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Submitted via IRC for Bytram
In the 160 or so years since the first skyscrapers were built, technological innovations of many kinds have allowed us to build them to reach astonishing heights. Today there is a 1,000-meter (167-story) building under construction in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. Even taller buildings are possible with today's structural technology.
But people still don't really live in skyscrapers the way futurists had envisioned, for one reason: Elevators go only up and down. In the "Harry Potter" movies, "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" and others, we see cableless boxes that can travel not just vertically but horizontally and even diagonally. Today, that future might be closer than ever. A new system invented and being tested by German elevator producer ThyssenKrupp would get rid of cables altogether and build elevators more like magnetic levitation trains, which are common in Japan and China.
Source: https://phys.org/news/2017-08-reengineering-elevators-21st-century-cities.html
(Score: 5, Interesting) by VLM on Wednesday August 09 2017, @12:20PM
The future is unevenly distributed... we call the cableless boxless horizontal things "people movers" for some weird reason and the big international airports nearby me are full of them. Its pretty comfy. I wish we had them downtown in our skywalks, but we have too much diversity, etc.
We call the cabless boxless diagonal elevators by the name "escalator". Back before retail started dying everyone used to go to the indoor mall which was full of escalators.
The problem both have is cities and high real estate are dead, they just haven't started decomposing and smelling yet. They were an artifact of 20th century capitalism when the economy required 15K workers packed into a factory and then an office building of 10K file clerks manually adding accounting figures using paper and quill. Now 10K workers are in China factories and 10K file clerks are in India writing buggy cobol-like java, individually cheaper than the locals and as a group system far slower and more expensive than the locals. You could move my entire suburb into a Pentagon like high-rise but theres no point to it and no one wants it, although yeah sure its technologically possible, sure...