
Sam Altman’s Manifest Destiny (2016) - shrikant
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/10/sam-altmans-manifest-destiny
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ArtWomb
_Recently, YC began planning a pilot project to test the feasibility of
building its own experimental city. It would lie somewhere in America, or
perhaps abroad, and would be optimized for technological solutions: it might,
for instance, permit only self-driving cars. “It could be a college town built
out of YC, the university of the future,” Altman said. “A hundred thousand
acres, fifty to a hundred thousand residents. We crowdfund the infrastructure
and establish a new and affordable way of living around concepts like ‘No one
can ever make money off of real estate.’ ” He emphasized that it was just an
idea—but he was already looking at potential sites._

I've been thinking about the feasibility of this as well recently. A good
college town has a component of informality, collegiality that binds its
residents together.

Munich may be the best example I can think of: a college town dating back to
medieval times, scaled up to a city of 4M+ souls. TUM and ABDK seem much more
intertwined with the real-world urban design and planning of infrastructure
and public spaces, than say MIT and RISD. Not to mention the crafts of cheese,
bread, beer making, etc!

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sonnyblarney
Utopian attempts to build cities almost always fail.

"the real-world urban design and planning of infrastructure and public spaces"
from the 19609's brought us empty downtowns, sprawling suburbs, lack of
culture and cars everywhere.

The notion of a 'tech first' place is almost repulsive.

Humans are people, who about 'people first'?

How about the fact that we have been 'iterating' already for thousands of
years on this one?

'Munich' is a great city precisely because it is old, and it will never be
great 'because tech'.

Utopianism is one of the most consistently apparent acts of crude hubris among
technologies and ideologues, and it blows me away because there is so much in
recent history to show how exemplarily bad it can all be. Basically the entire
Soviet Union and satellite Empire speaks to this.

Visit anywhere in Eastern Europe and see the 'revolutionary people's Utopias'
built on 'reason, technology and equality' ... my god man.

All of that said - it's good to experiment and if some college town wants to
'go tech' from Google, then that might be a good idea.

As for Google's 'Toronto Harbourfront' initiative ... no.

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lisper
> almost always fail

 _Almost_ always? What would you cite as a success?

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abecedarius
Alexandria wasn't utopian afaik, but it was a planned city that seems to have
been a success right away.

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lisper
Are you referring to Virginia or Egypt?

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abecedarius
Egypt. [https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/mar/14/story-
cities-...](https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/mar/14/story-cities-
day-1-alexandria-egypt-history-urbanisation-foundations-modern-world)

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jpm_sd
(2016) and quite outdated at this point.

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thesausageking
This is only two years old and it's very out of date. Amazing how quickly Sam
(and YC) evolve.

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minimaxir
This was posted in 2016: notable, as Sam hasn't blogged about these projects
much since then.

~~~
coding123
I think the demeanor, aspirations, love of country of most people changed
drastically very late in the evening of November 8th of that year.

~~~
jarjoura
Totally unrelated, but I just last week did say I loved being an American and
love this country yet immediately I got shunned for being a crazy right-wing
conservative. I'm like what??! So I can see how thought leaders in this space
are keeping quiet waiting for the hypersensitivity to cool off.

~~~
erikpukinskis
What did you say “I love being an American” in response to? And did you say
just that or was there more to it?

And how exactly did they shun you?

