Real estate studies for the AI era — where do you plant the flag

Over lunch in Singapore I had a fairly deep conversation with Yum. The topic itself was simple, but following it to the end produced a heavy scenario.

"Where and how do we have to work to survive?"

Yum, a consensus/governance/systems specialist, and me, someone who's run a grab bag of projects at startups. We ran a simulation across three options: Singapore, KL (Kuala Lumpur), and Korea.

Yum's view: "KL is the developer hub of the future"

Yum was fairly positive on KL.

• Growth energy: lots of companies are hiring developers in KL, and maybe because there's real urgency, people work hard. The whole city has an appetite for growth.
• Overwhelming value: at prices Singapore can't touch, you can live in a luxurious, spacious environment. The quality-of-life advantage is real.

Won't KL rise as a future center of gravity for developers? That was Yum's take.

My rebuttal: "the end of value-for-money is zero"

But as an ENTP I couldn't hold back a rebuttal. As an AI believer, I think KL's developer community disappears within five years.

Current structure: large companies put their HQ (or Asia HQ) in Singapore and run development teams somewhere like KL, leveraging cheap labor and office costs. The senior developers or CTOs controlling the KL team get hired in Singapore. (needs fact-checking)

But will that KL dev team still be there in five years? I'm not disparaging them — but isn't the scope of that work basically above coder and below senior developer?

• Coders? Already replaceable by cheap Claude Code right now.
• Senior developers? Replaceable within two years at the latest.

This isn't because KL is bad at anything, it's structural. A city that competes on labor-cost efficiency inevitably loses the price war against AI.

Yum agreed on that point.

So where is the future hub city

From there it went further. Assume that twenty years out, developers and senior developers alike stop mattering and stop being needed.

A world where something like 10,000 representatives of humanity — Elon Musk types — configure, guide, and architect the AI. (also wishful thinking)

This "human red team" will absolutely work on-site. In a world where intercepting, forging, and tampering with network traffic is routine, where video or metaverse can be forged in real time, how would you trust any of it? However much communication bandwidth grows — metaverse, Neuralink, whatever — I don't think it exceeds the bandwidth of meeting and talking in person.

And I got lucky enough to spend about a month in Silicon Valley: the people you pass on the street, the people you run into at events, are just employees of major companies, C-levels, VC staff. Leaving a place with that kind of human infrastructure to live comfortably elsewhere might itself be the exit condition from the human red team.

Also, in a future where the vast majority of humanity is inevitably unemployed, a hub city would have to serve as a sanctum guaranteeing their safety.

(total sci-fi lol)

Hub city candidates

• Singapore: already has plenty of HQs, plenty of senior developers and architects, and industry infrastructure across Asia for regulation, compliance, and governance. If it keeps positioning this well, it might become the only surviving hub city in Asia.
• KL: the way Dublin rose after Brexit, could KL do the same? Maybe... but it feels ambiguous.
• Korea: why though? In K-Galápagos? Separate from how capable Koreans are, I can't picture a global think-tank company being in Korea. Of course Koreans are diligently preparing for the future — by solving the population-that-must-be-replaced-by-AI problem via population decline. (self-deprecating)
• Tokyo: maybe better than Korea?

Half joking, half serious, that's how we thought through where to go.

Two preconditions

All of this fantasy comes with preconditions, of course.

1. Where exactly does the sanctum for the human red team get built?
2. Can we get into the red team? (or do we want to? or do we just want to trail behind them?)

That's the end of my science fiction.