The City of the Future Is a Data-Collection Machine
In Toronto, Alphabet, Google’s parent company, hopes to create the sensor-filled metropolis of tomorrow
By Sidney Fussell
In Silicon Valley, to make a device “smart” means to add internet connectivity, allowing it to collect, send, and receive data, often while learning and adapting to user preferences. The technology industry has invested wholesale in the idea that “smart” means better, and so we have smart speakers, smart thermometers, smart baby monitors, smart window shades, and smart sex toys, all perpetually collecting rich user data to send back to company servers.
Soon enough, we’ll have a smart city: Sidewalk Labs, a subsidiary of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, is building one “from the internet up,” with help from a series of private-public real-estate partnerships in the downtown Toronto neighborhood Quayside (pronounced Key-side).
It is not the first smart city — municipalities around the world have adopted smart infrastructure like artificial-intelligence-enabled traffic lights — but it might be the most ambitious. The project’s 200-page wish list of features is astounding. The “vision document” imagines not only the revitalization of a 12-acre plot that has sat largely vacant since its heyday as…
