Engineering a New Vision of Tomorrow: Jacque Fresco and Roxanne Meadows, founders of The Venus Project in Florida, envision a cybernated city of the future. (Visions).

A project under development in Florida attempts to prove one thing: The future can work.

The Venus Project is an alternative social direction of the future envisioned by engineer/designer Jacque Fresco and his partner, Roxanne Meadows. As Fresco wrote in THE FUTURIST (May-June 1994),

the Venus Project is a global social design that incorporates a proposed city built on the principles of sophisticated use of technology and sustainable use of resources. Now, he has built new models of the technologies to show how they will be used in creating and managing the cybernated city he envisioned. His conclusion: We can get there from here.

Technology is now on the verge of realizing the goal of a world in which resources are fully available to all of humanity. Futurists such as Ray Kurzweil and Hans Moravec have argued that machine intelligence may surpass human intelligence during this century, perhaps even within the next three decades. In the meantime, we should be harnessing that machine intelligence and developing new powers to create a better world, suggests Fresco.

"As artificial intelligence rapidly develops, machines will be assigned the tasks of complex decision making in industrial, military, and governmental affairs," Fresco believes. "This would not imply a takeover by machines. Instead, it will be a gradual transfer of decision-making processes to machine intelligence as the next phase of social evolution."

In Fresco's vision of the cybernated city, machine intelligence will be linked to all the social and environmental information needed to analyze issues and generate ideal options for decision making. Like an electronic, autonomous nervous system, the cybernated city will extend its sensors out into the social complex, then coordinate production and distribution on the basis of human needs in full accordance with the carrying capacity of the earth. Machine intelligence will direct massive machines to dig canals and tunnels, build bridges, and erect buildings, using all resources efficiently and for the common good of all humanity.

Among the technologies Fresco and Meadows envision are:

* Mega-machines to perform such tasks as lifting and inserting prefabricated housing components into place.

* Automated construction systems composed of robotic equipment that receives instructions via satellite.