Book Summaries
Chapter 5: The Triumph of Cities: Trade after 5,000 Years Ago (The Rational Optimist)
*Not long ago, demographers expected new technology tohollow out cities as people began to telecommute from tranquil suburbs.
Not long ago, demographers expected new technology tohollow out cities as people began to telecommute from tranquil suburbs. But no – even in weightless industries like finance people prefer to press into ever closer contact with each other inglass towers to do their exchanging and specializing, and they are prepared to pay absurdly high rents to do so. By 2025, it looks as if there will be five billion people living in cities (and rural populations will actually be falling fast), and there will beeight cities with more than twenty million people each: Tokyo, Mumbai, Delhi, Dhaka, Sao Paolo, Mexico City, New York and Calcutta. As far as the planet is concerned, this is good news because city dwellers take up less space, use less energy and have less impact on natural ecosystems than country dwellers.
The world’s cities already contain half the world’s people, but they occupy less than 3 per cent of the world’s land area. ‘Urban sprawl’ may disgust some American environmentalists, but on a global scale, the very opposite is happening: as villages empty, people are living in denser and denser anthills. As Edward Glaeser put it, ‘Thoreau was wrong. Living in the country is not the right way to care for the Earth. The best thing that we can do for the planet is build more skyscrapers.
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Related posts:
- Prologue (The Rational Optimist)
- Chapter 3: The Manufacture of Virtue: barter, trust, and rules after 50,000 years ago (The Rational Optimist)
- Chapter 6: Escaping Malthus’s Trap: Population after 1200 (The Rational Optimist)
- Chapter 7: The Release of Slaves: Energy after 1700 (The Rational Optimist)
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How to Win at Forecasting
*How do people react when they’re actually confronted with error? You get a huge range of reactions. Some people just don’t have any problem saying, “I was wrong. I need to rethink this or that assumption.” Generally, people don’t like to rethink really basic assumptions.
Book Summaries
An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding Summary (8/10)
*An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding* by David Hume is considered one of the most philosophical and scientific texts ever written, and primarily, it exposes the limits of human rationality through a series of 12 essays that are quite rational themselves.
Book Summaries
Rolf Dobelli (What to think about machines that think)
Rolf Dobelli dismisses the widespread fear that artificial intelligence (AI) will pose a significant danger to humanity. He distinguishes between two types of AI development: Humanoid Thinking (AI that extends human thinking) and Alien Thinking (radically new AI thinking).
Book Summaries
Arnold Trehub (What to think about machines that think)
Arnold Trehub argues that machines cannot think because they lack a unique perspective or point of view. He suggests that humans interpret the output of these machines, providing context and meaning to their symbolic structures.