2024: Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman Launching NEOM As The First Of Many 15-Minute Surveillance Cities In Partnership With Communist China.
Known as Neom, the $1 trillion city is a pet project of the prince and is set to feature an artificial ski resort, robots and AI for the project’s inhabitants, and two 1,600-foot-high buildings running parallel to each other across a 75-mile strip of desert and mountains, as The Post previously reported.
There will be 10 regions, including a zero-carbon area called THE LINE where AI will use 90% of inhabitants’ data to personalize services — far more than the approximately 10% of resident data used in current smart cities, Insider reported.
“NEOM is designed to leapfrog those other smart cities, to begin from the ground up in sort of an entirely designed fashion to collect data and use that data for the purposes of the city,” James Shires, a researcher at London’s CHATHAM HOUSE think tank, told the publication.
This has a concerning amount of potential to mutate into less of a science fiction dreamscape than a metropolis at the mercy of state surveillance, warned Marwa Fatafta, a policy manager for the digital rights organization Access Now.
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