Colin McEnroe: It’s 2027, Hartford’s On The Cutting Edge – Hartford Courant

Hartford. 2027.

The city has seen several big companies notably Aetna pull out. It has razed its old civic or XL center and ripped apart its expensive Riverfront Recapture Project. It has endured a long and painful highway reconstruction.

The city is thriving.

"Do you see those new riverfront condos? J.K. Rowling just bought one. She's not in America that much, but she doesn't like what happened to New York. She likes the pace and the creative vibe here."

The person speaking is Arunan Arulampalam, one of Hartford's two mayors. The other one is a computer.

"We're the first major city to use URBOXX, an Artificial Intelligence mayor," says Arulampalam. "As mayor, URBOXX runs 2,000 simulations per day of every city function. It has statutory authority to make micro-adjustments to save money or improve services. We're always on, always synchronous, always optimizing. There are no surprises, whether you're talking about the grand list or on-street parking. So I have more time for deep thoughts about policy."

When Aetna departed, its former campus was converted into shared "maker space," rented cheaply to designers and inventors and owned by a public-private partnership. The formerly deserted building now hums with 3D and 4D printers, holographics and hydroponics.

Very quickly, the real estate around Old Aetna became New Brooklyn a magnet for arts innovators, trend leaders and hipsters priced out of the five boroughs and the Bay Area.

"It was weird," said J. 8.0 Scallion, a transhuman restaurateur who relocated from Boston. "They had all this semi-built space they weren't using, including this fabulous old diner that has been sitting with a For Sale sign for years."

Voila, the Coasis, Scallion's edgy "scientific dining" establishment in partnership with nearby Jackson Labs. Each meal is customized for the individual diner, whose genetic and biometric data is crunched way before the celery sticks.

"Everything we were doing and thinking was wrong, but nobody knew that." So says Colin McEnroe, 72-year-old columnist for the Hartford Courant, now in the 45th year of his column.

"We were worried about big insurance companies when that industry was going to be brought to its knees. Autonomous cars are 15 times as safe as the old kind, and this generation hates owning stuff anyway. The National Public Option was essentially the end of private health insurance as we knew it. What's left for these companies to do?"

Former Aetna employees fondly known as Aefugees have drifted back into the maker spaces where they're collaborating on new products like short-span micro-insurance.

"This generation doesn't want to insure a car or a house. It wants to insure Tuesday afternoon. So we find ways to do that," explained Qi Qi, a principal in Crystal Blue Math, a three-person innovation lab in the old Georgian brick Aetna headquarters.

Across the street from the old campus is the former Cathedral of St. Joseph, now Godspace, a high-tech religious co-worship site that reconfigures itself with holographic overlays to comfort and inspire each of the 11 religious denominations that share it. When the Roman Catholic Archdiocese underwent parish consolidation in 2017, "we saw the handwriting on the apse," Auxiliary Bishop Adam Wang recalled. "We're still a Roman Catholic cathedral. In fact, using virtual reality, we can give you your choice of Catholic cathedrals from six different centuries and five different countries."

Hartford finally stopped patching up its creaky civic center, kicked its addiction to ice hockey and, in its place, put up a new state-of-the-art arena with the 10-gigabit capacity needed for new sports like competitive spectator video gaming. The new facility is operated almost entirely by robots, programmed to slide walls and seating sections around depending on the combination of events on a given night.

Tonight's bill includes an intimate concert by singer-song writer Luke Bronin, the former Hartford mayor who re-devoted himself to music when his wife Sara was named Secretary of Housing and Urban Development in the Murphy administration.

Bronin finished third on "America's Got Second-Career Talent," and his new album "Bro-Storm" is being heavily downloaded.

"There was a moment there in 2017 when we seemed to be planning a 1987 city," he recalled. "Thank God we ditched that idea!"

Colin McEnroe appears from 1 to 2 p.m. weekdays on WNPR-FM (90.5). He can be reached at Colin@wnpr.org.

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Colin McEnroe: It's 2027, Hartford's On The Cutting Edge - Hartford Courant