But similar profits are available at lower risk by developing at the edges of existing infrastructure. In particular, incremental development of this kind, along with some modest lobbying, will likely yield taxpayer funded infrastructure and services.
_rpd
Karma: 51
High quality infrastructure and community services are expensive, but taxpayers are reluctant to relocate to the new community until the infrastructure and services exist. It’s a bootstrap problem. Haven’t you ever played SimCity?
Perhaps a Mathematics for Philosophers book like this http://www.amazon.com/dp/1551119099 ?
We can expect lower food prices. High food prices have been an important political stressor in developing nations.
They mainly decided not to cut their production.
And there is a good reason for this decision. Saudi Arabia tried cutting production in the ’80s to lift prices, and it was disastrous for them. Here’s a blog post with nice graphs showing what happened …
KIC 8462852 Faded at an Average Rate of 0.165+-0.013 Magnitudes Per Century From 1890 To 1989
Bradley E. Schaefer (Submitted on 13 Jan 2016)
KIC 8462852 has been dimming for a century. The comet explanation is very unlikely.
If you are just trying to communicate risk, analogy to a virus might be helpful in this respect. A natural virus can be thought of as code that has goals. If it harms humankind, it doesn’t ‘intend’ to, it is just a side effect of achieving its goals. We might create an artificial virus with a goal that everyone recognizes as beneficial (e.g., end malaria), but that does harm due to unexpected consequences or because the artificial virus evolves, self-modifying its original goal. Note that once a virus is released into the environment, it is nontrivial to ‘delete’ or ‘turn off’. AI will operate in an environment that is many times more complex: “mindspace”.
A scenario not mentioned: my meat self is augmented cybernetically. The augmentations provide for improved, then greatly improved, then vast cognitive enhancements. Additionally, I gain the ability to use various robotic bodies (not necessarily androids) and perhaps other cybernetic bodies. My perceived ‘locus’ of consciousness/self disassociates from my original meat body. I see through whatever eyes are convenient, act through whatever hands are convenient. The death of my original meat body is a trauma, like losing an eye, but my sense of self is uninterrupted, since its locus has long since shifted to the augmentation cloud.
I think Seattle’s South Lake Union development, kickstarted by Paul Allen and Jeff Bezos, is a counter example …
http://crosscut.com/2015/05/why-everywhere-is-the-next-south-lake-union/
Perhaps gentrification is a more general counter example. But you’re right, most developers opt for sprawl.