Spaces for Humans

It was a hard life, a couple hundred years ago. For most people, food, clothing and warmth were scarce resources; you needed to work for them, a lot, taking up a significant fraction of your available time. You... sometimes found the time to socialize, to go to church, meet up with friends, have a good time... but this wasn't really a priority in the grand scheme of things.

Compared to this, we now have near infinite amounts of resources.

Have... used them for building anything impressive?

I'm writing this from Lighthaven, in Berkeley. The place is... hard to describe; the closest I have in my imagination is basically Hogwarts, with its many little rooms, libraries, nooks; there is a room in the attic of one of the buildings, with wooden walls, thick carpets, those folding sit-on-ground chairs (do they have a name?) scattered around. The occasion is LessOnline, a weekend convention of people vaguely associated with rationalists / EA / AI safety & their favorite blog authors (along with, um, less well known ones, like the author of this very blog). Basically, it's a bunch of nerds hanging out at an extremely cool social place, talking about random things and sometimes listening to talks.

(there are more photos if you click on these!)

Obviously, the place has been nontrivial to set up. Buying the former Rose Garden Inn and turning it into Hogwarts is no small feat; it probably also takes the right kind of people to actually enjoy this. But... still:

... you look around outside of this, both in time and space; you see very different things.

You see people getting into large metal boxes, and spending hours per day, mostly alone, directing these machines, speeding through many areas actively dangerous for unaugmented humans, to one well-specified building, where they sit at one particular desk for 8-10 hours. Lucky ones find some of this fun; less lucky ones do it only because society would abandon them for their transgression of The Rules if they stopped doing so.

Then, they return to their homes. Occasionally, they do put in the work to organize some events of meeting up with friends or doing something not related to their Job Function... just staying at home and staring at various screens is pretty common too.

Where would you even... go though?

It is saying something about how "well" this generally works that Starbuckses are one of the best, coziest places to end up as a Generic Human. There is other humans surrounding you, there is some good music, hot coffee, delicious croissants, wifi for your laptop; you can just work on something, or meet up with a few friends and chat while sipping something neat. More specifically: it is a room, it's welcoming, it has chairs and tables and a restroom and you're free to just exist, despite the real estate not being your actual property.

And yet... Starbuckses still miss a lot of social infrastructure. They'd look at you really oddly if you just randomly started giving a talk in one of the corners. Few ways of connecting to other people. Also... once you have seen places that are more cozy than "tables and chairs in a room"... could we do better?

There are places that are doing better. Here is Google's New York office:

Also, some college campuses come to mind. While they're rarely this cozy, there is typically more room to hang out than "basically none". Is it a surprise that it's a lot easier to connect with people while in undergrad?

(... yes there are other important reasons... "there is literally nowhere to do this" still sounds like it's a pretty important one though.)

But then also... more broadly... humans are supposed to be a fairly social species. There is also a lot of other humans you could potentially talk to, hang out with; there is a lot of places where you could exist, look at, get inspired by. The aforementioned metal boxes, despite all their downsides, have the great power of moving us to many of these places.

And yet... we don't. Despite all the powers, despite all the wealth, we still pretend, way too often, that we are subsistence workers of the variant depicted in Dickens books, slightly modernized but not given a lot more freedom. Even when it happens, it's a Vacation you pay for, not... your normal existence. Your normal existence is supposed to be bleak and uninteresting. Like the spaces you typically inhabit.

Can we do better?