{"id":179791,"date":"2017-10-24T20:48:00","date_gmt":"2017-10-25T01:48:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2017\/10\/24\/what-could-possibly-go-wrong\/"},"modified":"2017-10-24T20:48:00","modified_gmt":"2017-10-25T01:48:00","slug":"what-could-possibly-go-wrong","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2017\/10\/24\/what-could-possibly-go-wrong\/","title":{"rendered":"What Could Possibly Go Wrong?"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/a>It appears that tech companies are looking to running portions of towns<\/a>.<\/div>\n

Why do I NOT<\/b> find this reassuring?<\/p>\n

It sounds almost dystopian: One of North America’s largest cities handing over a key neighborhood to a tech giant so it can be rebuilt from scratch. That, however, may be exactly what is about to happen. Recently, it was announced that Sidewalk Labs, a division of Google-parent Alphabet, will (pending approval) lead the creation of about a 12-acre district called Quayside<\/a> in a prime area of Toronto’s newly revitalized waterfront area. <\/p>\n

But if the plan immediately sounds like the beginning of a sci-fi movie in which things are about to go very wrong, Sidewalk Labs’ vision at least is distinctly utopian. Simply put, Google’s urban spinoff wants to build a laboratory for how a city should be run, a smart city predicated on tech, data, and everything from self-driving shuttles to garbage sorted by robots \u2014 all while shifting its Canadian headquarters to the new district.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This has fail written all over it.<\/p>\n

After all, these are the folks who can’t write a calculator app that adds 1+2+3<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It appears that tech companies are looking to running portions of towns. Why do I NOT find this reassuring? It sounds almost dystopian: One of North America’s largest cities handing over a key neighborhood to a tech giant so it can be rebuilt from scratch. That, however, may be exactly what is about to happen. …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[365,588,439,382],"class_list":["post-179791","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-business","tag-fail","tag-government","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/179791"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=179791"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/179791\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=179791"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=179791"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=179791"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}