By Richard Lachman

The clay pipes in my front yard are as old as the house I live in. While society developed new materials, plastics, and production techniques, this older technology lived on under the earth, doing its job. At some point, however, tree roots grew through cracks and blocked the flow. It was inevitable – clay isn’t strong, certainly not as strong as the new high-density polyethylene plastic pipes we put in after digging up the front yard.

Sidewalk Labs, a project of Google’s parent-company Alphabet, has pulled out of the futuristic smart city project it spent two years pitching to Toronto. The company was proposing to build a city-of-the-future on acres of brownfield land near Toronto’s waterfront. It was looking for all sorts of public/government concessions as it created a living lab of technology woven into city infrastructure. The company cites a changed real-estate market (thanks to COVID-19) as the reason for cancellation, but the project also faced significant backlash from the citizens about its sensors-and-AI vision of life in the modern city.