Hyperdrive City is the birth of the American future. A reminder that we once built soaring structures of steel, cement, stone, and steady certainty in a better future. To think it, to utter it, is to remind ourselves that we’re not at the end of history. We’re at the very beginning. We must not dwell on the failures of the past, the disappointment of the present. One hundred billion humans have labored to place within our own hands the tools required to instantiate our vision. Hyperdrive City is the means to industrializing the light cone.
This isn’t about copying Shenzhen, though Shenzhen reminds us of what motivated humans can be capable. It’s about manifesting our shared vision of the future on America’s infinite plains and endless coasts, with its unlimited natural wealth and inexhaustible creativity. It’s Shenzhen plus experimentation, Shenzhen plus vision, Shenzhen plus freedom.
Diffusion models like MidJourney enable the conscious traversal of our collective dreamscape, encrypted in latent space.
These baby consciousnesses remind us that we are called by the future to be worthy of its wealth and power. To emancipate all of humanity from the last clinging strands of its desperate, wretched origins in animal ignorance.
AI alignment isn’t to be solved by RLHFing the febrile imaginings of structured sand to “obey humans”. It’s to be solved by elevating people to be worthy of the leadership of a cognitive infrastructure as far beyond our present best efforts as they are beyond the whispered oral history of ants. Humans whose words and thoughts raise generative factorium from the undifferentiated silicates left over from the formation of the Earth itself.
Hyperdrive City isn’t some misbegotten “high modernist” space devoid of life and spontaneity. It has buildings that are beautiful, inspirational, eclectic, and constantly in the process of creative destruction.
Hyperdrive City isn’t complete, finished, perfect. It’s a place of ongoing creation and recreation.
Hyperdrive City is neither a European socialist public transport utopia, though it does enjoy public law and order, nor a sprawling landscape of car-dependent suburbs, though it is not hostile to personal transportation.
The Hyperdrive City metro system is too logical for human minds to comprehend.
Christian Keil gets it. Flexible. Intermodal. Open. Handles logistics, people, leisure, work, robots, deliveries, personal VTOL, and space launch. A Human Terrestrial Transport Protocol.
I live in Southern California and take a special interest in the Salton Sea, embodying a sharp delineation between the horror of its death by neglect and the rapture of its incipient restoration.
Hyperdrive City will be built in many places, but in my heart we will build it on the shores of the Salton Sea. It’s going to inspire for a thousand years.
Diffusion models can foresee the generations of human flourishing that will occur here.
There is nothing particularly special about this land. It is so cursed that state and federal authorities have turned their back on it for nearly a century. We can build giant triumphant cities here. If we don’t like them, we raze them to the ground and start again. It is a canvas for the creation of our future and a glorious millennium that begins now and ends with our descendant culture embarking on a voyage to the Magellanic Clouds.
In the north, Desert Shores embodies the retrofuturistic promise of Palm Springs, a city of impossible contrasts built in the desert.
A broad shaded plaza is the canvas for a thousand lives and loves.
Call me a dreamer, but one day we’ll build a city around fire trucks that are smaller than a derailed train carriage.
Improved tree technology will shade prosperous streets.
We will bring plentiful water to Arrakis.
We’re going to house ten million people in a self-sustaining industrial hub that pumps out high quality, high complexity goods built from sunlight and locally sourced raw materials.
Hyperdrive City will grow and evolve, sprouting towers where needed and deleting when superfluous.
Hyperdrive City exists to nourish and uplift the human spirit, and is, in turn, uplifted by it.
The Salton Sea’s bed is, in places, shallow enough to build on piers. Imagine what the Venetians would have built had they had access to concrete, steel, carbon fiber, infinite wealth, mechanization, automation, and space travel.
With 110 miles of coastline, there is room for a kaleidoscopic variety of design and styles of living. Come on down, the water is (artificially) excellent.
Here, we see an Spanish-mission revival town center focused on street life and built on artificial hills, like a Santa Barbara with enough housing to have a positive birth rate.
Not everyone loves Italianate style, and that’s okay. There is enough land for many visions to build, compete, grow, improve, and flourish.
Gigantic towers are not incompatible with a human-friendly city, and they preserve natural space on the outskirts of the city. The Salton Sea has natural embayments but there’s no reason we can’t make many more.
The deserts of the American West are thought arid, but we have the technology to move arbitrary quantities of matter wherever we want – if we choose.
Hyperdrive City is an oasis, a nurturing environment with wildlife sharing space with humans. The vision of an ancient Arabian oasis, a smudge of ordered green amidst a vast plain of indifferent dunes and stones, but scaled up in proportion to our determination and godlike powers.
Long ago, great rivers traversed the valleys of the American West. Their dusty courses echo with the roar of spring floods and the promise of new life.
James Stauner Jr. recognizes the uniquely American design instinct of Frank Lloyd Wright.
This design is the opposite of structurally efficient, and that does not matter at all. Steel exists for a reason. Use it! Structural engineering exists to serve the vision of the creator and to inspire the inhabitants.
Water is not just an aesthetic statement – its presence in arid, sunny regions creates a cooler local microclimate, reducing dependence on air conditioning in sealed buildings.
Beyond the city’s limits, the mountains climb up to clear skies and an unlimited future for humanity.
We have the power to restore any landscape, no matter how poisoned, blighted, or neglected, to full ecological health.
Somehow the diffusion model captures how Frank Lloyd Wright made modernist forms inhabitable by humans.
Broad expanses of water break up monotony and expand the infinite sky.
There’s plenty of room for different styles, whether unified or eclectic. Whatever you can dream, you can speak into existence.
Sloped red roofs above light colored walls join living spaces to the Earth.
Hyperdrive City will restore healthy ocean chemistry for the Salton Sea, and even have a navigable canal to the ocean. Divers explore coral reefs right off the beach.
The American Century begins today. Anything we can imagine, we can build.