The cities of the Next-Gen
Today we live in a world that was unthinkable a century ago. We travel long distances in a shorter time, we speak to people who are miles away from us, and we can access all the information about the world through a palm-sized device in our pockets.
These great inventions have also brought about pollution problems, traffic snarls, sewage and sanitary problems, and global warming. Now more than ever, we need to live smarter.
Fast forward 30–35 years, our cities will be interconnected units of technological innovation. They will have life-like systems, designed to keep the environment healthy, sustainable and clean.
The technology required to make the city unit work in synchronisation will consist of a million micro-sensors, advanced robotics and pervasive telepresence.
Songdo is a smart city near Seoul, South Korea, which already emulates all of these features. These units will also be higher into the sky, to accommodate the ever-increasing population, which is estimated to be more than 9 billion globally.
The taller buildings will also enable more green space for parks and other recreational activities.
Massive underground power grids, well-contained sewers, garbage disposal and recycling systems will be wide-spread along with central control rooms where every activity will be monitored.
Data privacy and resource safety will be huge concerns, as the interconnected networks will be linked to a centralised power source, the failure of which could result in a system shutdown. These vulnerabilities in the system would have to be regularly analysed to minimise any threats of failure.
Advanced medicine and life-altering studies will be a norm in this new world which will enhance the life expectancy of the general population.
The increase in the number of mouths to feed will place substantial pressure on the limited supply of naturally produced foods, and therefore the primary source of sustenance would come from genetically modified crops and cattle.
A considerable amount of time and money will be invested into developing alternate sources of energy which are clean, green and generate as much as energy as the depleting fossil fuels to avert the impending energy crisis.
More emphasis will be given to R&D and innovation-based thought processes, rather than standardised processes.
This will increase the demand for technically sound engineers and logically capable innovators who can think outside the box. Strategic, decision-making jobs will increase, while present manual tasks will be fully automated.
Schools will be manufacturers of innovators rather than trained process-oriented individuals. The governments will spend most of their funding on educating people to run, maintain and improve the vast technologies.
I anticipate a bright future for our world, with advanced technologies and comfortable lifestyles, but the main problem we face today is the ever-increasing gap between the rich and the poor, which will be a bigger problem of the morrow.
The city of the future will come with its own challenges for the middle classes and the lower classes. The standard of living would increase considerably for the upper class of the futuristic societies.
However, the lower classes would bear the brunt of coping up with the ever-evolving technology which would only hamper their already striving endeavours with the considerable decrease in demand for manual labour.
While the middle class will move on to new struggles getting accustomed to the changing lifestyles out of necessity.
And as our humanity sees darker days, the dilemma we face today will continue as the rich get richer and the poor struggle to make ends meet.
