to rent a space when you’re actually there. That is, a robot system picks up all your stuff, packs it and moves it to storage, etc while you’re off of work, vacation, or wherever—at which point the apartment is immediately sterilized and prepped for the next resident—and you move back in (with all your stuff in analogous places to where you left it) when you come home. Not a particularly simple task, but doesn’t need big infrastructure like moving a whole house.
With regards to RV parks, I’m thinking a metropolitan center could easily use parking garage style buildings to house the RVs indoors in tall buildings. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if these exist already in some cities. It does probably imply lower population density on a volumetric basis than an equivalent apartment complex though, as there’s going to be distance between the vehicles, thick enough floors to drive on, high ceilings for clearance, etc. On the plus side, in an RV park you can easily step out of your vehicle and say hi to the neighbors, so it’s a bit different from being palletized in an automated storage/retrieval warehouse.
Roads are a lot more permissive for length than width. So you can disassemble the RV for transport you can have much more volume and area. A kind of hybrid could be a RV that would essentially be two RVs that are supposed to be parked next to each other and bolted onto each other before usage for living (each “car half” containing half of a room). A single-wagon RV you can stop anywhere or even use when in transit.
It makes me wonder why RV are not the focus of car maker R&D efforts and what would make mobile homes differently qualify for it. If one would ban firmly attached houses then house pressures would move over to RVs, but RV market remains small compared to housing market, suggesting that people really don’t find RV anyway a substitute for houses. If you could detach rather than demolish a house then you might be able to pimp it up in renovation budjet scales rather than reconstruction scales. Then the attractiveness would come from having a very house-like item in a very car-like price.
But this might require than rather than to build houses to last for 10 or 50 years we build them to to last 100 to 500 years. I could very well see that a problem would be that the upkeep costs are significant in comparison to funding costs, ie that if you start of with an old wall trying to get to the result of a new wall might cost more throught repair/renovation rather than starting from scratch.
One noteworthy thing from what I found is that a common technique for RVs is for them to sort of “expand outwards once they’r parked”. i.e. they have some collapsed sections that you don’t drive around in, but let them be “bigger on the inside.”
One could combine the effects to get even more room. And in fact I am not sure what bolting the parts together really accomplishes. You could have one RV with good kitchen and no bedroom and another with no kitchen and good bedroom. Then the downside would be taht you would have to go outside when changing rooms and exposing two outdoors for anyone trying to break in (and maybe the hassle whether you want to lock the doors when you are not present in one half or move through the doors). You could lay mats or other pavement to faciliate movement from one to the next.
One could maybe also make the modules link together water and data connnection wise? Then the whole network would only need one outward connection point. We don’t plug appliances into powered stands, we plug them into the wall.
A very low-tech option that would require less development woud be to just repurpose a parking carrage as as a RV park. That would get density a lot closer to skyrises. But marketing wise living in a parking tower seems like a challenge. What kind of improvements would need to be made into a parking tower to turn it comparable to a suburban neighbourhood or just the experience of elevatorspaces and hallways of a aparment highrise?
It’s possible to live inside a car-sized gizmo like an RV. Since it already exists, it’s not what Yudkwosky means.
It’s possible to site a more-than-car-sized mobile gizmo, such as a trailer, somewhere outside a city. Yudkwosky is talking about cities, so that’s not what he means either.
It’s not really possible to get mobile house-sized contrivances into cities, because of the width of the roads. RV’s are the size they are because of that limitation.
You could put trailer parks in city centres if there was enough space, but there’s also no point, because you are just diluting the high density that makes a city a city.
So you need to solve the problem of getting house-sized living podules into a city, and also the problem of storing them in a high-density manner. You could do that by building something like a giant server rack and using a crane to slot your living podule into the nth floor. But then you would still need to knock down an existing high-rise building.
And remember that there is an alternative technology available: you can move house by putting your stuff in boxes and unpacking it at a new location. On the one hand, there is a slightly inconvenient solution in the $100s, and on the other, a highly convenient solution in the $1,000, 000s, at least.
Good points, and I think we mostly agree. If I understand correctly, the idea would rely on building a city from the ground up elsewhere rather than modifying existing cities.
In principle, pods anywhere between shipping container size and coffin size could be warehoused somewhat like cargo, although obviously more safety considerations apply, and you’d need things like supply and air conditioning lines. I wouldn’t want to put up with a small pod unless the VR experience was very good, and it was easy to get out of.
The moving company analogy is interesting because in principle, you could automate the moving process to the point where you only need to rent a space when you’re actually there. That is, a robot system picks up all your stuff, packs it and moves it to storage, etc while you’re off of work, vacation, or wherever—at which point the apartment is immediately sterilized and prepped for the next resident—and you move back in (with all your stuff in analogous places to where you left it) when you come home. Not a particularly simple task, but doesn’t need big infrastructure like moving a whole house.
With regards to RV parks, I’m thinking a metropolitan center could easily use parking garage style buildings to house the RVs indoors in tall buildings. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if these exist already in some cities. It does probably imply lower population density on a volumetric basis than an equivalent apartment complex though, as there’s going to be distance between the vehicles, thick enough floors to drive on, high ceilings for clearance, etc. On the plus side, in an RV park you can easily step out of your vehicle and say hi to the neighbors, so it’s a bit different from being palletized in an automated storage/retrieval warehouse.
Roads are a lot more permissive for length than width. So you can disassemble the RV for transport you can have much more volume and area. A kind of hybrid could be a RV that would essentially be two RVs that are supposed to be parked next to each other and bolted onto each other before usage for living (each “car half” containing half of a room). A single-wagon RV you can stop anywhere or even use when in transit.
It makes me wonder why RV are not the focus of car maker R&D efforts and what would make mobile homes differently qualify for it. If one would ban firmly attached houses then house pressures would move over to RVs, but RV market remains small compared to housing market, suggesting that people really don’t find RV anyway a substitute for houses. If you could detach rather than demolish a house then you might be able to pimp it up in renovation budjet scales rather than reconstruction scales. Then the attractiveness would come from having a very house-like item in a very car-like price.
But this might require than rather than to build houses to last for 10 or 50 years we build them to to last 100 to 500 years. I could very well see that a problem would be that the upkeep costs are significant in comparison to funding costs, ie that if you start of with an old wall trying to get to the result of a new wall might cost more throught repair/renovation rather than starting from scratch.
One noteworthy thing from what I found is that a common technique for RVs is for them to sort of “expand outwards once they’r parked”. i.e. they have some collapsed sections that you don’t drive around in, but let them be “bigger on the inside.”
I think this is an example (not 100% sure)
One could combine the effects to get even more room. And in fact I am not sure what bolting the parts together really accomplishes. You could have one RV with good kitchen and no bedroom and another with no kitchen and good bedroom. Then the downside would be taht you would have to go outside when changing rooms and exposing two outdoors for anyone trying to break in (and maybe the hassle whether you want to lock the doors when you are not present in one half or move through the doors). You could lay mats or other pavement to faciliate movement from one to the next.
One could maybe also make the modules link together water and data connnection wise? Then the whole network would only need one outward connection point. We don’t plug appliances into powered stands, we plug them into the wall.
A very low-tech option that would require less development woud be to just repurpose a parking carrage as as a RV park. That would get density a lot closer to skyrises. But marketing wise living in a parking tower seems like a challenge. What kind of improvements would need to be made into a parking tower to turn it comparable to a suburban neighbourhood or just the experience of elevatorspaces and hallways of a aparment highrise?