Page 22 - LIN-Jan-ForWeb

TECHNICALLY SPEAKING

CITIES OF THE FUTURE

by Dave Trecker

echnical advances are coming so fast we tend to take them • Rapid transit will be a part of the change. Boston is looking at
for granted. Smart and smarter phones. Self-driving cars. high-speed monorail, and Paris will have underground
T Personalized medicine. Drones and robots everywhere. connections to most suburbs completed by 2025. More exotic
Yet that’s just the beginning. Borrowing from Bachman-Turner are pneumatic tubes to move people rapidly from city to
Overdrive, “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.” Take urban living, our cities, outlying areas – airports, sports facilities, factory complexes. And
even the greater Naples area, will look very different 15 or 20 years for the truly adventurous, get ready for unmanned aerial cars –
from now. Uber taxis with wings – now under development in France.
Here are some of the things we can expect: • How we buy things – the whole retail picture – is changing as
well. Online purchase and home delivery, already commonplace,
• Commercial buildings and some residential ones will have
will take on a new look. Expect drones to deliver pizza and
solar converters built into their windows and all roofs will be
medicine right to your door, as well as clothes on approval. If the
covered with solar tiles. As a result, buildings will generate their
clothes don’t fit, send them back by drone.
own power – electricity, lighting, cooling – and thin-line
batteries will store excess energy during the day and resupply • Where we live is also changing. Micro apartments will be an
it at night. option for city dwellers. Centrally located, with 300 to 600
square feet of living space, they may be just the ticket for low
• Buildings will do other things as well. Now being piloted
and medium-salaried urban workers. A Tampa developer was
in New York, high-rises will have exteriors clad with air purifiers
flooded with requests when he announced plans earlier this year
activated by sunlight to keep outer surfaces clean. No more
for 120 micro apartments.
window cleaners hanging high above the street.
• Then there is artificial intelligence. Huge strides in AI have
• And many buildings will be green, literally. “Biophilic” designs
enabled everything from urban storm predictions (piloted in
will offer mid- and high-rises cloaked with plants and trees
China) to by-the-minute traffic control (tested in Pittsburgh).
built right into the structures. Hotels are experimenting with
For some time now, AI-based robots have assembled cars and
this, and residential units have gone up in Milan and Singapore.
operated warehouses. More recently they have been used to
• Urban farms will also be commonplace. Vertical warehouses
count cash in retail stores. Some 7,000 Target and Walmart
in the middle of cities will use LED lights and automated outlets use robots, which will soon take over sorting and
irrigation to grow everything from peas to lettuce to avocados.
shipping functions and, eventually, inventory control. Futurists
Using stackable soil-free trays, 16 acres of food will be grown on say by 2030, maybe sooner, all hands-on retail work will be done
a floor measuring an eighth of an acre, then delivered to a
by robots.
supermarket right around the corner.
• But these changes all pale compared to quantum computing.
• What about transportation? That’s changing too. Car ownership
Unknown to most, quantum computing draws on the principles
will be a thing of the past. Instead, people will share or rent of quantum mechanics, using multistage systems to speed
vehicles as they need them. Just-on-time autonomous car
problem-solving almost exponentially. IBM has a
pickup and delivery will take you to and from the grocery store
supercomputer that can perform 200,000 trillion calculations
or pharmacy. Forget about oil changes or parking spaces. Those per second. The Chinese are developing a model capable of
were grandpa’s problems.
performing 1 million trillion calculations per second by 2020.
• Self-driving shuttles will bring people from the suburbs to city
center, where autonomous buses and driverless taxis will take What will that mean for community life? A redesign of everything
them to their destinations, all based on voice commands. from roads and beaches to water supplies and energy sources. Plans
GPS-connected traffic sensors will find the fastest routes, and will be crafted and instantly updated based on growth patterns,
there will be green bonuses. With fewer cars, streets will be demographics, even climate change. Health will be continuously
narrower and landscaped sidewalks will be wider and more monitored, directing personalized medical treatment. In more
walkable. Where will this happen first? Here, in warm climes ways than we can now imagine, our lives will be managed by
like South Florida. A Wall Street Journal report says driverless supercomputers.
cars have fewer issues where there’s no snow.
THE STUFF OF SCIENCE FICTION? YOU BET.
AND IT’S JUST AROUND THE CORNER.

22 Life in Naples | January 2019