GineersNow Engineering Magazine Issue 005

THIS IS
LIFE IN A
FUTURISTIC
CITY
What will the future look like
in 50 to 100 years? Nobody
really knows for sure but our
imaginations can come up with
so many possibilities that it could
either fascinate us or terrify us.
There’s no certainty if we’d still
see the big blue oceans or the
wild animals in the safari but
we do have a glimpse of what
futuristic cities can look like. We
are on the way to living in the
future and today’s engineers have
very big ambitious plans for the
places we’ll be living in.
First, our future cities will
definitely involve a lot of artificial
intelligence systems. Remember
The Jetsons? We’ll probably be
living their lives soon. We can have
cars that fly and a robot for a maid.
We let things move on its own
through science and engineering
and we’ll have more robots to
take over the government and the
private institutions to serve us.
There’s even a possibility that real
dogs and cats might go extinct by
then and we’ll replace them with
robotic pets.
According to a robotics professor
from the University of Sheffield,
Professor Noel Sharkey, robots
will take on an important role
in law enforcement and crowd
control:
“They keep the police out of
harm’s way in an increasingly
dangerous world of armed
criminals, gangs and terror
organizations.”
How about our mode of
transportation? It is possible
that futuristic cities can easily
allow citizens to travel in just a
short period of time. Aside from
autonomous cars (which aim to
avoid accidents and lighten the
load of traffic), engineers are
working on flying cars and rail
transportation that’ll only take a
few minutes for people to arrive
from point A to point B. We
might even see a hovercraft in
the near future.
As for the infrastructures of future
cities, we’ve already seen what
they’ll look like in smart cities
around the world. They’ll be selfsustaining
and will use renewable
energy to power up buildings,
homes and industries. In an attempt
to make places a safer and cleaner
place for the future generations,
engineers are working very hard to
use solar, wind and other sources
of renewable energy to power all
of the energy needed for all human
consumption.
70
JULY 2016
Future Cities & Robotics