By Elizabeth Leafloor | RedIceCreations.com
2012 05 14
In what is being billed as the first of its kind, a billion-dollar futuristic town is being built in New Mexico, but residents need not apply.
The new 15-square mile city will be built as a testing ground for new, cutting edge technologies. The Center for Innovation, Testing and Evaluation project will "help researchers test everything from intelligent traffic systems and next-generation wireless networks to automated washing machines and self-flushing toilets. ...Complete with highways, houses and commercial buildings, old and new." Source
The unique research facility will appear like a ghost town, as no human beings will be invited to live there. Instead, the only people to be found will be research scientists. The houses, however, will be outfitted with all the amenities as if people were residing there, with appliances and plumbing.
The investors developing CITE were looking for open spaces. Brumley said his group scoured the country for potential sites, "but we kept coming back to New Mexico. New Mexico is unique in so many ways."
Will lifeless mannequins replace human beings in this new town? This city may seem like a vision of the future, with self-driving cars and automatically flushing toilets, but the idea of the eerily silent and empty ’community’ of robotics and their handlers seems more like a dystopian, post-human, artificial-intelligence earth fate than an episode of The Jetsons.
’The only thing we won’t be doing is destructive testing, blowing things up -- I hope.’ - Bob Brumley
