Have you ever felt like you are destined to become a supplicant whose chief purpose is to be sensed electronically, generate data and have it processed by intelligent machines for somebody else鈥檚 benefit? If not, you are probably lucky enough to have been spared the hype of the smart-city lobby.
Not for long though. That hype is hitting fever pitch. An investment group, backed by Microsoft founder Bill Gates, just pledged $80 million to kick-start Belmont, an near Phoenix, Arizona, which will reportedly be replete with driverless vehicles, high-speed internet, jobs in advanced manufacturing and autonomous delivery services.
In Canada, Google owner Alphabet has partnered with the city of Toronto to consult on and develop a into a high-tech smart district. In Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, the government to create a smart, solar-powered megacity 33 times bigger than New York.
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The premise goes like this: we are increasingly told that what we need to do, if we are to fight climate change and embrace mass urbanisation, is to live in artificially intelligent cities 鈥� sensor-stuffed nirvanas designed to make most aspects of our lives hyper-efficient.
The reason, ostensibly, is to make cities more sustainable, with services such as water, energy and transport scheduled and overseen by cognitive machines, themselves informed by all-seeing, all-hearing 5G wireless networks.
Fine 鈥� except when it鈥檚 not. What role will politicians have in the running of these new communities? And many such plans rely heavily on technologies yet to mature. For example, the driverless car will be on UK roads by 2021, . That is a date many engineering experts .
Hackable cities
But the biggest problem is that smart cities sound about as digitally secure as that boat full of holes called the internet of things. The risks are profound, as shown by 聽hacks, such as the recently reported one on Uber. In a smart city, stores of personal data will multiply as will opportunities for disruption. And don鈥檛 forget algorithmic transparency to ensure the AI systems that run your city are accountable. How that can be guaranteed is unclear.
Having been exposed to smart-city lobbying for years, I would suggest these projects are more often focused on things other than privacy, transparency and accountability. The first such thing is the creation of markets for products: computers, sensors and wireless links and the services that run on them.
The second is feeding egos. After achieving business success, the giants of commerce have long sought to dabble in our domestic lives. In mid-19th-century England, mill owner Titus Salt built Saltaire, a beer-free village to house his God-fearing workers. Later that century, soap magnate William Lever built the town of Port Sunlight on the Wirral. In 1928, US industrialist Henry Ford attempted to build , a town in the Brazilian rainforest, where rubber for car tyres was being sourced 鈥� but that project failed.
Likewise, when today鈥檚 corporate titans get involved in the places we live, it doesn鈥檛 always go well. The laying on of from expensive employee housing in San Francisco to the labs and offices of Apple, Facebook, Yahoo, Genentech and Google in Silicon Valley sparked demonstrations against gentrification and exclusivity that as being akin to 鈥渃lass war鈥�.
Before any of the grand plans now on the drawing boards become a reality, big tech and municipalities need to engage a lot more with people so we can work out what they mean by smart and who the plans are smart for.
