Politicians like these are why innovation is so slow. Google was primed and ready to try something new but it was just too different for these people to handle. I don't even like every aspect of the Google city plan but it would have been an invaluable experiment.
Sorry, but the politicians were largely on Google's side, sharing your absolutely ignorant enthusiasm. It took a massive, years-long grassroots campaign of engineers, residents, security researchers, urban planners, ethicists, etc etc, for us to finally amass enough political capital to pressure our elected representatives into actually, you know, representing us.
> it would have been an invaluable experiment.
That's the point. There are proven solutions to the problems this city faces, with long histories of being researched in universities and implemented elsewhere. These are the things we need, not "experiments". We are the fourth largest city in North America, not a test ground for American "innovation".
Why would we want our city, homes and public places, to be turned over to an "experiment?" And not just an experiment, but an experiment conducted by a corporation? And not just a corporation, but a foreign corporation that doesn't even have any significant presence here offering us decent jobs (and is instead one the leading causes of our "brain drain" problem)? Even if this experiment is invaluable (I can't imagine how it is), the majority of the value from experimenting would accrue to Google (experiments are valuable if they can be repeated many times after learning something new, and while Google could learn from the mistakes and repeat the experiment in a different city, Toronto would not be able to tear down the "smart city" to repeat the experiment). No great city in this world has been built on gimmicky technologies that will become obsolete. Just look at "smart homes" that were built 20+ years ago (e.g. installing speakers throughout the house etc), all the technology becomes an obsolete eyesore that eventually gets ripped out.
It's not that it was "too different", it's that it was "too evil". Google was trying to use public resources to build a Google-owned neighborhood where they controlled the lives of everyone within, and were interested in being able to levy their own taxes and exempt themselves from existing laws.
> proposed taking a portion of Toronto property taxes, development fees and increased land value to build a smart city on the eastern waterfront [...] which would amount to an estimated $6 billion over 30 years
6 billion dollars isn't astronomical for a major urban development project.
And Google being paid based on increases in property taxes gives them an incentive to increase the value of the land, which is the exact incentive the city would want them to have.
There's a huge gap between the article you link and OP's claim that Google was "interested in being able to levy their own taxes and exempt themselves from existing laws".
> Google being paid based on increases in property taxes...
... isn't what the article or Alphabet were talking about. They were discussing being paid property taxes, period, not simply taking the property tax delta caused by their real estate development.
And anyway, if I buy a house and pay property taxes, then improve the property so that my property taxes increase, I don't get to keep that increase. Why should Alphabet? But _even this_ is less radical than what Alphabet was proposing, as I've explained above. Alphabet was directly seeking a subsidy from the city, to be taken as a percentage of property taxes.
You may not think of this as unacceptable, in which case I wish you luck attracting such an offer to your own city. But over here, we don't want it.
Just like the wonderful experiments of Fordlandia, EPCOT, and Pullman? Hell, if you want to look at the broader theme of companies running entire countries, look at the mismanagement of the British East India Company.
The history of such projects rather weighs against the Google project being any better, particularly given the proclivity of many in the tech world to have the arrogance to believe that they know more about other fields than those who work in those fields.
Ever notice that for every problem, Google's first answer is 1. big data, 2. apply AI?
I don't even mean to be snarky. If you're a hammer company full of hammer experts, you're going to see a lot of nails.
One of the interesting city planning concepts I've seen is to build the houses with their backs to the roads. You still have a place for cars/deliveries/logistics, but it also forms a walkable neighborhood that's designed for people. I've seen some small developments based on this--it feels like a big park, and the only real side effect was the coffee shop needed a second public facing door.
There's lots of cool stuff from architects and material scientists that's worth building, but the longer I work in software, the more I'm convinced that sometimes we should look at a thing and conclude we are not the most qualified people to improve it.
> One of the interesting city planning concepts I've seen is to build the houses with their backs to the roads. You still have a place for cars/deliveries/logistics, but it also forms a walkable neighborhood that's designed for people. I've seen some small developments based on this--it feels like a big park, and the only real side effect was the coffee shop needed a second public facing door.
My cousin lives in Dubai in a similar neighborhood design of sorts. The front entrances face the general roadways to cars (which are mostly empty and lifeless), etc, but the back entrances face a central small sized park, in a cluster of maybe 12 homes or something. Essentially the park becomes the local meeting ground with lawns, play areas and barbecue spots, and the venue for celebrations of all sorts.
Why do you think corporations using black-box technology on human guinea pigs in a city-size scale is an exciting ‘experiment’?
Innovation is slow because science is constantly commoditized and recommoditized using violent means by a partnership between capitalist politicians and capitalist firms; the ‘intellectual property’ system is the tool (trade secrets > copyrights > patents).
Innovation is slow because many of the new technologies aren't that transformative.
Some technologies are very transformative. The Internet in 1990s killed much of the paper based printing. When was the last time someone bough a physical accounting ledger? A newspaper? A printed calendar? An encyclopedia? But, it doesn't take long for people to internalize the change, and go about their daily lives. Not thinking about what happened.
Most technologies are just incremental changes. Or, new digital technologies slapped onto old brick and mortar hardware, as upgrades.
We're fairly far into the Internet era at this point but I imagine that even many of the people who lived through the transition appreciate just how different the world is today from the mid-1990s, 25 years ago.
Most didn't have Internet--and for those who did we're mostly talking about things like Usenet. Many didn't even have cell phones, much less Gen 1 smartphones. Most were still navigating using paper maps and written directions. There was very little ecommerce. Many didn't even have home computers, much less broadband. TV was mostly still something you watched in a scheduled way unless you programmed your VCR. Etc.
> When was the last time someone bough[t] a physical [..] newspaper?
Sorry to sound like I'm stuck in a timewarp but we pay for our local newspaper to be delivered three days a week, it's waiting on the doorstep at 6am, I read it as I drink my first coffee.
I could also read the articles online, but the actual physical version is definitely better for our purposes.
