Roko is of course begging the question, and the premise he is wrong about is that there is a sizable population willing to relocate to a floating iceberg, instead of living in an existing country.
Consider what the proposed citizens have to consent to:
- paying for the R&D required to implement the technical solutions Roko envisions, along with the continued higher maintenance costs
- paying higher wages for the people who are supposed to do all the boring menial jobs in this floating city, on par with existing cities
- paying higher daily cost of living for everything from food to building supplies to luxuries to entertainment that have to be imported
- being at the mercy of “legacy governments”, many of whom possess navies capable of everything from interdicting the food supply, to literally undermining the city from below, to actual assaults and airstrikes
- paying higher prices for insurance of their lives and dwellings and possessions because of all the above
Amusingly the solution for a libertarian city is a megastructure project probably only a rich nation is prepared to pay for.
Someone send Roko a copy of James K. Morrow’s novel “Towing Jehovah” which involves the enormous corpse of God being towed, by a (much smaller) oil tanker, from near the Equator north to a fijord for burial in a cave. (I lost interest toward the end).
It’s not strictly relevant - I don’t think the crew sets up on the corpse itself - but it’d be fun to watch where Roko’s head goes.
“Step One: We kill God. Step Two: We harvest the cadaver, plastinate it, and build our city.”
Yes, we’ve had vertical cities with economic class strata, but have we had frigid vertical cities with economic class strata? This is an incredible innovation in the dystopian novel genre.
N = 2 (this and judge dredd) right now, but was there a rise in fiction in the 70’s/80’s where they did the ‘people live their whole lives in a skyscraper and didn’t come out’ thing? Is there some underlying societal fear I’m not super aware of? Or am I making too much of two examples?
It was (is) a real thing that archtitects have thought about. In 1969, the concept was named arcology. I learned about them through SimCity 2000 which helped popularize the concept.
I think, culturally, it’s an offshoot of Modernist thought. One trend in modernism is that science can be used to find more efficient ways to live, and that science will lead to human dominion over all natural processes. Some thinkers took this to one (terrible) conclusion and wondered about if people could live, work, and socialize all within one building; one efficient and contained (and human controlled) space.
Real skyscrapers were often designed with this in mind, and we still see the echoes of it today with concepts for Mars colonies and hanging-building mega-cities in Tokyo.
@Soyweiser It was a bigger theme earlier: 50s/60s. Asimov, Bradbury, and I think Heinlein all used it.
extremely funny that none of his interlocutors bother asking what his engineering background is
Don’t worry Roko has the support of the best mind of our generation behind him: Roko: “Elon is absolutely right that Tunnels[sic] would solve traffic”
E: More on the best minds, somebody in the comments : “‘it[a country selling their land to a new country] has happened’ is far less rare than CREATING the land, which has never happened.”. Are we a joke to you? [this sentence was translated from Dutch].