118 - Nathan Waters on The Future of Housing, Mobility, and Work

FUTURE FOSSILS

“I want to break the idea that housing is an investment vehicle. I mean housing is a f-cking HUMAN NEED.”

This week’s guest is Australian futurist Nathan Waters, whose vision for a mobile, modular mashup of apartment living and driverless cars offers a solution to a trifecta of wicked problems in affordable housing, cost of living, and enjoyable work. We’re talking about a mature and equitable sharing economy that goes asteroid-to-dinosaurs on the exploitative systems of corporations like Uber and Airbnb…this is an episode for anyone who dreams of a fairer and funner world, a world that reconciles the yearning for flexibility and adventure with the desire for a nice place to call your own:

Nathan’s popular essay on “driverless hotel rooms”:

https://hackernoon.com/driverless-hotel-rooms-the-end-of-uber-airbnb-and-human-landlords-e39f92cf16e1?gi=cecb64856db9

Nathan’s blockchain-based skill-sharing economy website:

https://www.peerism.org/

Nathan’s futures-oriented social media channel, Futawe:

https://twitter.com/futawe?lang=en

Nathan cohosts this YouTube talkshow about the singularity, Hive45:

https://www.youtube.com/user/hive45com/videos

Somebody either ripped off his driverless hotel rooms idea or just stumbled on it independently:

https://www.usatoday.com/story/travel/2018/11/27/self-driving-hotel-room/2123668002/

https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/autonomous-travel-suites/index.html

From this episode:

“A job is a terrible, terrible concept. I think of jobs as modern-day slavery. It’s a bunch of wasted mind and human capital.”

“We have material abundance because of capitalism, but now it’s almost an existential threat. And we need to transition quickly to something else.”

Most of the housing space and vehicle space we own is unused most of the time.

We can’t legislate affordable housing because the incumbent politicians are real estate speculators.

Modular hotels made of autonomous vehicle components (adding a z-axis to the not-a-trailer-park for hip young professionals).

A new resolution for our age-old dialogue between sedentary and nomadic communities, wanderers and people of place.

How to fit 9 billion people into 100K apartment buildings; see also: Paolo Soleri’s Lean Linear City.

Building a blockchain-based, decentralized skill-sharing economy.

A/B testing modular cities to find the optimum layout for human happiness.

Mark Lakeman of City Repair and restoring streets to a safe commons.

Can we handle constantly fluctuating and re-organizing architecture?

Geophysical filter bubbles.

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