There are reports wherein Sidewalk Labs, an urban planning start-up owned under Alphabet (which is Google’s parent company) has had their eyes on the ultimate project – building their very own high-tech city.
Alphabet Wants Their Own High-Tech City
Alphabet’s Sidewalk Labs CEO, Dan Doctoroff, stated their aforementioned plans onstage during a conference hosted by the Information. “Thinking about [a city] from the Internet up is really compelling,” Doctoroff said. The CEO, which is also a former deputy mayor of New York City, continued, “cities are hard. You have people with vested interest, politics, physical space… But the technology ultimately cannot be stopped.” He then refers to the potential to assist in creating solutions for privacy issues. He plans to address these as he said, “If you could create a place, it’d be a laboratory to experiment with these problems.”
Even though that a high-tech Utopia may not be within reachable grasp from Google’s parent company, Doctoroff, along with the CEO of Alphabet and Larry Page, a Google co-founder, are going to meet in order to talk about the creation of their very own futuristic, technology-based utopia, to which they will call it “Project Sidewalk,” as what the Information reports.
“A lot of people have tried it and haven’t succeeded. Right now we’re just building products and services but there are lots of lessons that can be learned from the past and we’ll see what happens over time,” Doctoroff said to the Information. It is without a doubt that the plan is of a grand scale; and if Page approves, then Sidewalk Labs and Google’s parent company could already be beginning to look for bids from different cities within the year. To spearhead this project, the parent company of Google has already brought 100 expert city planners on board to design this “city of the future.”
This new city will become a “test bed” for technological advancements which will include self-driving vehicles, ultra-fast Internet speeds (what could even be an enhanced Google Fiber), and other smart, Internet-connected gadgetry. The Information reports that Detroit and Denver are being considered to be the prime locations for their Project Sidewalk. While Sidewalk Labs is keeping more information relatively close to their chests pertaining to this project, they have already started working on installing high-speed Wi-Fi hubs around New York City.
While it is great to hear about this tech-empowered city by Alphabet, they are not the first to have ever dreamed of having a tech utopia. Venture capitalist and PayPal co-founder, Peter Thiel, had been known to have proposed a project entitled Blueseed, which would be the “world’s first floating city.”