Smart City doctrine is steeped in the UN's Sustainable Development, and yet our government agencies seem oblivious to the actual plans of implementation. Smart Cities depend on censors, data and geo-spatial intelligence algorithms to track all activity on city dwellers, and it is a precursor to scientific dictatorship.
5G cell-towers are already rolling out as the telecom industry salivates over the new high-speed wireless technology; note that China's Huawei is squarely in the middle and will likely fight to be a principal developer.
Technocrats have found their Nirvana in Songdo, South Korea - a smart city built from the ground up with the latest Orwellian technology available. Companies like Cisco and Nvidia will make billions while perfecting such technology to bring back to American shores.
Indeed, universities are cranking out 'smart engineers' centered in Sustainable Development, even though "with AI, cities can soon enough cities run on its own." This trend was driven by the Smart City ideologues, not by natural or existing demand for such engineers.
STEM education (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) is key to the implementation of Smart City urban planning because technology enables the whole social engineering project. The natural demand for STEM education falls short of necessary and 'skilled' workers to create and maintain smart cities
Thiel is a Libertarian, Transhuman, Technocrat, steering-committee member of Bilderberg and now creator of his own South-Pacific nation, financed in part by crypto-currency. The smart nation will be the epitome of 'sustainable' urban planning.' There will be no laws or moral codes that constrain technological development.
If Elaine Chao is not a Technocrat herself, her globalist history and current outlook plays into their hands and their doctrine of connectivity and smart cities. Smart cities have emerged as a key global component of Technocracy.
As a Technocracy, China is engineering its smart cities to include autonomous vehicles powered by alternative energy. In other words, the two concepts are merged into one. Considering its already-existing and ubiquitous surveillance program, people will be micro-managed like ants in a glass ant-farm.
In Technocrat eyes, religion means any belief system other than Biblical Christianity, including Buddhism, Islam, shamanism, paganism, witchcraft, Catholicism and even atheism. Because religious sects can be manipulated by their leaders, they can be used for social engineering agendas.
Smart Cities are a key component of the full implementation of Technocracy, because they are an comprehensive expression of scientific social engineering. Technologies pioneered by Gates' project will quickly weave their ways into other existing cities.