Bill Gates Decides To Spend Millions On Building A ‘Smart City’

Microsoft founder Bill Gates doesn’t know what to do with his money, and I sincerely mean that from the bottom of my heart. I guess when you are a billionaire and everything is within your reach, you tend to lose track of how to really help your fellow man if that is your main calling.

Gates has purchased close to 25,000 acres in Arizona to begin building the world’s first ‘smart city.” This could be the beginning of turning our world into something out of Buck Rogers and the 25th Century.

I wonder who his guinea pigs are going to be and what kind of experiments he’s going to do on them? I am trying to keep an open mind about this, but it sounds like another gimmick to make money. Imagine the ad pitch: “Look look, you too could own a piece of Bill Gate’s dream for the small sum of $100k per square foot. Best price today only!”

Source: Yahoo News

Through one of his investment firms, Belmont Partners, Gates has committed $80 million to build a community composed of offices, stores, schools, and homes. The community will be known as Belmont.

Roughly 3,800 of the 24,800 acres will be devoted to office, commercial, and retail space, according to Belmont Partners, while 470 acres will be set aside for public schools. The new community will feature 80,000 residences, giving it a population of about 182,000, comparable to that of Tempe, Arizona.

Belmont Partners expects its development to feature all the trappings of a futuristic city: high-speed internet embedded in the built environment, accommodations for self-driving cars (such as traffic lights that communicate with one another to minimize congestion), and smarter manufacturing technology.

“The experimentation that takes place in this new community has the potential to demonstrate the viability of new smart city concepts and serve as an example for cities nationwide and globally,” Brooks Rainwater, the director of the City Solutions and Applied Research Center at the National League of Cities, told Business Insider.

Yep, that sounds just like something a billionaire would wish to do. Build a whole protective bubble in which to live in and surround himself with like-minded people, in which he’s essentially their overlord. Good luck with that one and may I remind you not to drink the punch.

I guess when it comes down to the nuts and bolts of it all, we have to compete with the rest of the world when it comes to technology. China is already doing it and we need to speed it up with our infrastructure. It’s going to be looking like the episode of Futurama where the old city resembles slums before it’s totally transformed.

Do you think you would be welcomed into this ‘smart city?’ Would you try to live there? SHARE your opinion below in the comment section and add this to your Facebook/Twitter timeline.